Some outOfSphere ZBrush 2 quickies I’ve done at work while waiting for map bakes. Around half an hour each.

Here are a few…

All from still movie frames.

Here’s somebody’s head:

A few hours of work thus far:

This was just for fun, and I’m not sure what is he going to be: just bust, high poly model, or game spec model. But I hope there will be another update soon.

Wow, I have a website?! And nobody told me I need to keep it updated? (Oh wait, I was told, but too busy to do much about it).
And so there was Dominance War this year again and for some odd reasons I decided to participate, even though fantasy or sci-fi fighters are not my cup of tea, and neither is the whole background for the characters. Luckily, I have teamed up with a great concept artist, Chris De Joya, aka Snowfly, who came up with a concept for my entry. Here are some of the sketches he made for me:

And then, here are my final renders that were submitted:

I didn’t really get the chance to polish the presentation or even set up some good lighting, but I hope to revisit some of the textures and render out a turntable, since there is an iridescent shader on the shell and wings that doesn’t show really well in the stills. I will also post some close-ups when I render them out (or hopefully, when I learn how to write CgFX shader so that I can show a viewport grab). The main problem I had with final presentation is that hardly any details showed up, because the image is so small (800×900 pixels was the upper limit for all the submitted images), and also because there wasn’t any closeup that would really show all the detailing that went into the texture work, or even some of the smaller normal map details are still barely visible.

I might as well post my work in progress images, to show my high poly and the entire process I went through until I reached the stages captured in images above. So here goes…

Base female mesh done in Maya and Silo:

At this time, Snowfly came up with the nice shape for the mount, and was kind enough to create a nice side view sketch so that it was easy for me to model it (it was my first animal model, if I don’t count Mrs. Boaring who wasn’t fortunate enough to have her texture finished). Here I show how I modify the shape of the beast to add more bison-like features, and finally add wings (or at least placeholders for wings):

We are struggling with design at this stage. The initial idea was to do a beetle type character, then I suggested adding a rider (a big mistake! it cost me many extra hours of work, since I essentially worked on two characters instead of just one). So here is my paint over of my model in perspective, and a rider, mainly based on previous Snowfly’s sketches and some of the ideas we were throwing at each other:

Until we decide on the final design, I start working on the boot:

Then I create high poly in Mudbox:

Then there is pretty much final design for the beast, and I go ahead and add more detail to my initial model, and it looks something like this:

The next step was to create a quick rig (it’s not even a rig, just simple skeleton), and see how the two characters fit together:

I start adding bits and pieces to the base female model of the rider:

I take the arm geometry to Mudbox, do some sculpting, and add some details in Maya (the ornaments around the shoulder pad):

I then go back to Silo and try to finalize the medium res model of the female, but I have much troubles with the helmet. Colleague at work told me she looks too friendly with round shape on her head, as if she just begs to be patted, like those cute little animals Sonic takes care of - and he was completely right. But yeah, at one stage my rider looked like this:

I know for sure I have to do something about the helmet, so I look back at Snowfly’s sketches and try to find bits from all of them that would fit together and make the character look more menacing (Polycount’s characters are supposed to be evil!):

The final sketch of the rider had those things attached on the hips and they seemed to add some nice interest to the silhouette, so I decided to add them in. I take all that to Mudbox again, and do some more sculpting:

I add a few more details here and there, and call the high poly for the rider done:

Then I take the mount into Mudbox:

Still some more definition is needed, but I decide to move on to low poly, and here is the rider with messed up AO map, courtesy of their Slowness, mental ray:

At the same time I baked the colors assigned to high poly, to make isolating materials on texture sheet much easier:

I then add head gear to the mount and add some details to the wings at last:

Finally done with low poly and also finished the high poly of the rest of the gear (saddle and bags). And then, xNormal comes to the rescue, just at the moment I was about to go kill mental ray! I was so happy that this program worked great for me - thank you so much Santiago Orgaz, Sir! This is what normal map + ao in color channel looks like (pretend you didn’t see it in construction shot at the top):

I realize my characters are too large and are hard to fit in the frame so that all the detailing is actually visible. That’s the reason I grab some close-up shots to show:

I then start adding some colors:

All the areas have colors now, although some modifications of the hues are to follow:

I add iridescent shader that is alpha masked, so it only shows up on the shell parts. Need to add something similar to the wings as well:

Created new skeletons and trying out some poses:

Contemplating the shot from behind, and also added the rock to act as a pedestal, quickly running out of time:

It is already Sunday night and I’m out of energy. I post this render in my progress thread on Polycount:

I receive handful of good crits, but I realize they mostly address issues I already worked on and there comes painful realization that most of that work DID NOT actually show up in the render, since the details were so small and mashed with all the filtering and post processing. For instance, there was a suggestion to add iridescence to the wings, and in fact spec for the wings was gray, color was yellowish, and the colors seen in the render came from iridescent shader, but alas, it was a still shot and nobody could tell where the green and blue in the wings come from. I’m figuring that iridescence shows only from sharp angles, just like specular, so I have to find another angle for the final shots. And it’s already Monday night and I’m out of time, and it takes forever to render. I submit my stuff, sigh, and feel relieved but very crestfallen.

