Masked Child

This was an idea I thought up around Dia de los Muertos, which is a mexican holiday were people celebrate the lifes of their deceased loved ones. Food and drink and toys are left out in belief that the souls of the loved ones will visit for the celebration. The holiday is both a happy yet mysterious and a bit creepy, which is what I wanted to depict with this image.

Any character with their face concealed reads mysterious and creepy, especially children. But that is balanced out with the festival colors and the carnival like display in the background.

On the technical side, this was my first attempt at using Maya hair. below you can see the build up of it. by default it's very flat and blonde. I used the "puppet p_shader" plugin on the hair to have better control of the speculator and root/tip color. then, I bumped up the curly and frizzy values way up to give her a scraggly look, kind of like my own hair.

 The girl herself was modeled and textured in Zbrush. I modeled the whole face because although it wouldn't be seen, I wanted the eyes and eyeholes to appear in the right locate. The skin and face were then textured using ZApplink and photoshop with images. Then the low poly was transferred to Maya and displacement maps were created and applied.

Image Dump

This is a kind of an image dump of illustrations/graphics I created from the past 2 months. I did them all for creative challenge contests, just to entertain myself and to keep my mind and skills sharp. The kids at the bottom I think I might continue as a series by creating more baby versions of fictional characters in that style.

Blimp

For my second project while working at Ninjaneer, I got to work on a demo video for a company that makes these Zeppelin like blimps, filled with helium instead of hydrogen because as history shows us, that didn't go too well.

The project was to create a 2 min long demo in just 4 weeks and it was a fairly small team, just me and other guy. I was mostly the creative lead and divided the project to: week 1- previz, week 2- modeling and texturing, week 3- animation and lights, week 4- rendering and compositing/ pull hair out.
I don't think I can say too much more about the content of that video, but you can check out that blimp company's stuff on their website: http://www.theflyingyacht.com/

Also, below is a couple of stills and a demo of some of the comping I did for the project:

Art & Algorithms

It's been a LONG while since my last post. During this time I've been working on a couple projects here and there including working as a Cg generalist contractor for an animation studio, Ninjaneer. There I got to work on a 3D mapping projection project for the Art & Algorithms festival out in Titusville. The 7 min show was projected onto the side of a building and featured really cool effects, spacerockets, antigrav chambers, and dubstep beats.

For that project, I helped brainstorm and worked on all the storyboards. I also did the modeling for the rocket factory, Antigrav chamber, and the outdoor nature scenes. Here's a look at some stills from those scenes:

Also check out the full show on the Ninjaneer fb page, it's pretty cool stuff:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=422367274534176&set=vb.125171504253756&type=2&theater

Mr. Wilson

More attemps to sculpt closer to human, this was a quick project to further practice and refine sculpting human portraits. I hope to have the chance to texture and bring him into Maya for final rendering.

Woman portrait

Quick update with a small project I'm working on.
Sculpted in ZBrush and working with the Maya Mental Ray subsurface scattering shader.
The braids were created in Maya by having nurb circles extrude along two 2 spiraling curve paths. The new spiral extruded geometry was then skinned with a joint chain, then snap (using the spline curve tool) onto curve paths I had made across her scalp. I can make a braid tutorial in a future post if anyone is interested.

Final:
I started to notice that using the Maya Physical Sun and Sky was interfering with the fast skin subsurface shader, So I relighted using just a direction light and a bounce and fill spotlight. The hair fuzz was then created in with the Shave and Haircut plugin.

Jayden: update 01

I started remodeling the my Jayden character a couple months. Not only did I over-hull her design and rig but the story that was to be my senior film. I think after letting ideas marinate over time, I may got something I really like now. Here's a first look of the redesign and the new robust curve-based facial rig.

I'm continuing to work on her rig and storyboards in my freetime, hopefully I'll have another update soon.

Your act, Mike...

A piece I did for ​Daniel Gonzales' "The Art of Visual Storytelling" online class

UPDATE: after feedback, I went back in and pushed Mike's pose and expression, I dig it much more after the changes

Unlucky

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! 

Here's a piece I did for the Laika monthly creative challenge contest. The theme was to create a piece about an unlucky leprechaun. The time limit was 2 weeks, but I started a bit late, so I completed the image in 9 days. It was create with Zbrush, Maya, Nuke, and photoshop for final touches.

At first, I wasn't sure what to create for the contest, but I know I wanted to enter because it was a pretty good opportunity to practice my zbrush modeling. When I think about St. Patrick, I think of the saying about how he drove all the snakes out of Ireland. Of course he didn't actually drive snakes out, it was just a way of saying about how he brought Christianity to Ireland.

