Dragon Bait and Animate

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

Yesterday we were talking about our projects again and Ryan reminded me of a game I saw at E3 a couple of years ago: Bound. Bound has a really cool low poly style which is particularly effective in the environments. I love the movement and how the environment pulls itself together and shifts as the character moves. I'm not sure how much I'd be able to incorporate into my final project but I think this is quite important in terms of inspiration.

I finished my final renders for my character assignment yesterday. I had spent the day before posing and lighting the character to try and get it to fit with my chosen image. My character's story revolves around performing a ritual in front of a bonfire before dozens of other people so I wanted her to be near a bonfire and ready to summon a dragon. It was a bit of a challenge to get the render's lighting similar to the image and considering we weren't using Arnold or Keyshot with a retopologised model, it made it a bit more tricky. It was a lot of tweaking and adding texture and noise in Photoshop to try and bring everything together as best I could. I'm pretty happy with the results and hoping to have time to retopo the model in the future and get some nice posing and renders finished.

I spent yesterday and today finishing up my model and putting some colour on it. I've since added more detail to the paint as well as posing the character and adding in some lights. I just need to tidy it up and render tomorrow.

I re-did my storyboards for my Dragon Walker character assignment and I'm much happier with these boards than my previous attempts. I like the flow of the story better and it was easier to find timings through these boards when building the animatic. Music is important to this animatic so I added in some sound as best I could but I think I want to extend the drum beat until the dragon actually appears from the fire.

Part of our course for this semester requires us to take a character through a full development process, from 2D concept art, turnaround and model sheet as well as a storyboard and animatic before we take the character into 3D and create a model that can be rigged and posed. I had originally planned to use the character I'm going to use for my final Project but since she is going to be low poly and not have a lot of detail, this assignment seemed like a good chance to try something different. My plan now is to use a character I've had in the back of my mind for a few years... more like 6 years. The Dragon Walker. She's a fantasy character with strong links to dragons and magic and has a tribal feel to her. So I started out with my inspiration board. I love the style of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Moana and Fable: The Journey artwork. So I pulled all of these references and ideas together to help me design my character. I went through several different sketch...