Hi

Thought I'd start my sketchbook here on the polycount forums, graduated from Swansea Metropolitan University this summer with a BA (Hons) in Creative Computer Games Design and I am currently working on my skills to hopefully get a job in the norwegian games industry.

This is the blog I kept while working on my final major project: http://lastyearmajorproject.blogspot.no/

At first during my final year at the University I wanted to become a level designer or content creator, but recently I've really found character modelling to be very fun and rewarding, and although this is most likely the hardest to get into the industry as, I thought I'd give it a go, maybe I can get there someday.

This is the project I am working on now:

A Alien character that is suppose to be from an advanced tribal culture.

I usually always start the character in Zbrush while goZ it into maya to clean up the topology once in a while, and at the end I project the decimated hi poly sculpt onto a lo poly version in maya.

This is the blog I'm keeping about my current projects: http://tasmanastics.blogspot.co.uk/



I started with the head of my character before I started to think of the body.




This is when most of the head detail had been applied to the bust I guess you could call it, I wanted to blend the classic Alien features like the huge eyes and relatively smooth features in the face, with some reptilian ones.



This is the first polypainting pass I did in zbrush, I wanted to avoid green as this is really often used with reptilian style skin and I wanted to make this my own.



To finish off the head I added a dead eye (to make him look more interesting in the same way that the scars do, it gives him a kind of visual backstory), colour for the head veins and a kind of spreading colour from the neck to the cheeks like as if he has a kind of spreading illness or maybe it is a normal feature of this species physiology.



I have also started on the body of the character, since one of the characters for my final major project was a big muscly guy, I wanted to try something more subtle and interesting for this one, I want the character look slim but also like he could be a fierce fighter, so I'm going for lean sinewy muscle type, also change the anatomy and the traditional musculature since he belongs to an alien species it would be somewhat strange for him to have completely human anatomy I think, and it also makes it a little more interesting to model.

I chose for the character to have these "tripod" like hands because, besides the fact that it looks damn cool, it also distances him from the traditional human body shape.




Being understandably unsatisfied with the, unfinished, Velociraptor inspired feet design I completely redid them. These weren't aggressive enough for me and didn't align with the vision I had for this tribal species and their culture which is steeped in conflict and war.



Using this Tyrannosaurus foot for inspiration, which has nice big claws and powerful feet....



.... I created this design for the feet which I think has turned out much better than the original one, because I originally wanted the Velociraptor claw to convey more savagery and aggression when you look at the character, but it hit me that the rest of the foot look all too human, I was suppose to put claws on it and rough skin but the whole shape was too human for me, so that's why I think this looks much better on the character.



Side view of the entire character so far.




I think I'm managing the reptile look quite well so far, can't wait to add some alpha patterns on here so it looks like proper reptile feet, though I think I need to add some more thickness to the some of the toes maybe the back ones depending on how much they use them.

After doing most of the work on the feet I decided to begin on some of the fun stuff, which is, alpha brushing the body.
It has always been my intention for the character to have a skintight suit most likely made of some kind of animal hide to reflect the species tribal / hunting / warrior culture, and I really liked how this almost crocodile patterned alpha brush looked as it looked hard and rough, though maybe too hard to be used for a skin tight suit? as this is an extraterrestrial being this can't be crocodile hide but perhaps rather an equivalent and with slightly different characteristics.

Though I still want to add alot of scratches and other wear on it.



I also added some wear on the suit where it would be most likely to be some like under the arms, at the elbows, the .....crotch, and also behind the knee. I did this to make the suit not looks brand new but more worn and personal.

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I actually did this some time ago but I added alot of skin detail on the characters face, mostly lines and cracks, this is definately not a young example of the species, if their signs of aging is the same as ours....?

I've started to do some polypainting on the character, might end up not being the final design though, but we'll see.

I've continued the color scheme of the head for the hands and feet, where the strongest purple color is is where the roughest skin is located.

I want a shiny, almost wet look for the suit. And the leather bracers should look worn and scratched, but thats for later.

I thought the character looked a little bare and unprotected, this species has, as I've stated before, a tribal warrior culture and are very agile and good fighters. Now a specialized and bare outfit like the character is wearing now is ok for a stealthy assassin unit or something similar, but what I am going for is the soldiers outfit that would be the standard for this species and I would then want at least some armor on him.





It is fairly low poly (for a sculpt) and low detail, but the intention is for the armor to consist of some creatures bones to protect from slashes and I will want something hard in between them that at the same time wouldn't restrict movement. And I will also need to find a way to make the bones not seem too rigid so that would allow movement as well.

I refined the lines of the armor, I changed my mind about the armor being traditional looking bone with hard but flexible material underneath but instead going for a kind of over lapping design.

Here you can see how it looks on the character, I also want either some clothing or more armor for the characters hip area, but would rather not have a traditional belt looking thing.

My Alien character is ready to be decimated and I now need to start working on the low poly version of him so I can project the details, the pain is going to be deciding on how hi poly I can permit the torso armor to be so I can capture the shape of the folds without going to the thousands of polys.




I decided to ditch the leathery braces and shinguards idea and rather continued with the shell/carapace idea I used for the torso armor, the character will, when finished, wield a hi tech staff as a weapon.

After a busy time, I finally managed to get back to work so I could finish my character model, this is a render of the final game character, although I will probably do some polishing on the texture maps in photoshop.... now to create some tripod-hand friendly weapon designs which should be great fun!

Here is a render of the character with two of the weapon designs I came up with

A warclub for savagery, and a mini-gunish gun.

This isn't exactly a new character, but one I thought up a couple of years ago but haven't gotten around to creating until a month ago or so. Forgot to put it up here, although it's on my blog.

The character is a stylized version of a Puffin bird (national bird of iceland) and he's called Puff.



This is the reference photo I used of a Puffin bird during the design phase.




This is the Zbrush sculpt of the character, I would later add eyelids to make his stare a little more..... benign.




The comparison between the untextured lo poly model vs. the textured lo poly model complete with normal maps.





Wireframe.





I rigged the character with a simple rig and did some test animations which you can check out here:

Walking off screen

Puffs Flight School

I'd love comments on my work if any of you have any.

I started on a new character a couple of days ago with the intention of, hopefully at some point, making an indie game.

A human stylized space Captain.

a cross between Duck Dodgers and Han Solo (in my mind at least)


First I had to concept the Captain so I would know what I was dealing with.





when I was happy I made the characters sheet for the modelling process







I have now more or less created the base model to be taken into zbrush for detail creation.

I've finished the Zbrush sculpt of the character yesterday, wasn't all that sure about the color of his clothes but thats luckily easily fixeable.

I also added the holster from the concept to the base mesh that you can see in the previous post.

I've finished the game character version of the sculpt, finished.

So these are the characters I have documented the creation of so far.

So I have a pretty unique looking desk that I do my clay sculpting and occasionally my computer stuff, so I thought why not use this desk as a reference for some much needed environment modelling.

Now I took the picture at an akward angle so it actually looks wider but I broke out the measuring tape during the building of my model so it should be the same.

The model ended up at 326 poly faces which is a nice, pretty low polycount.