week 4 of thesis

So this week for my thesis, I gathered tiger images, I tried to balance photos of tigers, anatomical images, and some cg tigers.  I created a quick base mesh to sculpt from in maya after setting up orthographic images in photoshop, on this stage I tried to focus on proportions and even topology for easier sculpting.  After bring it into zbrush I start to block out the forms while maintaining the proportions and learning the anatomy of large cats at the same time which came out to be a lot more complex and different from humans than I thought.  After forming the muscles and bones, I started smoothing them out which didn't take too long/  Since this is getting ready to rig I didn't have to worry about gesture except for the mouth.  I didn't get as far as I wanted to since learning the anatomy took longer than I thought; I still have a lot of work to do on the paws, head, and other parts like skin/fat/fur, I think total this week was about 12 hours.  

As for other projects, I decided to practice some anatomy (female) before sculpting the tiger which turned out to turn into a 4 hour thing instead of a quick one hour practice since I started to do a face as well that turned out a lot more stylized than I thought which I really liked.  I also started my second lighting/rendering/materials project, for this one I'm thinking of a fantasy outdoor scene with some Salvador Dali feel to it and also design an insect for it too.  Last thing for this week was that I found my rig that I made over the summer for my co-op which I will modify to fit my real time character for my Unreal Development Kit class.  

week 3 thesis progress

So this weeks been a really busy one but I still managed to throw in around 8 hours into finishing the design for my main character for my thesis; I'm always looking at new references and inspirations so I don't know how much time was actually put into that.  Some ideas that I put into this was to make the exoskeleton suit have a ninja influence to it.  the hidden melee weapons were inspired by elbow blades/ tonfas, I also equipped him with a hidden ranged weapon, I'm thinking energy pulses, or maybe projectiles like electrical shurikens or something heh.  to enhance the mobility, flight, and melee strikes I added jet like pieces that go in opposite directions.

I can say that I am on track with my schedule so now I am going to go into the modeling and sculpting phase where I will continue to enhance my designs.  I gave myself 5 weeks to work on the modeling so here's my goals.
-week 1: tiger sculpt
-week 2: mechanical tiger parts (kit bashing designs in zbrush, hard surfaces in maya)
-half of week 3: body sculpt (for proportions)
-other half of week 3 + week 4: suit modeling
-week 5: head sculpt

I will include retopoing and uv unwrapping in the texture phase since I like to do those things together

As for my other classes, I'm making a flying castle in UDK where the white-box block-out is done and a motorcycle still-life that I just finished doing the UVs for.

***update!***

so I'm really glad I decided to do a motorcycle for my rendering/lighting/shading class still life project since it was a great way to practice my hard surface modeling and my newly learned skills in v-ray

week 2 progress

So for the second week ( my weeks will consist of work done usually between friday - monday so its kinda last week but the way I am naming my week is like this.  So last week was research, learning some workflows, organizing everything, and gathering a few things I did over the summer.  this week I am doing concept art for the two characters; about 2 hours was done just looking at references including a tutorial I watched on designing concepts and about 10 hours sketching up and designing this.  I will try to spend roughly 4 hours finishing the concept for the exoskeleton suit before class critiques. I work kind of in a messy style since I only wanted to spend roughly a week with the concepts; if this part of the project had more gravity to it, then I might have went back to do a lot of clean up work but I have a ton of other work from other classes to work on as well as the other character design to finish. I also kept the silhouette in the last image since I liked the graphic look to it. the idea behind this guy is that he's the main antagonist.  the target to be destroyed by the main character.  it's a tiger corpse reanimated through mechanical means, equipped with missiles (hidden on the side of the body) as well as a rail gun/ pose-able shield.

solidifying the forms

pulling out the details

roughing in a silhouette

Starting thesis

So I'm going to start dedicating my blog to my thesis... alright here goes, week 2/30+ holiday break

this week I did some research to refine my pipeline along with solidifying my plan, I also gathered a lot of conception/inspirational images and videos. finally I started doing some rough sketches of how my second character will look.  I'm going to try to spend about 4 hours a day on each of my off days (16 total while balancing my other class work loads. 

my main passion would be character design so I believe animating the characters will help enhance the design to show how they will move and stuff.  with the new skills I picked up this summer including learning how to rig (the advanced way), nukeX, vray and other design processes I hope to create this an awesome 90 sec cinematic. 

narrative:  the video will start off with the character (exoskeleton armor) flying through the sky. through his point of view, the target is spotted.  coming down to the snowy wasteland he is instantly attacked (tiger corpse reanimated through machinery and bio experiments, it is 3x larger than a normal tiger and enhanced with regenerative properties)  fight scene occurs.  at the end the tiger is destroyed and the hero reveals himself from the helmet, ready for his next target.

hi res: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bipo44rymu3ewon/thesis_timeline2.jpg

here are some links to some videos that have inspired me

http://youtu.be/KB53H3-qOWk?t=45s

http://youtu.be/QCw_aAS7vWI?t=2m26s

http://youtu.be/agk2svo7svI?t=35s

http://youtu.be/ulAW4zsaRXk?t=45s

First week of classes

Hello! been real busy now that I'm in my senior year.  I've been doing a volunteer work making a virtual coach character that needed refinement, it's mainly for people who have problems such as anger management, spousal abuse, drugs, ect.  I also started my senior thesis and started some conception for my character that I want to make which is an exoskeleton suit.  I've also been trying to practice more on my human anatomy as well as hard surface modeling.  The motorcycle I made is based on the yamasaki ninja 300 2013 model for my lighting, shading, and rendering class where we had to model some sort of still life and I felt this would be more interesting than a bowl of fruit.

high poly quick render

motorcycle block-out 

mid section male anatomy block-out  wip

redesigned helmet

mid section body armor wip

concept workflow

clothing wrinkles in zbrush

before and after head