Saturday 16 April 2011

Wednesday 6 April 2011

Renders from the presentation

Here are some of the images of my rigged characters from today's presentation. Still work-in-progress.







Monday 28 March 2011

Tuesday 22 March 2011

老人

Current work-in-progress texturing of Chung Lee. Using Xoliul's Shader at the moment. Bird feathers are a pain in the butt to texture, so over Easter I'm planning to visit my local museum to take some photos of the birds they have and use my own textures.


Thursday 17 March 2011

Jack beginnings


Aah I'm a little behind with this 'cos I spent too long on the face, yet it doesn't really look like him. Portraiture is harder than I imagined, making a convincing face is one thing, but getting it to look like a real person is really difficult. The hair is placeholder right now, will try baking it as geometry but if it fails I'll do alphas again. There will be alphas anyway with little strands of hair coming off. Sculpting his overcoat is going to be fun.

Monday 14 March 2011

The Wise Mentor

Current work-in-progress images of my 3rd FMP character. Used Sammo Hung images for references.

Tuesday 8 March 2011

jason pretty much finished


Woop, first iteration is done! Few things to fix, want to add more diffuse detail to the hands and neaten up some seams here and there.
It was a chore to finish this after loosing some work, but its done now, can't wait to move on!

The final stretch


Managed to finish off Jason today, will take renders later.

Did a concept for Jack today. Tried to keep his wooly tweed coat and gave him an evilier expresion ha. Had a go at painting the face too. Will do more iterations later

Saturday 5 March 2011

ah crap...

So my FMP folder on my external corrupted for no reason and thankfully I had most of the stuff either open or backed up on another HDD. Most of the textures had gone but managed to recover them. Recovering Jason's head texture right now, but at least the body texture and model are safe.
You can never have enough backups...things will just break at random :(

Friday 4 March 2011

Tuesday 1 March 2011

New dress for the win

Changed the top part of her dress completely now, whoooooo looks heaps better than the ugly lumpy version I previously had. It actually looks more like folded fabric now.

Morgana's new dress

Ok, I didn't like the wireframe on the previous dress at all because there just wasn't enough geometry to hold the high-poly folds in the sculpt, so I re-did the entire upper "wrap area" of the dress so here it is.

Monday 28 February 2011

revisions

Went to Blitz open day and got some crits on the characters from lead character artists Simon and Mauro. Also got a helpful paintover from Jolyon.
For Harriette -
Eyes were too big and far apart - reduced eye size and pupils
Mouth was too low down on face - moved it up
Legs were too long, feet too big and hands too big - reduced everything
Hat was perched on head - made it sit better
cardigan too tight unlike in the concept - made it baggier
wet-looking folds - yet to fix!

For Jason - too tall - fixed
eyes too far apart - fixed

The dress, aargh

Here's Morgana's full body so far. Very unhappy with how the dress has currently turned out, I need to work on those folded areas in the top part of her dress. Jolyon from Blitz said they looked too lumpy in the Zbrush sculpt so I made them less lumpy, but I think there is still a lot more work required to make that "wrapped area" of her dress to look right.


PS. Is it just me or does she make me think of a better version of my Tellu from my 2010 Comicon entry? XD

Sunday 27 February 2011

Morgana's face in Marmoset


Just a quick test to see Morgana's face in the Marmoset engine. She does have eyelashes (you can barely see them in the side view on the very right), but Marmoset doesn't seem to be great at displaying alpha maps as I've discovered in the past. I'm going to have to really enlarge her eyelashes to make them show up like her hair alphas.

Wednesday 23 February 2011

more face


More saturation + added eyes and poofy hair. Still need to bake the body and work on that, aah lots to do! Going to leave this for now and work on the body.

Tuesday 22 February 2011

jason face wip



Ffff pale skin is hard. Needs more saturation I think, no specular yet. Here's my dorky diffuse map so far, in stupidly high res. I'm trying to use less photo paint more.

Saturday 19 February 2011

turntable

Jason WIP turntable from Blair Armitage on Vimeo.



This is a cool feature. Go to movie - turntable and export in zbrush~

jason high poly progress


About 3 hours into the jacket, acquired real life ref and I have the jacket I'm making with me :) Hoping I have enough polys to work with to put in all the interesting wear and tear.
Also got some crit from Cam on the face and made some slight changes to the proportions and pulled out the ears more.
Sculpting this is really challenging...

Thursday 17 February 2011

Morgana a little older?

Made Morgana look a bit older. Hopefully she looks more mature now.

Wednesday 16 February 2011

hoodie


Argh so blobby, I'm pretty happy with the top half of it, but tried to add interest with the belt and getting the folds right is tough. Need real life ref.

Morgana enters

A start on my second character, Morgana. Femme-fatale type, around 30.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Jason wip



Started working on the face, the structure is there just needs some asymmetry/interest. Comparison with older Shepard too, I tried to make them look alike. As usual I can't get the back of the skull right..!

Sunday 13 February 2011

Harriette + progress report

nearly done, just needs tweaks but moving on to Jason now. He's about 80% modelled, aiming to get most of the sculpting done this time next week.

Thursday 10 February 2011

expressions test


LOL most of these look retarded. Top and bottom left are okay. I will never criticise facial animation again, this shit is HARD.
Conclusion - more extreme expressions are hard to do with no controllers on the face. Slight subtle changes work much better. Also, I didn't put enough polygons into her face to give her eyebrows enough expression. My polygon distribution in general is pretty terrible, must get better.

Wednesday 9 February 2011

Armless Shepard with some texturing so far


Current texturing stage. Lost his bloody arms cos an old Zbrush file ate it.

*rage*

Will add new ones soon.

harriette texture wip

Aiming for a kind of silky chiffon. What does it look like to everyone?

Monday 7 February 2011

hair alphas are the bane of my life


Me and Z are stunned that the default Max shader can display alphas better than Marmoset.

Friday 4 February 2011

Wednesday 2 February 2011

Friday 28 January 2011

Zbrushing Shepard

Current work-in-progress stage of my character in Zbrush. Will add pockets to his trousers.