Now after a bunch of my crummy photos, have some of my husband’s beautiful photography! Doppleback is finished, primed, and ready to be painted. His whiskers will be added in later, they were too thin for clay. I made a quick silhouette of the first photo just for kicks. More updates on my other projects to come later this week.
This will probably be the last set of photos before he is baked and primed. Still have some refining to do, and I need to work more with the base. The support wire will be removed in the final piece.
More progress. Still looking rough, but getting there! Might have to add an extra temporary support after all. More to come!
Got him all blocked in today except for most of the tendrils. I am liking how his pose is looking, looks good from several angles. His support wire is going to be concealed by an environment of rocks, coral, and plant life. I love using a mix of Super Sculpey and Sculpey firm. I can actually see what I am doing and it doesn’t moosh all over the place. (note, I just wanted to point out that firefox is telling me that “moosh” isn’t a real word. i am greatly displeased, this is a very professional technical term!)
I am currently building up my digital portfolio. Some of you may remember this model I began before Comic*Con last year. I’ve been working on him again, applying things I learned when making my polar bear model. He will eventually be textured in zBrush. At some point too, I would like to do a version of his mane using Maya fur.
For those of you that never saw him, here is the maquette I made of him last year.
12″x10.5″x10″
He is finally finished and photographed, hooray! This guy has been about three months in the making. I have progress photos posted a few entries back for those of you that are new. This guy is sculpted out of a mix of Super Sculpey and Sculpey Firm over a rather intricate wire armature. The leaves are a fabric paper that I punched out with a leaf shaped punch. I then added in variations with paint and bending. The fine parts of the branches were done with floral tape and a few dry brush coats over top.
This guy is second in a series. Some of you may remember my original forest spirit that I did a few years back. I will be doing a spring and winter version in the future, just not any time soon. They all protect the forests and are docile creatures unless someones threatens their home. I will be modeling this guy in Maya soon and he will hopefully be rigged and animated by my friends! How cool will that be!
My new year’s resolution is to stay back on top of this blog once again!
I’ve have been working on a lot of stuff lately, some of it which I cannot show unfortunately. However, here are a few projects that I am working on right now. The whale is a character that I designed for a friend on mine. After I create the maquette for him, Jessica Dunbar will be modeling him. In turn, she is creating character concept art for me to model! It’s a fun project so far. We are hoping to create a final render with both characters in a scene, as they will be from the same world. We shall see how it goes!
The polar bear model is close to being done. He doesn’t have any teeth or a tongue yet. Originally, he was going to be for a Christmas tree ornament at work, as we have a 3D printer. I didn’t really get it done in time though. Maybe I can have him printed for next year! He was modeled in Maya and then I brought him in to zBrush to do the fur.
The Autumn Dragon is complete at long last! Photos will be coming soon! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and happy new year!
I thought I would post some progress since I haven’t updated in a while. Here are some photos of him before and after the textures. I am still refining the texture a bit more, as well as the shapes of the branches. The final piece will include leaves too as well as a fully detailed base. Still tweaking the pose a bit too, not 100% happy with it. Comments are welcome!
I’ve been working a lot in Maya lately, learning more about modeling and texturing. I am hoping to have more to show soon. I want to finish my model of Dezzi as well as my Heman/Battle Cat zBrush piece. But I will also be modeling the Tree Dragon. It’s going to be a huge project involving some of my coworkers. Mike Corinella has been so kind as to agree to rigging him. Then, I just have to bribe someone else to get him animated. I am really excited about that.
I have really been enjoying working digitally since I started using Maya more. Surprisingly, I like it a lot better than zBrush. I am still waiting to work with zBrush 3.5 though. zSpheres look like they make so much more sense now to us traditional sculptors.
Once again, work has taken over my life. I love my job, but I haven’t had the time to work on my own stuff as much as I’d like to lately. I’ve also been lacking a lot of motivation for it. I feel like I’ve lacked direction since I got back from SDCC. There are so many options and I don’t know what to go with.
SO, I decided to do a little art for me to ground myself. Some of you may remember the forest spirit I did a few years back. One of my coworkers told me I should do a series of them representing the different seasons. Since the equinox is coming up, I decided to do an autumn spirit. I’ve done some concept sketches and built the armature. He’s going to have a bunch of maple leaves on him.
Also, I did a sculpture for our online stuff at work. I was working off a character design by one of my coworkers, Mike Sanborn. He’s a mad scientist type guy, he was fun to make.
More to come eventually!
I’ve been busy with work since I got back from SDCC. We are getting ready to go online with our class so there is much to be done. I am still working on my own stuff too though, just haven’t had the time to get a post together.
My current project is a pair of zBrush sculpts featuring He-Man and Battlecat. Here is some progress of Battlecat. He is still pretty rough, but I am moving a lot faster with it than my last zBrush sculpt. I had a big fight with zSpheres on this one. I probably redid the zSphere configuration 6 times! But I learned a lot about zSpheres so it’s all good 
I am excited for zBrush 3.5 to come out this month. zSpheres2 looks amazing and I am looking forward to playing with it.
I have also have a sculpture I am doing for work for an online tutorial. It is a mad scientist character created by one of my coworkers. I should have photos of that pretty soon. He’s totally out of my style, super cartoony. I really love working off of someone else’s artwork!
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been doing work with Joy & Tom Studios, learning cool new stuff about molding, casting, and production. I have an opportunity to help out with some pretty big projects so that’s really exciting! The artists Joy and Tom are a pair of awesome people, very talented and helpful. I am really happy to be working with them.
Finally, my book is coming back to life again slowly. I am really hoping to have it done for SDCC next year.
Thanks for watching, people. I’ll be around
