WIP Jeep

Ok :) so here are a couple of Work In Progress (WIP) pics for my recent project.  I started this one waaaaaaay back before I started my Gnomon online courses.  It was a little crazy going back to it having spend a few months studying at Gnomon but the difference in skill level really hit me as I was able to very quickly fix all the issues that were slowing me down before and race ahead.  So I will be UV'ing and texturing this piece for my showreel in the future but for now I will be starting my next portfolio project a game prop.

Here I go!

OK so I finished my last online course at Gnomon and now it's time to bite the bullet and start putting together my portfolio!
I got some great advice from Devon during my last class and now that Jen has moved to LA to study at Gnomon I will be working flat out to finish my current projects and build an awesome showreel!! :D
I saw some amazing work displayed in the Autodesk CG Student awards and that has totally inspired me to really pick up my game and work on something amazing!
Wish me luck, here I go!

Environment Modeling Final

We had a double class this week from 3 - 7:30am which was a little tough but we covered some really cool topics from tree modeling to lighting and rendering and then went over some portfolio/website advice! It has been a pretty intense few weeks leading up to the Environment Final.  I had a little trouble nailing down the final composition but I am genuinely and pleasantly surprised with the look of this hand in!  Composition has never been a strong skill for me.  I usually get a rough idea of what I think looks good and just run with it desperate to get the bulk of work to a good level.  For this however we were pushed to question the composition a lot and keep tweaking it till it really looked good.  Its a practice I hope to use for all my work from now on.
There is still plenty to do to this image with regards to adding more intrigue and detail.  I want to redo the palm trees entirely but also just break up some of the more obvious CG'ness that comes from some of the perfect symmetry and crisp lines some of the props have.  The catapults especially were pointed out as being too perfect.  A few extra details and maybe damage would make the whole image more believable.  Then its on to texturing.
So that's it for me and Gnomon for a bit, my next challenge is to finish my last two finals up to a show-reel ready quality and build a few more show-reel pieces and then wish me luck because I will be looking for my first job as a Junior Modeler!!! :D

Gnomon CharacterModeling Final

So its been an amazing 2 months I have learnt so much and I am really happy with the end result!
I spent about 7 weeks just working on the topology of the base mesh, sculpting in the muscular form and adding skin detail etc.  It felt kinda slow compared to my previous Gnomon course but the last 3 weeks we learnt a little about fabric modeling and costume design.  When I got to this stage the development just exploded and started to look real! I did wind up hiding around 90% of my character sculpting work :p but it was still a great learning outcome.  I was getting a little worried 1 week ago before I finished up the jacket and extra props since it was looking a little bare and simple but one more week of work and it all came together!
The last few classes focused on hair and blend shapes (blend shapes are a tool animators use to do facial expressions) As for hair the first image below shows the base strips the hair is projected onto (this is low poly enough to be fed into a game engine and animated) The tpose image (3rd image down) shows how the hair looks when there is a texture applied to it and how it would look in game.  I had never modeled hair this way before but it is a really cool workflow and I really look forward to working on my next project and hopefully taking it all the way into a game engine!
So here it is the final renders for my submission for Character Modeling with Kevin Hudson.  I totally recommend this for anyone who wants to really get a grasp on how characters should be done for animation or games! check out these online Gnomon Courses if you are interested.

This is my posed shot rendered in Keyshot based on the beautiful concept piece below by Changming Xu (http://www.inspirefirst.com/2013/05/31/conceptual-art-changmingxu/)  I made my character a little chunkier than the reference since when I was sculpting the base character she looked more realistic with some muscle mass :p  I also let the jacket sit a little looser rather than quite as form hugging as the reference again it just felt more akin to the character I had in my mind.

This is the unposed (T-pose) mesh that all the development was done on.  This pose is used for modeling because it makes it much easier to rig (build a skeleton to allow animation)  You can also see the rendered hair in this image which was done using ThunderClouds GMH2 plug in which I very much recommend! A great and very easy to use tool.

This image shows some very rough color being applied to the character.  None of the props have been UV'd or textured yet this is more of a visualization shot to get an idea of the overall color and materiality of the character.

This last shot shows the high poly wireframe.  As you can see its pretty dense.  This would actually be ok for an animation for film etc. but if this character was to go into a game the mesh would have to be reduced to about 1/10th of how it looks now.

Character Modeling Update

Just a quick update.  Week 8 and we are finishing up our characters with some costume modeling.  I really like this process, rather than modeling in the wrinkles in with Zbrush the workflow we are using is to create a slightly lower resolution control mesh which has NCloth (Maya tool) dynamics applied to it allowing you to simulate real cloth folds.  What this means is that once you have modeled the fabric geometry you can make your cloth fold realistically.  The character I am working on is wearing tights but I wanted to try out this workflow on the trousers first since its one of the easier pieces of clothing.  The far left image is the trousers with the denim preset (and a little tweaking) the far right image is a simulation of what would happen if your pants suddenly turned to honey... :p Maya is awesome I've always wondered what that would look like!

Gnomon_Update

So its been a while since I last posted and I thought it would be a good time to do a general update on how my Environment and Character modeling courses are going.

So above we have a very cool (imho) looking gun for my pirate character.  I have been finding myself with a little free time after completing my Zbrush sculpting homework for this course so I thought I would get on top of modeling some of the hard surface props she is going to have by the end.  :)  I approached this model in a slightly different way, by building each of the components piece by piece I was able to keep the very refined detail without running excess loops all around the model.  I think if this was going to go into a game engine I would have to retopoligise the mesh but I am planning to do that anyway after I have sculpted in the ornamental detail you can just about see from the concept art behind (not mine from Pintrest)

This is the first stage of my block out for my environment modeling final.  I found a great piece of concept art from Feng Zhu's website check it out there is so much amazing work on display there!  The camera angle was soooo hard, Jen gave me some help but in the end the shot cam has a FOV of like 12 (normal camera is 35) that's very fish eye lens.  I finally got the camera to look right and the rest was pretty easy :) Looking forward to starting the next stage tomorrow

Lastly this is the most recent version of my female sculpt.  Sculpting in the muscle definition was very easy when the underling topology is already there but Jen and I took a trip to the V&A in London just to check out some nice sculpture to help out.  I was previously having a little trouble with the forearm muscles (those things are twisty!!) but after the trip and getting to see some beautiful Greek mythological sculpture I think I got a better grasp of how it all works. Next stage is to sculpt in some skin pore and wrinkle detail and then apply that to the base mesh in Maya with displacement mapping.  Kevin also taught us how to set up a very cool shader that allows for variation in displacement or bump detail.  The example he gave resulted in his human male sculpt being able to animate between smooth skin and bulging veins!! it might sound a little complex if you have never done this before but seeing it in action was so cool!! cant wait to try it out for myself!

Gnomon_EnvironmentModeling Week 04

So my pillar came out pretty well using the Zbrush decimating and uv mapping tools.  It was really fun to try out proxy rendering which worked out well but I was using it for hero props for my last image where I think it would have been better to either use a different technique or more complex proxy shapes that better reflected the silhouette of the model.  It was still a very cool technique to learn though and I will definitely be using it in the future.  I decided to try out the same techniques we learned in class on a more complex model too.  I wasn't able to get Zbrush to retolopogise the high poly mesh without leaving big holes destroying the wings and fingers.  So I used TopoGun to build the low poly mesh instead.  The normal maps worked well and I am getting used to Maya 2016's new hypershade... :p another fun week, looking forward to next class since we will be starting on our finals :D