I've moved

Thanks for coming.
I've moved over to wordpress so will no longer blog here.
GoTo my new site to find out what new things I've posted.

Creative Tanks

A picture of the main character from the 3D short story I'm doing this year, I'm not sure why he's in a zombie pose...

Gantt Chart for 3d Short

I've made a Gantt Chart, as a suggestion from a friend of mine for my 3rd year project.
I can see myself making Gantt Charts for all my activities, it's quite awesome seeing how this can be utilized in a production environment. Teams can easily track productivity and if they on schedule and quickly see the overall progress of the project, and what needs to be done to get it done on time.

Dragon Sculpt 2

More Dragons! I need to learn on how to comp images together properly in photoshop from Zbrush.

My workflow is as follows:
I start with low poly mesh made in Maya, Import it into Zbrush and sculpt then make smaller low poly meshes for the details for things like eyes and claws, then add those as subtools.
I should also accredit this design to Niko Marlet who designed characters for How to Train your Dragon and KungFu Panda, seriously inspirational design.

My next attempts will be a pure Zbrush creation, starting with ZSpheres.

Dragon Sculpt

A two and a half hour dragon sculpt in Zbrush. Got inspired by How to Train Your Dragon, and decided I needed a 3d dragon so here's the WIP, still to add claws, eyes WINGS! horns and all other funny things to make him complete, this is also serving as the learning process of how to make normal maps / displacement maps and all that other good jazz that allows you to have low poly models with high detail without the performance hit, or I guess I could upgrade my compy.

3D Short Schedule

Heres the Schedule that I've put together for the 3d short I'm busy working on in my final year at the Animation School. I'm finding it quite a useful tool to have the pie graphs in there as a motivation through the rougher times of the whole process, watching the red disappear on those graphs makes me quite happy. Go Creative Tanks! It's a working title, however we all growing attached to the name, but until it changes we need more pie charts!

nCloth Pipes

Creative Tanks Project - nCloth Sim Tests
I'm busy Investigating ways of doing pipes for the chair for the project i'm working on in 3rd year. Had trouble controlling the spline IK Hair curve method. But that seems to be a much much quicker way to evaluate the pipes, and will probably try figure it out in the coming days. In the meantime I've done tests with ncloth, I've not had much experience with nCloth at all so I'm quite happy that I got any result at all.

Alchemy Head

Got hold of Alchemy, the free vector program and it's amazing. It's really creative. Just spent a few hours looking at shapes form things. I can definitely see this program being a useful tool in getting good silhouettes for the character design process. Overall this program is just down right fun to play with and allows you to feel totally creative.
Here's one of the heads I saved while watching the shapes form.
Took it into photoshop and did color overlay to get the colors.

Rigging Exercise

Fast rig / animation exercise
I felt like making a four legged run, so inspired by South African Studio, Luma, and the bun&bunee design. I made and animated this cute little robot.
The Idea was to see how fast I could create and animate something. In hindsight I should have noted the hours.

Completed in 1 Day.
All the rig has is:
Stretchy ik limbs with SDK foot rolls and banks and a Fk Head.

Side note: I have no clue why it's funny looking in the beginning, the original mp4 I have is fine. My assumption is that something happened when I uploaded it to YouTube. If you know the reason why this happens feel free to let me know.

CT Character Rigging 02

Mostly completed the body rig.
Still need to paint weights for the "render res" model. Next is to start on a blendshape driven face rig.
Hoping the maya expressions wont slow it down too much during the animation phase later.

If you looking at this picture and saying: "Cool! but why is he cut everywhere?"

Then to you I say: "My recent browsing of the forums have enlightened me that
if you parent geometry straight to the bones it speeds the rig up quite considerably."

Fast rig = Happy time for all.

CT Character Rigging 01

Finishing up the Character Rig for the project I'm working on in my 3rd year. This is the base Model/Rig that we'll be using and then using facial blends and different texture maps to make different characters,
I've got the low poly model that's been cut up and parented to the bones for max speed (apparently this is a very fast way of doing things) and I've got the normal body that I'm going to skin and smooth for higher res versions. Thinking about making the Collar and Tie nCloth, or maybe the collar with jiggle.. Will be testing out those options soon.

Mank

Inspired by Street Fighter, and Jouste's Style. This is what came out.

Haduken

Been playing some pocket fighter online. Flash style. Wish there was more, more specifically I wish you could play as Dan! He's awesome. Solidifies the desire to purchase a Xbox when i'm able. + Street Fighter!
Wanting to draw someone doing a Haduken, this is my attempt at a character, stole some colors from Dan.
Name - Unknown

Monster sculpt

What started out as fat head doodle sculpt turned into a full body. Having fun with it, after watching some hard surface videos of Vitaly Bulgarov on youtube It's made me want to attempt some hard surface modeling which I'm going to attempt to do for the armor for this sculpt.

I made low res topology for the head and then the torso and imported them into Zbrush and had fun.

Doodled in less than 12 hours