Dragon Bait and Animate

I offered to 3D model one of my classmates characters as she has 4 characters in her final film. So I made Dalila's character, the Moon. I sculpted in ZBrush and used a mix of ZRemesher and Maya retopology to create the finished model which was smoothed in Maya. I had a lot of issues with the head piece and spent a long time trying to get it to look right until I eventually decided to use the Curve Strap brush in ZBrush to create layers around the head. I could make these low poly in ZBrush then just smooth them in Maya. Concept by Dalila Trovoada :  Block in: Adding Detail: Further Detailing: Adding shirt with transparency test: Retopoing:  Final Arnold Render:

I've spent the last couple of weeks tweaking the character mesh to tidy it up for rigging. I used Advanced Skeleton 5 again to rig this character as well as looking at a few online tutorials to make sure I got the most out of the rig. I also used Advanced Skeleton to build a facial rig which works better than expected although the blink function didn't work properly so I added in my own blend shape to allow the character to blink. I also tweaked some old assets and built a couple of new ones to bring into the final environment.  I forgot that there was an email about sending in artwork that might be selected to be used on the Masters show posters so I posed my character and pulled together a render in Maya that I felt represented my project and compared to earlier work, I feel that this has a lot more style and personality. So now I'm pulling in all of these assets and final ideas into Unity for the final project and I hope to have this all set up b...

I was away on holiday last week so spent a couple of days working on my anatomy in ZBrush Core but it turned into a little piece based on an old painting of mine. I'm actually really happy with how the face came out so I might re-purpose it for another project, possibly Diebrig's as she needs models for the Bee Hand Maidens. 

I started sculpting Elara the mermaid almost a month ago! But Going Live and my Research Presentation kind of got in the way and I didn't have time to finish her. So I sat down at the weekend and today and finished her up. Based on a piece by Nikhil Shinde More on my ArtStation! This was the first time I sculpted in pose and based on someone else's concept art. It was loads of fun and I'm looking forward to doing some characters based on classmates work for upcoming projects. 

After the Faun sculpt I did I wanted to try a similar piece to see if I could apply a lot of the things I'd learned. I also threw down a quick polypaint today to mess about with colour. The Unicorn - High Poly Sculpt by Leah McEwen on Sketchfab

I spent the weekend working on a sculpt in ZBrushCore because I was getting bored of Maya! I used one of my old sketches as a reference and messed about using a couple of different YouTube tutorials as helpers to keep me going. One thing about ZBrushCore is the lack of tools that would have helped me with the hair, so I may come back to it later. But it was a lot of fun and I learnt loads! The Faun - Sculpt by Leah McEwen on Sketchfab My ArtStation has it here too: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QyLvl

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point.  There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de...

I spent a little while working on setting up a basic scene in Maya and found a lot of inspiration the the PS4 game 'Bound'.  I love the way they do the far away scenery and I like the idea of the world cracking and moving around my character so I tried to incorporate this into the test scene I was building.  There's a lot that still needs to be worked on, especially the far away background but I'm happy with how it's slowly coming together. I also spent a bit more time playing about with lighting in Maya and trying to get it to look a bit more like I wanted it to look originally and the idea that the face is projecting it's own light and coming to life. Again, there's lots more to work on but I feel like I'm getting somewhere.

I was thinking today about an older concept I had when I started developing the current idea for 'Cure' and I think it would be easier for me to focus on research on something I really care about: Mental Health. The narrative throughout 'Cure' was initially developed with the thought of depression and loneliness being at the centre. The loneliness aspect was singled out for most of the continued development but I would like to bring it back to its roots of depression. With this in mind, I spent today thinking about lighting. After running a couple of tests in Maya, (Lighting in Maya is hard) I sketched up some rough thumbnails of how I wanted the lighting to appear to the audience. So I want to run some more tests and practice lighting in general for the future. In other news, I put together a little comparison image of some concept art and the final model.