|
PROJECT
“Say Cheese” is the first of five projects that I created for my final term at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. The class was Creature Construction, taught by Alex Alvarez. We were given two weeks to go from finding a concept to presenting a work as close to production quality as possible. The first week was dedicated to modeling/sculpting, and the second week was for texturing, lighting and rendering. This was in addition to the rest of my classes and working. Needless to say it was intense, but worth every minute. As they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!
CONCEPT
 My search for a concept lead me to the very talented artist Kai Spannuth’s website . As soon as I saw the concept, I knew that was the one. It reminded me of a mix of Star Wars and the Last Star Fighter, both being favorite movies of my childhood.
PREPARATION
My objective was to make the final product look believable and, most importantly, a very strong likeness to the concept. First off, I found it easy to rotate the image, so it was more of a straight on camera shot. I then selected the perspective camera and imported the concept in as an image plane. After a very basic blocking out of the character’s head, I started concentrating matching the Maya camera to the point of view in the concept. I feel this is the foundation of the project. I liked using the X-ray display to do this, which you’ll see me using quite a bit. Upon getting the camera in position, I chose to set a key frame. Doing this would always give me a very quick way of getting back to that set camera view. Another option is to lock the attributes of the camera, so that you don’t accidently tumble the camera. If you do choose this method, you’ll just have to create a new camera as your working camera.
BLOCKING
I found out that the easiest way of blocking out the anatomy was to start with the eyes and building from there. Especially being that since this is a humanoid type creature, I felt the structure of the anatomy was going to be fairly easy. I wanted to concentrate on the major edge loops that you would when modeling any character, loops around the eyes and mouth. I knew I was going be using ZBrush, but I always like having a very solid Basemesh before moving forward with sculpting. However, I knew Retopology was going to be unavoidable, so I kept the ears very simple.
I knew from the start that the outfit would be primarily done in Maya, with some minor sculpting in ZBrush. All these parts were very straight forward. The challenge here was to put them in correct 3D space. In doing this, it also helped me solidify the overall thickness and form of the torso section.
|
