"New" Project

While I'm looking for work I am continuing work on my mages. You may have seen the white mage in the flatbook, but here is some more in depth of what's going on with that. First off, the point of the project is to redesign the red, white, and black mages as the different body types.




Plus, I'm either gonna do the Dragoon, or maybe a monster for them to fight. These characters will be retopo'd and textured, posed, lit, the whole sha-bang. Basically a little diorama. So, far the white mage is sculpted, her face needs some work and she needs accesories. The Black mage is partly sculpted, no clothes picked out yet, though. So, the next step is to retopo the white mage, and start designing the black mages outfit.

White mage:


Black Mage:

PORTFOLIO SHOW DEC 18TH

Pretty sure nothing is new on here that isn't somewhere else on my blog, but never the less this beast took FOREVER to make. Mainly because I have never used after effects before, except for very minor rendering stuff.

It sits at about 2:30 and from all the sites I have looked through that seems to be an acceptable demo reel length. I wanted it a little shorter, but I'm not really willing to rip anything out unless there's a really good reason.

Please comment and critique! Be brutal! This thing has to knock the socks off of any employers/artists I show this too. Even minor stuff could be helpful!





Also you can go to my website

www.AndrewCQ.com

by clicking the banner at the top. Again, please comment! Building my first real site (lol, pun) was a huge learning experience as well. Tedious, but worth it. Just like UV's.

A whole month gone by

Been cracking my head over portfolio stuff. I took a break last week and decided to sculpt a new character and finish my horse by splitting it into a draft horse and a demon horse. More of those three later.

Also finished a green chavant sculpture of a fat guy, not entirely unlike Billy's dad. More of him later as well.

In the meantime here is my flatbook so far, and check out my website www.AndreCQ.com

Moar stuff

First up is the intro to my demo reel. Not rendered yet, but here is a playblast. The animation is still a little wonky, But with the camera shakes, I don't think it will be super noticeable. Ignore the placeholder meshes, they will be replaced with my weapons and shield.

Also attached is the inspiration for the whole piece from EA Mythic's Warhammer Online.




I also took Bryan's advice and tweaked my blend heads. I re-did the lighting so that much more detail is visible and tweaked the material pretty heavily for more of a clay texture. Sadly the badass decimation plug-in doesn't work for blend shapes, since it re-topologizes based on detail. I wish I would have known about that plug-in earlier, I've been using a workaround through 3dsMax that was kind of a pain.

Blend Heads Finished Kinda!!!

Here is the draft render (no background yet) for the blend heads. I ended up having to use the level 4 division out of zbrush, anything higher would crash any available computer. I think enough detail is preserved that making really clean normal/disp maps are probably counter productive.
Custom mental ray shader/lighting setup.

Portfolio Crunch: Now with fiber!

So this Wednesday is the start of what will be the most grueling 10 week crunch I have experienced thus far, and something tells me it will be only the first of many to come.

Up first are some more busts for the blend shape thingy. I'm re-posting the fish-girl and chupacabra-Anubis guy in video form. As well as the last 3 (for now) heads: a mob boss, the basic planes of the face, and the start of a toddler. Not sure if I like the pattern on the fish girl's head...





And after that are the base mesh of my coat of arms: 2-hand orc blade, pump action grenade launcher, and a shield with my logo in place of the Triforce.




SIEGE was this past weekend and I got some really great input on my portfolio stuff, and some very honest criticisms of the Nightmare tower level that I've been doing with Yusuke and Aaron. So one of the many tasks next quarter is to retool most of the assets and textures to make them really pop and actually look next-gen.

Update:
I did some testing in maya just to see how exactly I was gonna do the animated blending of one head to another. So i ended up just using a blend color node in hypershade to blend between one normal map to another (just color in this demo). I initially tried doing really clever stuff with animated gifs, but turns out you can just key the blender attribute :P

Only small snag is that the blender node only has 2 blend targets, I have like 8 heads. So I will have to render each section separately.

Game Jam 2009

So, last weekend was game jam, a 48 hour contest between groups of students from AIA and SPSU to see who could make the best game. All assets, programming, and even game ideas had to be made within the 48 hours.

So my contribution to H.E.A.T. (Hyper Extreme Attack Tanks, lol) was to model 4 tanks, each with its own set of stats. The game itself is sort of a mash-up between Joust, Blaster Master, and Smash Bros. First day was spent on modeling, second day was for title screen and other junk.



Tank 1 is the Slug. Average build, basically the human in D&D terms, ho-hum.
Tank 2 is the Heavy. Obviously has higher attack and defense, but really low jump and speed. Also fire rate is pretty bad.


Tank 3 is the Bike. This one has the lowest attack and the least amount of armor, but it's also the fastest and has really fast fire rate.
Tank 4 is the Pider. Look up Baman and Piderman. Basically average, but with really great jump ability.