Eternity NU

Eternity NU is a 3D artist who's work has come up alot recently on my facebook feed, in disucussion with other artists and on 3D websites such as CG society. From Bangkok he is a 3D Modeler Supervisor for Picture This Studio. I was drawn to this artwork as they are very similar outcomes to what I would like to achieve with my indian warrior character. Where the character is very beatiful and feminine yet fierce and not to be messed with.
Here he has also shown shots of his work flow whilst creating the final image of the character shown firstly. They model is very low poly and stylised with anatomy. This has given me insight into a posttible work flow to character my indian femal warrior character.
The way he has sculpted the hair on the characters is very simple yet effective, by taking a shape and scupled lare clumps of strands in, it retains a stylied quality.
Find more of their work here.

DreamWorks Animation

Growing up i would always get excited if I saw the boy sat on the moon fishing at the beginning of a film, this was because as a kid I knew that this meant it was going to be a good film. DreamWorks has creaeted many of my favourite animated films growing up including; Antz, Shrek, Chicken Run, Over the Hedge, Flushed Away, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and more recently the Croods. The have made a huge influence and contribution to the 3D animated feature films. They create beatifuly realistic yet stylised creatures and environments allowing audiences to indulge in a rich realistic colour and texture in a stylised animated way.

 I am always looking at ways other 3D artists have stylised and designed animal characters without making them too 'humanised'. Dreamworks has an abundance of inspiration for this throughout it's films over the years. I am currently working on building a lion character in 3D I previously posted on my blog. I don't want to get caught up in trying to achieve a high sense of realism here in form and texture.

Currently awaiting for the release of How To Train Your Dragon 2, which looks to be as beautiful in design and rich in story as the first, I am very exctied.

 

I definately encourage fans to go to schoolofdragons.com where members can creating their own viking character and raise a dragon to become the UDT! ultimate dragon trainer.

I also encourage everyone to check out the awesome trailers by clicking here.

Andrew Hickinbottom

Andrew Hickinbottom has to be one of my favourite 3D cgaracter modellers, with a distinct style throughout his work. Hickinbottom works with 3ds max, Mudbox, ZBrush, V-Ray, and Photoshop. Hickinbottom is renound for creating female / pin up characters, with stylised figures, soft and elegant character in a dynamic and interesting pose. Often he works to create one still image of a character in a scene or studio lighting set up allowing focus to one still composition a higher lever of detail and a high level of attention to detailing from one angle, this is one of the reasons I have always wanted to create such a set up. The indian female characer will be modeled in positon and can therefore be treated in a similar way. I have selected some of my favourite pieces by Andrew Hickinbottom, lots of these characters / portraits have been created in reference to fans and friends.

andrewhickinbottom.com/

Through his facebook page Hickinbottom is always keeping his fans up to date with current projects and their work in progress. November 2013's 3D World featured an article and interview on Andrew Hickinnbottom's 'Polygon Pin-ups' where he says the best advice to artists trying to break into the market is to stand out :

"Try to be original, to be unique and to do what you do well. Get a good online precesnce to get your self notices and be enthusiastic enough to do personal projects in free times, as you can truly express your skills and vision."


3D World November 2012 issue

Sculpting Rocks & Terrain in Z-Brush

Recently I have beeen experimenting with making rocks and rocky terrain in Z-Brush and Maya. As I have never created such an organic environment before I have felt a little out of my comfort zone, therefore I have watched and read many tutorials on making rocks & terrain quickly and effieciently. When researching this I have also come accross many terrain and rock generating programmes which look really effective and useful in making and environment quickly, however these being quite expensive and trial products not allowing a transferance to maya I havent been able to use them for any final product. i have however experimented with a few trials which I found really useful just to get an understanding of the level of detailing required to create a realistic terrain.
Instead I have opted to sculpt the rocks and terrain using Z-Brush, below are some of the earlier results I was getting. 

Blue Sky Studios

Recently Blue Sky Studios announced that Peanuts the movie would be released in 2015, alongside the trailer which can be found at YouTube. I was really impressed to see the trailer as having always being a Peanuts fan growing up, I was eager to see how the artists at Blue Sky had translated the 2D drawn characters into 3D models or even if this was possible to do successfuly and still retain the original artworks visual style. To be honest I was more than impressed it was like I had stepped into one of the old illustrations. The shapes and lines retain the qualities of the original artwork, however the beautiful lighting brings the environment and characters to life in a 3D way. I was a bit skepitical of the idea of Peanuts in a 3D visual style at first, howver from what I have seen so far it has been very successful. I look forward to seeing more teasers and trailers before the realease of the film in 2015.

Blue Sky Studios films have all made it into my top cg ainmated films from Ice Age to the more recent Rio 2 being released soon. I always find looking at the artwork for these films hugely inspirational and helpful when dealing with a creature desing. Both in the concept and 3D work their artwork retains a level of realism with a combination of cartoon stylisation. This juxtaposition creates really interesting and unique characters. The bird characters on Rio have to be some of my favourite character designs, their characters features are so strong each is an individualy strong character both personality visualy and mentaly. I am really looking forward to the release of Rio 2, having watched the first film again recently.

