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After many months of working on and off on this environment, I'm finally ready to call it done. I drew inspiration from the old Polycount environment challenge 3 (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=113765), with the goal of learning the basics of UE4 and to try out Quixel's DDO. Was a fun project, but I'm excited to get back to some more character modelling and rigging now!        
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Decided to take a prop for an interior scene I've been developing (updates on that soon) a bit further and do up some snazzy presentation sheets. Was a fun exercise, I'll probably take it another step further and rig it up too after I get some other stuff out of the way first. The BMX was modelled in Maya with some minor detailing in ZBrush, baked in xNormal, had its base textures created in dDo2 then refined manually in photoshop, and finally was rendered in Marmoset.     Been forgetting to add this to the archives for a while now... introducing my final year undergraduate film, "The Belvedere Double." I finished work on this around about November 2013. I spent eight months on the short doing everything from script writing and pre-vis through to post-production on my lonesome, getting tripped up at just about every obstacle on the way. It was a fantastic experience. Sure, there were a heap of 3am bedtimes with 6am wake-ups, but it forced me into a lot of corners where I had to step out of my comfort zone to learn something new, and was a good gauge on how far I could push myself and still manage to function as a normal human being. There's a whole pile of amateur-level things going on - the stiff animation (courtesy of my terrible old rig), the poor pacing, the weak ending - but I'm proud of it for what it is. I went back and tried to fix a few of these problems after I'd finished the version uploaded below, but ran out of steam. I replaced the weird modern hubcap in the intro with a 50's era one, and modelled, rigged, and animated some crows squawking and carrying on outside the windows in the first two shots, but after all that I ran into some major headaches with the render farm and decided to just call it a day. Big thanks to Darren Whyte for capturing and adding sound to the short! You can see more of Darren's work here: https://soundcloud.com/static-structures Just completed a schmick new character to practice more cartoon-style rigging and deformation with! The piece is based of a concept by the very talented José Manuel Fernández Oli, who you can see more of at nibbledpencil.com/index.php Took me about three weeks to do working on and off between other projects. Went for a diffuse only texture, following the workflow presented by Valve for texturing DOTA assets (http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterTextureGuide.pdf). Only major detour I took from the workflow was using primarily ZBrush to paint on textures, before baking the vertex colours out of xNormal and integrating into my main psd. Was a fantastic workflow to get into - I'm thinking for my next character I'll follow a similar style, but tackle a more simple model that can be built faster so I can put more focus back onto my technical skills...   Over the past week and a half I've been slapping together a script for personal use for a games project I'm currently working on. The breif calls for around 8 fully rigged bipedal characters completed within the next few months. Thankfully none of them are full on, only basic functionality needs to be implemented. No facial rigging necessary, although one or two might need one so they can be posed for promotional images. I could have jumped onto CreativeCrash and used one of the many fantastic auto-rigging scripts found on there, or used Maya's built in Human IK system and be over and done with this in a day, but I guess I didn't want to 'cheat' myself when theres so much to learn from doing it yourself. I've had some background using c# during the course of university, and thought this would be the perfect excuse to actually put some of it to use. So I decided to start simple, and just completed my first significant MEL script that automates the process of setting up and rigging arm and leg chains. After rigging the first two characters for this project it became immediately obvious that spending anymore time repeating these steps would be a waste of time, so set out to automate it. I found 'The Art of Rigging: Volume 1' by CG Toolkit provided a good spring-board to get started, but once I'd written the first couple of procedures the rest came naturally. The script is by no means elegant, but it gets what I need done in a fraction of the time. Next up, I think it might be good to work out how to automatically create a IK/FK stretchy spine setup, or how to generate a series of FK controls along a joint chain of any length, like in jbuck's neat script "The Rigging Toolbox." (www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/the-rigging-toolbox) Not because I'm too cheap to buy it, but to learn how it's done. At least thats how I justify myself. You can download my script, "autoLimbRigger" for free from CreativeCrash at: www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/autolimbrigger  |
Author3D artist and rigger from Brisbane, Australia 
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