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.