Pathfinder Progress

For the past month I have been working on the production of the interior environment of a space ship, to be used in the VFX film short 'PATHFINDER'. The interior being collaberatively buit along sid Zoe Lane and being directed by Dominic Pugh. We firstly blocked out the basic shapes and objects in the scene, slowly adding details, such as screws bolts and wires.
Having build all our listed assetts, all together we suddenly had an evironment. However it didn't look that busy our director therefore asked us to create more visual noise within the scene, by creating extra panels, hanging wires, pipes and pillars. To do this me and Zoe used different detailings from eachothes models to add details around the scene, by doing this we hoped to create a better visual flow and continuity throughout the design. After adding these extras into the environment it seemed more connected visualy throughout.

Then the unqrap.. :(
Working between Maya and RoadKill we unwrapped adn UV mapped the 400,000(aprox) poly environment. This took us longer than expected, causing us to fall behind and use some of texturing time. Once the scene was fully unwrapped and uv mapped the texturing process was able to begin.
To ensure that the textures of our seperate assets would coordinate together we decided to create a texture source pack, frm which we could texture the whole scene. This would ensure similar metals, colours and erosion. We also create a base metal texture that would be the primary metal throughout the scene.
Most of the scene has been textured with photoshop, however with some of the more organic materials in the scene such as the fabric on the back of the chairs I have used Z-brush to create the folds, tears, creases and fabric texture.

I then textured the rest of the metal on the chair in photoshop. I lost alot of the detailing in the creases and stitches when exproting my maps from Z-brush and will have to find a better method before the final rendering process begins. I want retain the high quality of the fabric as the backs of the chairs will be in alot of the shots in the Pathfinder short.

Above is the studio lighting set up I have created to render my turnarounds from. For the first time I am using a platform to display and turn the model on, I have done this as I have had lots of feedback in the past that models look lost on just the soft lit background, I've just never realy liked it. However by using the platform I've found it makes the model look more central in the scene throughout the whole 360 turn. Now that our models and textures were complete I now needed to begin rendering turnarounds, whilst Dominic and his VFX compositing team rendered and comped the necessary shots for the short. Below is a screen shot of the camera shot being lined up with the 3D scene in Maya.

These shots will be render and comped over roughly 2 months, compositors will add special effects such as lense flares, smoke and particles. Glows from the work station screens will also be added to the actors face, a test of this is shown below.

I look forward to updating the progress of this project in the near future until then alot of rendering needs to be done.

Final Uni Project- Pre-Production - Proj 4 - TimeFreeze Indian Character

The project "TimeFreeze" will be an epic battle scene frozen in time, the project is a collaberative projects working with multiple artists and one animator, the time freeze and stillness of the film will allow the artists work to be shown of in great detail. The character that I will be placing into the scene will be an Indian warrior woman, her model pack process shown below.

This character will be frozen mid being attacked by a dragon created by +zooluluu , I plan to model the characters basic shape as shown below in maya then I will rig and pose the character before continuing to sculpt and add accessories in z-brush.  

Final Uni Project- Pre-Production - Proj 3 - Fish Hybrid

One of my personal projects will be used to create a male character. As I am focusing my career toward being a character artist I have focused my projects mainly on characters, covering female, male and a creatures anatomy. 

For this character I have combined the male anatomy with fish and water features to create a fish human hybrid. To begin the process I began incorporating fishy features with male anatomy.

To create the characters hair, I have tried to use fins and tentacles to create a similar effect. I didn't want to create the typical hybrid of fish and human with a mer man or mer maid, therefore I have kept the character very human based anatomy wise with fishy features.

human anatomy base

Final Uni Project- Pre-Production - Proj 2 - Creature

One of my personal projects will be used to build an animal character, here is the model pack I have created for my lion character / creature. This will be built in Maya and textured using Z - brush. To create the hair I will use a combination of different alpha channels to give the effect of hair strands.

Final Uni Project- Pre-Production - Proj 1 - Pathfinder Interior

My final major project for 3rd year of university has been divided into 4 separate projects; two collaborative and two personal. One of the collaborative projects will be used to work on a friends project, called "Pathfinder" this is a VFX filming project. The storyline of the film involves two spaceships battling in space, crashing into each other then crashing into an alien planet that I will be modeling and have shown some concept work for previously in my blog.

The interior of one of the spaceships will have live action actors comped into the scene, me and another artist +zooluluu will work collaberatively to build the interior in 3D within Maya.

Above the image shows a simple lay out of the scene and the various objects that me and +zooluluu will be building between us. We have separated the assets equally and worked alongside each other throughout the design process.

Flooring Designs:

Captains & Pilot seats:

Worksation:

These are the final design for the scene, and am currently building these in 3D in Maya alongside +zooluluu, progress and process of the building of the scene will be posted soon.