So in the end, I think it was great to participate in another challenge and make something, but I also feel that the whole contest was missing the point by having us make “real-time” (e.g. game specs) models that are intended to only be seen in one small render and eventually thrown in portfolio to catch dust. Another thing that surprises me about my work is that for some reason I had so much energy to put into this, and yet I knew nothing about these characters, or what do they do and what are they like, and I didn’t really even care about them, because they were so devoid of any meaning and personality for me, so it comes as a surprise to me that the craft was quite enjoyable without any background to give meaning to final product. And that is all beside the dubious setting that these characters come from: a war 1100 years from now in which the glorious forces (pardon - shadows) representing the empires of our favorite bulletin boards are fighting… for no particular reason (?!?). Now that I think of it, I’m really out of place in that war (and perhaps most other women). And so are my characters…
So the next thing I make will by all means end up in the game. And that’s final, YEAH!

Well, it’s the holiday again and I have Monday off. Seems like I’ll be doing some more sketches instead of finishing off the Boar entry? Well, painting is painting, only this time I don’t have UV space to work within.

During the extremely warm winter days (and it’s warm like in the middle of the summer, not sure whether it’s because I’m in Florida, or El Niño really messed the winter up) I somehow started participating in another Polycount challenge, themed Boaring! No, it’s not boring, you already thought I misspelled that, eh? At first, I didn’t think I would enter another challenge, now that I have UnrealEd3 to play with, and the holiday break was almost over, but then I started fooling around in 3D and I just modeled a fat lady pig in something like 2 hours. Then I let it sit for a while, and finally yesterday I unwrapped it and started texturing it, and now it seems like so much fun. I also drew up a quick concept sketch, but I don’t think it’s worth posting.

I am just posting the most recent texture WIP snapshot, and I’ll show wireframe when it’s all done (I have about hundred tris out of 2k left, and some texture space as well, and I will add some props):

I figured I should do one of the naked muscular dudes to get better with anatomy, so here goes the sculpt thus far:

He is only under 130k polies, so there’s plenty more details to be added later, but I kind of wanted to have a really decent human male model that I can use as a base for some more interesting designs.

By the way, I didn’t mention here that I started my job at EA Tiburon, and I’m living now in the sunny state of Florida. Now is the time of holiday break, so I’m using it to work on some stuff I wanted to do for a while, but didn’t have the chance yet. One of those is just practicing sculpting believable (accurate, hopefully) anatomy, so that I can move to more exaggerated forms that will still be believable, yet stylized.

I also bought RoboBlitz game to get a chance to play with UnrealEd 3 before UT2007 is out, so perhaps by the end of the break I will have something to show straight out of Unreal 3 engine - yay! The material editor is really great, it works similarly to Maya’s hypershade, with all the connections made between various nodes, and all represented clearly with boxes that represent nodes, and arrows that show connections. I already imported some of the textures I made for Shadowing Hate, and I noticed that there is reflection added to areas with higher level of specularity, which I thought was pretty neat. Although that didn’t quite show in the game, it looked great in the editor’s browser. However, I will have to experiment some more with material properties before I make a judgment, and I still can’t wait for UT2k7 to be released, as I think it will help a great deal to look into those great game assets and read hopefully available documentation so that I can prepare my models and textures to make better use of Unreal 3 technology.

And here are the final images that were submitted:

Enjoy! =)

I haven’t updated FogLog in a long time again, but I did update Portfolio though. So this post is dedicated to showing my entire progress on Street Fighter Redesign challenge over at Polycount. So instead of simply redirecting you to my progress thread, I will show the images as I uploaded them. So here goes…

Start on the model (medium high poly):

Start on the dress, as seen on the concept from the previous post:

Side view in wireframe:

New concept, painted over the model.

Begun to work on high poly:

The gloves:

The dress:

The back side of the dress:

Head that I didn’t like:

Me in the princess dress on the New Years Eve (I had to find this photo, but figured there was no need to post it on the boards though, so here it is anyways):

The new head, resculpted from lowest level and up, using a proper photo references this time around:

Did some more work on the dress. All geometry is now in place:

And the back side:

Fixed the head, since formerly the back of the head was a bit collapsed:

The dress was feeling very blobby, so I decided to try to smooth it out. I added another level of subdivision for the two lowest sections, which allowed me to add finer wrinkles.

And the back side again:

And a side as well:

Started working on the jewelry:

Closeup (back):

Closeup (front):

Earring:

Built low poly model:

Baked normal maps:

Started texturing:

Closeup to show how jewelry turned out, now that I have added alpha map:

Rigged and posed the character, and got close to finishing off the textures.
There was a suggestion to add secondary color to the dress, to make the bows pop out more, and I started experimenting with different combinations:

Here are some more variations:

And this is the final beauty render. I think I will make another post and just add the finals that were submitted.

I hope it was helpful to post the entire progress like this, as it shows the process I went through.