Monday, August 1, 2011

Character Modelling

The few blog uploads of Gamer Camp work seem to have got me back into the mood for blogging and seeing as I started modelling something which I hope to be a portfolio piece this morning this feels like a good time to post some stuff. First of all, resolutions for future work 1) finish them 2) spend as much time in zbrush as physically possible, I'm reaching a bit of a plateau with my Maya knowledge at the moment I don't know everything but I know enough that as long as I keep using it I'm not going to run into any problems of "o crap how do I do this" so now I want to make sure I'm spending plenty of quality hours in zbrush.

Anyway intro over onto the work. The last piece of zbrush work I did was something I quite liked, definitely as a concept, but due to other commitments the project got really drawn out to the point where I could only see what was wrong with it, and just wanted to move on and use what I had learnt to start something new. Also going with a humanoid character barely lots of flesh is always a tough challenge because anyone can tell if anatomy is off even if they can't tell you why.
Anyhoo digressing again.

Here is a quick sketch I knocked up, the basis for the character is that he is going to be a corporate espionage/spy/hacker person who is infiltrating an order of monks who keep documents and information guarded from the outside world. I started by knocking out a rough and ready base mesh from maya, but all the leg work has been done in zbrush. This is definitely how I prefer it, it makes the whole process way for artistic. The idea is once I have the human body finished I will model clothes around it, I have gone to higher levels of detail than I need to for the body seeing as it will be covered, but it's a valuable practise exercise. The model looks a bout a billion times better than my previous, its way for anatomically correct and the subject matter isn't someone on roids which I always prefer. I feel like I'm getting the subtle anatomical details down much better this time around. The hands feet and face are still pretty underdeveloped, a lot of time will be spent on the face as its going to be a focal point of the model. I will keep posting updates as the work progresses.