Current comments will be highlighted.
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| "'Nora' from 'Streets of Rage 1'. Created in Maya 2010, then taken into ZBrush for a high-res sculpt." |
This model had a very simple, low res base-mesh created in Maya, which was then brought into ZBrush where I subdivided it several times while sculpting it into this piece.
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| "The mesh brought back into Maya for shader application." |
Not understanding that ZBrush can texture things or unwrap things, I felt I had to bring the ridiculously high-res sculpt back into Maya to apply different shaders on the model for rendering. Yes, this took forever and gave extremely poor results.
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| "'Shiva' from 'Streets of Rage 3'. Modelled in Maya 2010, Textured in Photoshop CS4 Extended with an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet." |
A latter character model I made; a vast improvement, but still had much to be desired. The difference this time was that I knew what I was doing wrong, and how I might change it for my next character.
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| "Fully rigged with joints." |
He was fully rigged and poseable, my first one ever! I learn't how to do it properly in University that day.
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| "Messing around with Blend Shapes to make his facial expressions." |
I also learnt how to create Blend Shapes for facial animation, so made a small set of expressions for this guy to use; nothing special.
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| "Modelled in Maya 2010, Normal Mapped in ZBrush, and rendered in Mental Ray." |
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| "Normal Map created from ZBrush." |
I finally got how to get Normal Maps out of ZBrush for use in Maya (and in turn, how to apply a Normal Map in Maya). This was created from a very simple, fast base-mesh in Maya, which was UV unwrapped. I then brought it into ZBrush, had a high-res sculpt made, and extracted a Normal Map from it. This was then applied to the low-res model back in Maya, and rendered with Mental Ray. I got very excited at the prospects of what I could use this for now :D
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| "X1-Alpha' from 'Future Cop: LAPD'. Modelled in Maya 2010, rendered with Mental Ray." |
A simple model, simple shapes, not much effort required, but looks quite cool in the end I though :D
Lovely dramatic lights! I learnt how to use Area Lights with this model (as seen above).
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| "Rendered with Vector Render as verticies with strokes and fills as a .SVG file." |
I also found another renderer hiding from me in the plug-in's box; a vector renderer. It is surprisingly slow but can give completely editable renders for programs such as Illustrator to use, which is cool.
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| "Character project Concept. Drawn to the computer using Photoshop CS4 Extended and an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet." |
A new character project in the works to try and bring together a bunch of different things I had now learnt.
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| "Model 99% complete." |
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| "Mesh" |
Probably considered to be my first actual 'clean' mesh of a character, but still far from perfect.
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| "ZBrush high-res sculpt." |
Sculpted in ZBrush from an exported .OBJ file from the Maya model; everything seemed to be going well.
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| "Test render (Normal Maps not 100% working)." |
And then this result. At this point, I QQed, and went to bed at 5am. I realised what the problem was while lying in bed; the UV map I had laid out for the model made various parts of the model share UV space to mirror eachother. For example, I had both arms on top of eachother in the UV map to save on texture space, as well as both legs, and even half of her face. This meant the Normal Map extracted from ZBrush was overlapping itself in the same areas in UV space, a big problem. Instead of completely re-doing the UV map, I edited the Normal Maps to hell the next day to make them work, and kept what went wrong in mind for future projects.
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| "Final Model and Render from Mental Ray." |
All maps fixed. In the end she consisted of two shaders, each containing Diffuse, Specular and Normal maps.
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| "'Holiday', drawn to the computer using Photoshop CS4 and Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet." |
As I said, every so often I got round to doing a quick drawing ;)
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The Forum Comments:
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"Wow! It's amazing how fast you have improved Ricky! Keep it up and good for you! I really like this last model a lot!"
SDink was always so inspiring to me! And comments like this just motivated me to carry on and improve more and more!
"So Cool! You are very dedicated, its just awesome how much you do! ^_^ Keep up the awesome stuff! The Photoshop piece is incredible!"
Lovely dramatic lights! I learnt how to use Area Lights with this model (as seen above).
