Madame Mirage

I am working on Madame Mirage from Paul Dini (Author), Kenneth Rocafort (Illustrator). Awsome story, I read it last year and was hoping to see a Mirage Game after Darkness.

 A turnaround of the model, a simple and clean sculpt. I am going to be using her for simple animations and so I can improve my particle and hand animation skills again
Nothing to extravagant. This is stills has the Sculpt hair I used as my reference; I use an insert multiple mesh tool the make the strips for the low game hair. I don't want to use Fibers for this one; I plan of using NCloth and am not sure if my little computer can handle rendering the fibers and the NCloth.

An early Marmoset scene. I am still working on the extra people in the scene and laying out the environment and lighting to get the best views. Planned on this for valentines but life and time took precedence.




And I have been getting re-acquainted with the Animators Survival Kit and have made a simple sexy walk in Maya. I have half the dress as Ncloth; still have to go through and fix the last frames so they blend a little more seamlessly and her legs snaps a little too much for my liking.

Work Work and Reading

I am working on the scene of the post apocalypse character for the CG Hub Challenge. I am toying with using the creature I sculpted. I need to perfect the sand and play with the lighting. I am planning on using this character in my reel when I have the whole scene finished.

Yet another reel piece, I am toying with the environment for Rosa, and I am perfecting my animation as best as I can. And I have revisited the Zbrush model cleaned up the anatomy errors. I have a new pose in mind for her Zbrush model, if I can get it to look right I will used that instead of the one she has now.

I fixed her hands and cleaned the feet up on the this model (this is the old image and pose) I am thinking about putting her in a whole semi-scene like I had her riding the crab from the first concept I had.  

I am putting the Djinn to the side, not because he isn't good or unfinished, I think it would be better to perfect what I have. I am still modeling more characters but I am spending time fine tuning the ones I have. I am rigging the Djinn still and given my animation skills I may ask someone to animate him, if the rig is good enough. I want to show that I can do a little bit of everything, lighting, rigging, animation and some compositing.

Most people would say "don't put it on your really if it isn't great", then when I say "I can animate on a pre-viz/pre production level" they'll ask "why don't you have animation on your reel?" The catch 20-20. Though I am may be over thinking somethings I am still of the opinion it is better to prepare for the worst and pray for the best.  Anyway,

I have a pose of the Deity, I am really proud of how the hands turned out on this. The leg arms and the back ones I really like. I want to get all of those intense feelings into the whole body. A feeling of loss, anger and defeat. I need to do the fibers/fur still and the background but its coming along. I might have this on my reel but I don't know if having him would be a good idea. I am trying to show a variety of characters; I might have him as the creature but I'm not sure yet. 

Also along the same sad, emotional line. I read Batman and Robin #18, and it was inspiring. It is a silent comic, no one said anything and I didn't even notice that till I read it again. I loved this panel because it hurt so much; I never read the issues when Jason died but I saw Under the Red Hood and it was really really sad, and they ended it with Jason saying "This is the greatest day of my life" when he was a young Robin, tore my heart out. This comic just ripped my heart out and turned into the tiny pieces of lint you find in your pockets. I also love the panel when Batman is in the shower and his suit is covered in blood and he looks so broken. All I can think about when I read this comic now is "Pity the Grieving man, Fear the Grieving Father"

Animating and Retopologizing

 

I haven't update in awhile and it's not that I am not working, I am just working on things that take time to do well.

 

So I have a low version of Rosa made. I rigged and animated her in Maya. I used Softimage's tail bones in the dress and the hair.I rendered this is Softimage XSI, I used an .FBX file to jump from one program to another. I still need to render the low version of Rosa with wireframes, I will use her tpose and render her in Maya. I haven't really done a lot of animation since I left school so this was a good refresher. Nothing amazing but its good practice and I show I can make a model that can be easily rigged.

I am currently working on a lower version of the Djinn model in Zbrush, curse my asymmetry. Trying the zsphere method and drawing out the topology is kind of working, though I might just use the zsphere and just remake the whole body to get a better result. Its that trial and see what looks better kind of project. For rigging, to save time I may use the biped rig in Softimage and animate him with that rig. I found some videos on YouTube for reference animation for the Djinn. Kwonkicker Shadow Boxing. So its going to be a lot of graph editing and matching the reference.