Concept Work

The concept is essential for the overall look of the character, of course there were more thumbnails and roughs created before I chose this drawing for the female warrior. The static pose and orthographic drawings are shown. I like to use pencil and then scan images into a 2D program like Photoshop or Gimp then mock up the form and color schemes before going
further with the model
and sculpt.



Character Name: : Lotus
Origin: Qadar
Character type: Female Warrior

Challenges

Challenges are a great way to find out if you have the chops to compete in the real world of 3D. Working with Blender as a base I will create a warrior class female. And try to model, UV, sculpt, texture, rig the pose and render this character. It is essential to keep your traditional skills up as well as your 3D. This will be a low poly character and then be sculpted into a higher resolution with accompanying maps to be utilized.

I plan on finishing this in 30days of the new year and will record progress as I go.

notebookguy

notebookguy

Hello,

Currently I am now offering my services as a freelancer for various projects. You can find my additional portfolio work on Elance.

low poly tree

Blender, Max and Maya are great programs for cost Blender can not be beat. Here are a few jungle trees created with blender.

Oil Paintings

Oil painting is still one of my favorite mediums.

Traditional Work

Some of my charcoal drawings

Blender/Gimp Project

Modeled in Blender rigged in Blender textured in Gimp. So far this should work I will apply texture in program to see overall results.

Blender unwrap

From working with programs such as Maya and 3Ds Max and Roadkill, Blenders unwrap is pretty well designed. Here is the low poly unwrap of a model a old west revolver is also included as part of this unwrap template. I manipulated and placed the UV Islands in a more linear fashion and not use the default unwrap I also mirrored portions of the model for ease and to save texture space. However from past experience I will try to forge ahead with the rig build for this character before I actually try texturing this in Gimp. I am working on learning two new programs at one time so Gimp is taking a little more time to get my head around it. But their are lots of tutorials out there to help with the learning curve.

Blender Revolver

The Spirit of the Old West never leaves the hearts and minds of most Americans. Previously I opened my blog with a Max modeled revolver now I just finished a Blender Revolver that looks OK it is a low poly of course and I will probably model or sculpt a high res one for creating a texture map since the engine I would love this to run on does not support normal maps but they work so well when done right. I will probably bake the texture map in Blender after a quick texturing job in Gimp.

Done

Wow after considering the options of how to get a hold of modeling programs that I could finally feel good about using, I have to say that Blender is a pretty darn good package it does a lot of things the big boys do also it is free.

Here is the completed male model completed i might do more tweaking and actually try to lower this poly-count, but for a first time and the help of some awesome tuts on working with the interface and learning the hotkeys this is an OK model.
From what I have gathered FA=faces which currently for this model is a a scant 174 but follows the typography of the reference image pretty well.

Time for a Change

Well its been a while since I last posted I have been really busy with other projects and a few fine art shows of my oil paintings.

After defining the best available option to continue production of any future 3D work for any type of commerical work I will manage a workflow solely comprised of opensource programs like Blender, Gimp and others. My first model that I wanted to make is a low poly character for use in mobile game apps that seems to be really popular also it gives independent game artist the opportunity to create games, if you can get your head around the programming side of the process.

I have been at Blender for about a good week now and studying the tuts all over the web so far this is what I have done.

This character I think will comprise a base model that can be used to create a slew of Nazi type characters that can be animated with a simple rig as an NPC that can be fired on.

I plan on posting as often as possible.

Later

Blast from the Past

Working with 2D images is just as important as 3D here is a 2D image that I have been working on.

Wheels

Wheels added to motorcycle, which will be spoked through use of an alpha channel. There is alos more detail that will modeled for the normal map and a poly reduction for the base mesh.

Motorcycle Continued

Currently this unoptimized base mesh of the motorcycle is holding at 8,923 polygons, it should come under my proposed polycount. I modeled in quads to help with deformations and smoothing groups when applied. Unlike a car a motorcycle has more asymmetrical parts, while some parts can be duplicated by symmetry or mirroring many parts can not be created in this fashion. The tires and spoke rims are the last part of the base mesh, After which I will use this to continue to create the high poly and then reverse engineer to create the low poly. I would love to try using Topogun to retopologize this mesh but it might be done just using Max.

B-Movie challenge

Well I have been tossing some ideas around I think I will flesh out a few more concepts.

Motorcycles

Motorcycles are great when done right, recently I had a chance to see the new video game Bayonetta, which looks great by the way. Motorcycles are used in the game like many others from the past and present. My plan is to create this as one entire solid base mesh and then do a high resolution version to apply as the normal map, currently it weighs in at around 4,466 polygons. I should be able to keep this under 10,000 polygons my idea weight for this model would be somewhere around 7,000 to 8,000 polygons.