The Avenger

I got the chance to model the Avenger in the new Xcom 2 game cinematics. It turned out to be a pretty fun project, I got a lot of freedom in realizing the final design from the concept paintings so there's a lot of my own interpretation in the final product.

The cinematic had to be rendered in the Unreal, and there was a limit to how many polygons a single object could have, so the ship ended up being broken into 4 major parts that then basically just flew around in close formation in the engine.

Spaceships

I got to do some models and texturing for the Civilization: Beyond Earth intro sequence.

The gantry and launch vehicle for the future American launch.



The mothership model was provided as a basic previz model which I cleaned up and textured.



A quick and dirty shuttle model for the final sequence of the animation.

Bald Girl Redux

I've been slowly picking away at this model for a while now, maybe I should get around to figuring out a worthwhile hair solution...

 

Get to ze choppah!

Here's a test image for a special ops UH-60 that's going to appear in an upcoming movie. There's no textures on this chopper, as it'll end up being pretty small in frame, and mostly a silhouette. I setup some basic shaders in Arnold, and with a bunch of motion blur, bloom, and film grain it should look real enough.

Textures!

Still need to do some further work on the arms and legs, but the general look is pretty much set now.

Scales and more scales

Got a decent start on the scales and wrinkling, but still needs a lot of work. I may add another row of those crocodile style ridges along the very top, and carry some of those larger knobby scales down the sides of his torso.

Here's the highres sculpt in mudbox, currently at about 13.5m polygons.



And here's the lowres in Maya's viewport 2.0, at about 20k polys.

T-rex skin

Here's the rex after a bunch of tweaks to the proportions, especially the head and neck. I'm still playing around with general coloration ideas, but I kind of like how this one is looking. Eventually this guy will be dropped into Unity and used as a test to see how well rigs and animation transfer over from Maya.

T-Rex Wip

I grabbed an old sculptris doodle of a t-rex I did a long time back and got it ready for proper sculpting in mudbox. Here's how it currently looks:



I like the look of Jurassic Park's rex, but I'll try and avoid imitating it, after all, there's a fair bit of leeway with the finer details of these guys.

Random Stuff

Time for the annual update :P

Here's a few things I've worked on in the past year or so:

Reworked Face

Another huge gap in posting, oh well. I ended up resculpting the girl's face, but managed to use the existing lowres cage, and its uvs, textures and shaders. That saved me a fair bit of work, and with a bit of tweaking here's what I've got:

Still lots to do, but I'm in no real rush to get this thing finished, its proven to be a bigger learning experience than I had expected.

Cybergirl Wip

I signed up for one of Cgsociety's online workshops, and this is the character I've been making as a part of the coursework.



The class is roughly half way through now, and there's still a fair bit of stuff to cover. So far its been really informative, I think my work has improved quite a bit in a short time thanks to it.



The upcoming weeks are covering texturing and setting up shaders, which is something I've been looking forward to.

Skin Texturing

I'm slowly figuring out a workflow for realistic looking skin using really highres displacement maps, and subsurface scattering to get the right look. Its kind of close, but still not quite there. I'm kind of surprised by how much of the detail can actually just be sculpted and then used as a displacement. The diffuse map is actually fairly low detail at the moment, and it looks like I probably don't have to do a whole lot more to it.



This is actually the first time I've done a character quite this detailed, so a lot of this is fairly new to me. Hopefully the general workflow I've figured out will let me do future characters a lot faster, because I'm itching to move on to other things.

Triangles Begone

I managed to mostly reuse the cage from an earlier version of her face, which saved me a couple of hours of work. So, now I'm mostly back to where I was before, with a nice mesh that I can do my further work on.



I'll have to figure out a way of modeling / sculpting the inner parts of the lips. I've got a rough idea I want to try, but haven't really tested it out yet.

CG Girl Redux

I ended up scrapping the work I had done so far on that girl model, there were too many problems with her facial structure. Rather than waste time polishing a turd, I restarted a couple of times and tossed aside a few of those iterations. I think the repetition did help somewhat.



The skin texture is just a temporary one I had lying around, and I'll be using it as a general guide for when I get to to actually painting up some real textures.

Demon General

This guy is something I started as a last moment entry for the Pre-Dominance War V contest, but totally ran out of time on. I started on him about 5 days before the contest was due to end, figuring I might be able to get something bashed out in time, but alas, technical issues proved to be my undoing.



The highres model was done with a combo of Sculptris for the organic bits, and Softimage for the hard surfaces. This stuff was fairly straightforward, and was mostly a matter of figuring out what I wanted the armor to look like.



For the lowres, I used Softimage to get a sub 3000 triangle version built. The contest limited textures to color, alpha, and specular maps. So, I planned on baking out some ambient occlusion maps and using them as a base for the color / spec. This is pretty much as far as I got before running out of time, but I'm liking this guy enough that I think I'll eventually finish him off.

Further Work on the Cg Girl

I'm slowly making progress with this model. The mid-detail sculpting is done, and she's been retopologized so I can start working away at her in Mudbox.

Work in progress

Hmm, long time and no updates. Not good. Anyhow, here's something I'm cooking up in my free time:



The initial work was all done in Sculptris, and then obj out to Softimage, where I did some further tweaks to the geometry. I recycled a few assets from earlier work to save some time. The eyes, eyelashes and skin shader are all old stuff that will get replaced once I move farther along in the work.

Texture Painting in Sculptris

I haven't done much texture painting lately, so I took a few hours to make this goblin bust. I also gave the paint tools in Sculptris a serious try for the first time. I'm quite impressed with how easy it is to get stuff laid down and looking somewhat ok.



I did a bit of color correction and brightness / contrast tweaks in Photoshop, but otherwise this is straight out of Sculptris.

Recent Practise Sculpts

I spent most of September bashing out roughly one sculpt per day to improve my understanding of anatomy. The images below are the better ones of the bunch. If you're so inclined, you can check out the whole set of 30 sculpts here.