So from that saying, I began to think, "what if he missed one?" and, "it would be incredibly unlucky if someone was to run it him", and from that I had my idea. So I sketch the little guy out and began modeling him with zSpheres in Zbrush. 

I found it easier and quicker for me to model the hat, pipe, and coins in Maya, then export then into Zbrush, because they are much smoother and nonorganic. I then played with the hues and colors until I was happy. I was thinking at first to make the snake green but I was afraid if I put him on a grassy hill he would just blend in and vanish, plus I didn't want him to clash with the green hat.

The objects were then UVed so they could be polypainted and/or textures applied. I used ZAppLink to texture the pipe and eyes with photo images, and the snake and hat was texture with polypainting. I screen cap the progress, brought it into photoshop and roughed out what I wanted the background to look like. I thought a warm background would be a nice balance to the snake's cold blue color. Oh and I flipped the hat because I thought it looked to neatly placed on the ground before.

Next, the ground and foreground plants were modeled, and everything was sent to Maya for materials and lighting.  

 

Subsurface shaders were applied to the snake's body, tongue, eyes, and to the blades of grass. When you get up close to grass, it can be notice how the light penetrates it and it illuminates from it, so I wanted to try and recreate that look. I also experimented for the first time with Maya fur to create the far grass and the fuzzy texture of the felt hat. 

Since I needed to work fast and this is only a still image, I rendered out only the master beauty, an ambient occlusion, masking parts using blackhole shaders and white surface shaders (in post I used this as masks in nuke for color correction of individuals parts, normaly I would render out each individual part and comp them together but this saved me time instead of having to do multiple renders), and a Zdepth map. I then Composited in Nuke, added lens blur, played with levels and colors. Lasted, I painted little things in Photoshop like the shine of the coins and the browning of grass and then it was complete.

I hope you enjoyed, it has been the quickest I've ever crank out an image from concept to completion. Tough, but good experience. 

HellHog WIP 02

Just a quick update. I used the Transpose Master tool to mount the rider onto the bike, then modify his expression and added the tail, cigar, and some piercing rings. Transpose Master is a useful tool that allows me to pose all my subtools at once, but one problem that I encountered came with the difference in the face sizes of the subtools. For example, the zipper and jacket did not exactly match in the end because the zipper has small faces but the jacket has large faces. So for some parts I had to remodel to match them back up, I guess a lesson learned.

Next steps are to add further details, and wrap the fingers around the handles

HellHog WIP 01

This project was thought up to practice ZBrush modeling of different cloths, skin,and Hard surfaces. Also, to learn tools such as Shadowbox, Transpose master, and GoZ. During the Biketoberfest we have here in Florida, I doodled up a classic red demon depiction of this rider character on his bike.

I thought this would make for a very challenging but fun ZBrush project. So using the low poly mesh from my male anatomy project I became sculpting. 

The Shadowbox tool was use to create small trinkets and pieces like his pitchfork zipperpulls. For the bike, I modeled the body in maya since it is amazing simple to create hard surface objects.

I then took it over to ZBrush to sculpt the intricate pieces of the bike.

The step is to use Transpose Master to pose the rider onto his bike. Then, I will sculpt the tail, fill his jacket with pins and patches, and texture him.

Male Anatomy

For my First Zbrush Project, I wanted to learn to sculpt a realistic human. I thought this was a good project because if I could figuring out how to spot and recreate bones and muscles in complex animals like humans then I should be able to sculpt any organism.

I started the figure using ZSpheres placed in front of an image plane of a photographed model. I converted the ZSpheres into an adaptive skin.

From there, I just continued to shape and divided the face and body. Once the sculpt was completed, I UV-ed the model and used the ZappLink tool to make texture map in Photoshop. The texture map was applied to a subsurface material in maya, and the turntable was lit and rendered. 

Hair was created with the Zbrush tool FiberMesh. And to allow for quicker transfers and renders, the model's polycount was decreased using Decimation Master. And for fine details, a bump map was used.

What have I been up to?

It's been a while since my last update, but I've been up to quite a lot during the past ten weeks. Back in October, while applying for career opportunities I was working on my Jayden film. I had created a curve-based facial rig for my character and was ready to make a demo video to post, but before I could do that I was contacted for a job interview at a very impressive studio. 

But at the interview it became clear that my lack of experience in ZBrush would become a hindrance. So since then, I have been working hard to learn ZBrush on my own and create some strong works that I could add to my portfolio.