sumo_ beuty shots

Some beauty shots of the sumo



Too tired to post the wire frames today, haven't slept in 23 hours [life is cruel] any how enough whining and on with the beauty shots.

Depending on your monitor collaboration the images might appear over saturated.

click image for a larger file

click image for a larger file

sumor rig wip demo

A wip demo of the sumo rig. I have yet to cretae the finger controls. However, with that being said most of the major controls are there, for example, the, ik hand controls as well as the feet. I have decided not to bother with SDK [set driven keys] for the fingers since the rig is not intended for complex animation but rather for simply posing the character.

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blogger seems to compress teh video  hence the poor quality  

sumo character done

I finished modeling the sumo character. The character has  an inverse kinematic rig that can be used either to pose the character or animate it.

 

sumo skin weight problem

been up since 1 in the morning, its 6 in the morning now. Few minutes a go ran into a problem while re importing the sumo base mesh from Zbrush to maya, for some odd reason it missed up the skin weight values '' hasn't happened to me before'' luckily I was able to solve the problem by copying the weights from the maya file to my base mesh that re imported from zbrush

sumo face model sheet

the face turn around sheet for the sumo character

third character sumo

I finished the concepts/model sheets for my third character, which is a Sumo Wrestler.

Oh, and I have also finished rigging and skinning the ace ventura all that's left is creating a video to integrate it into my show reel and prepare the data for hand in. Due to the fact, I lost the original characters I was working on I had to create these new ones which is a lot of work, but it has to be done right.


The second character is an afro hunter gatherer. I will upload the concepts for that one later in the week.


In the meantime, here are the concepts for the sumo. 

click image for larger size

Ace Ventura

finished the facial model reference [concept]
concept work flow

I  created a low polygon geometry in maya then took that to zbrush and used the paintshop plugin to create the concept by painting over the lowpoly template.

ace ventura

my ace Ventura model sheet is finally done. as you could see its my own representation of the character. Not my usual style because it is heavily stylised.

face model sheet coming up in the next post.

misc

I was able to partially recover my elf character file from my hard disk, however i couldn't retrieve the dwarf character.

Guess I will have to remodel two new characters

overheating

well my laptop over heated again and destroyed the hardisk so now i cant retrieve my data. there fore i will be creating new characters.

i will post concepts for my ace Ventura character [ why don't they make films like that any more ], an afro hunter character and the third i haven't yet decided. 

I don't know wither to cry or laugh at my miserable luck.

dynamic hair rig

I started working on the rig but before I went any further I had to create a rig for the ponytail of the elf character.


Rather than going with a conventional joint rig, I went ahead and combined the spline IK with a single dynamic curve driven by a single hair system, this way the joints are all driven by the hair system which gives it a very natural movement the joint is also driven by the turbulence in the hair system.

Next steps are to start working on the skin weights for the entire character. 

MENTAL RAY SSS

I finished the modeling of the elf character well at least the body and the armour for now anyway.

I am not totally satisfied with the model, but I have to say enough for now and move on to the rigging part soon after I have polished out the textures.


I am using the mental ray sss material, still have some tweaking to do but should be finished by tomorrow. I will start to do some sketches for the weapon, either a staff or a sword anyhow I will post it up here tomorrow.




here is a WIP render with the Mental ray SSS Shader applied 

click for larger file

As you can see from the picture bellow. I have used a very simple shader network, its nothing complex, but it does the job.

click for a larger image 

elf character modelling process

Hi,
finished modeling the elf character two weeks ago unfortunately I forgot to record the modelling process '' wanted to create a video tutorial from it'' any how I did manage to get some WIP screen shots.


I always start my character from a single plane. This gives me more control in the way I define the edge loops of the character earlier on rather than having to refine everything after creating the boxed cage.

Bellow is my typical modelling workflow.

click for bigger image

texturing the elf

I started texturing the elf character. Initially, I wanted to paint the textures by hand. However, I soon found out that my painting skills weren't really that great, so I decided upon using Image textures.


Usually in the pre zbrush era you would have to unwrap your models and paint your image textures in a 2D Paint Application such as photoshop or Painter. However, with zbrush all that has become unnecessary as you can project your textures directly on to the 3d model, now if that wasn't enough the new zbrush4 offers even more intuitive tools to make the texturing process even faster and fun.

For this project, I will be using zbrush 4, or to be specific the ''zbrush light box'' feature which allows the user to load multiple textures and paint them on to the model.

click the image for larger version 

the darker part on the nose is the result of two edges overlapping each other. this will be fixed as i progress