FogLog

Production Journal

Bounty Hunting Lady

1 Comment »

August 13th, 2010 Posted 8:49 pm

As it was undoubtedly about the damn time to start some kind of actual project, the timing was perfect to discover the 3D character challenge at CGHub and so I decided to give it a shot. The theme is bounty hunter, and even though one month doesn’t seem like enough time to do fully textured, posed and lit character, I thought there is a chance to still come up with something that I can continue working on and finish it off as polished illustration.

<rant>I’m having trouble finding challenges that don’t call for fighter type characters, which I’m not really interested in. Maybe being a woman has something to do with it. Oh, and a peace frog! Make love, not war, people! And “put those guns down, boys” – says DJ Horace “the Pacifist” Walsh on K-Jah radio in GTA3 :) But alas, all I’ve been seeing is characters with weapons. Because you simply can’t kill anyone with poison, by throwing him out of the window, or any more sophisticated method that would also require some thought put into it, e.g. do it so that not even detectives Goran and Eames can ever find you. Forget about about smart characters – all we need is guns, boobs, and long legs, because if you make character with realistic proportions, people will comment that it looks too chubby, or that the legs are way too short. Sigh… </rant>

Anyways… here’s the brief:

Background After doing some thinking and brainstorming, I picked to do a female character. Her code name is Yves. She had an extensive espionage training with some secret government agency, so she knows the ins and outs of getting the information she needs to find the fugitives. After managing to escape the agency and lose her trail, she arrived at the capital and decided to do bounty hunting until she has enough money to join the elite circles and that way gain influence in society, which would in turn help her push her own agenda. She is very smart and confident, and knows how much she is worth. People that know her well don’t believe she is completely human. Some kind of wicked perfection, one of her friends said. She is also versed with various assassination techniques which were part of her training, but her priority in this bounty hunting gig is to blend in with the crowd and keep low profile, while making sure her occupation remains a secret, and it’s not her thing to go around killing people that are on her way, as that would raise suspicion and make her the kind of fugitive she is hunting for big bucks.

Being a very attractive woman, she uses her looks to seduce men and women alike to get information she needs. She also has a partner who is just a behind the scenes hacker guy that hooks up to the surveillance cameras throughout the city and guides her to avoid danger. She has a brain implant that hooks her directly to the net, and also her eyes are like cameras that send video feed to her partner to help him help her with guidance.

Visuals I wanted to have a mix of masculine and feminine facial features; masculine to show a hint of brutality and feminine to make her seductive. She really has no remorse, but that’s not to say that she lacks emotions entirely. These days she’s trying to blend in with hipster crowd, because she found out that one of the gangs that hangs out at Rock’n'Shock bar might be sheltering a very valuable fugitive. She knows just the way to get to them.

Inspritation / Reference Here’s the reference and inspiration sheet I’ve put together:

I’ve started with a female base model I’ve made some time ago, which is up for grabs in downloads section.

And here are the WIPs:

Hurray for a productive weekend ahead!

Posted in Works

Before May Runs Out

No Comments »

May 31st, 2010 Posted 4:40 pm

Thought I should post another render, a bit more fresh, in fact so fresh that it still smells like rendering fumes. But that’s okay, now that I finally had an upgrade from dual to quad core Intel processor, and the chick from the previous post was used as a benchmark: with dual, it took 87s to render and with quad almost half as much, only 47 seconds. Because of this boost in rendering speed, I decided to have some fun with mental ray this weekend. For the following render I used as a guide Ryan Kingslien’s tutorial from Gnomon Workshop titled Creating a Photo-Realistic Render in Mental Ray. The sculpt is very rough and I did some more work on it last night, so there should be updated render before May runs out completely.

Sitting female sculpt

Posted in Works

Box modeling fun

No Comments »

May 31st, 2010 Posted 1:44 pm

I created this female head few months back, and I’ve been meaning to post this, but kept wanting to do more with the final image. So let’s just call it WIP in hope that one day this lady will have some hair. I’ve recorded the process of box modeling in series of snapshots and then did some SSS render tests in Maya, using mental ray. I’m not quite satisfied with the look and feel of the skin, hence some more fiddling with texture and material settings will have to happen. Anyhow, here she is:

Box modeling of female head

Here’s another render, color corrected:

Posted in Works

Male heads, mostly

No Comments »

May 10th, 2010 Posted 9:59 am

The last piece was done as a paintover of zBrush sculpt, with some photographic sources added in, and lots of tonal adjustments and reshaping. The sketch next to it was a study from a still, and the first two sheets are just sketchbook pages, some were done with reference, some without.

Law + Order + Beyond

No Comments »

March 9th, 2010 Posted 1:00 am

Law & Order is my current show of the month – I’ve been tearing through the episodes while sketching or modeling. Almost done!

This large dump should make up for the lack of updates this year. Here are the studies and sketches from the past two months or so.

ps032 ps035_lorder ps033_lorder

ps036_lorder ps036a_lorder

d016 d015

d021 d017 d019

p008 p006

AfterGameFest2010 plaidingGuilty

And here is something different – this is the poster I did for a short film by Juan Reinoso, called Flowers For Norma, after Stephen King’s story:

Norma_Comp01_final

Bobcat

No Comments »

December 27th, 2009 Posted 4:26 pm

That’s right, it’s Bobcat:

Bobcat

And some other junk: Cathrine from Jules et Jim

ps031

Some framing / mood exploration in black and white:

filmnoir filmnoir1 d014

And some more imaginary heads, except for three that were done from reference, but I’ll let you guess which ones are those:

d011

Entry0003

No Comments »

December 22nd, 2009 Posted 4:05 am

It’s a crime scene!

Entry0003

Wires

No Comments »

November 25th, 2009 Posted 9:46 pm

Well, first the wire was in the blood…

ps028_witb ps027_tonyHill

Then it was just wire:

ss_Wire_mcnulty ss_Wire_stringer ss_Wire_avon

And then there’s other junk, mainly lacking any reference, which still shows, but not as much, I hope…

im_fbi im_lady3

im_ladyhead2 im_ladyhead

And another noodie:
fnpose008

…and I hope there’ll be more after happy happy Thanksgiving break.

Framed by windows

No Comments »

November 25th, 2009 Posted 9:40 pm

windows

d’innombrables fenĂȘtres…

Some nudies, Delon from the back, and Mastroianni!

No Comments »

October 13th, 2009 Posted 11:01 pm

Back with more studies…

marcello fnpose001 fnpose002

fnpose003 fnpose004 fnpose005

fnpose006 fnpose007 ss_MrKlein-delon