Comi-Con, Comi-Done

 I finished my Comicon challenge, if it wasn't for the extension i don't think i would have. If you know my life at the minute you know that recently I'm tasked with moving and decorating right on deadline time for comicon. But I worked at it and got it as finished as its going to be. So I'll update you a little bit on what I was doing.

So i never really talk about texturing usually as its normally just churning your way through maps. Basically after decent enough bake that gives you a nice point to make cavity maps with. If there is any blups, which i always seem to have I usually take the maps into 3d coat to fix the seems. I do this with the diffuse but also the normal map as it always like to leave you some unwanted gaps. Anywho the rest of the texturing is just overlaying textures and brushes and the hard bit for me is getting the materials look right. I'm still not sure what my metal is made of lol. I did get time to add the arm which I'm glad about. I purposely blew it out of proportion because her exoskeleton isn't form fitting,

I could then pick any colour i wanted....now obviously I was drawn towards the pink. Having that hair colour for 3 years has affected my colour choice. But i decided to go for a blue as its a nice compliment to the orange and yellows in the piece. Again i deliberately tried to keep the palette limited as it can get too much very quick.

I used Mixamo to rig the character, i finally figured out how to get the free trail working and its an amazing program. Unfortunately i gave myself a harder time having an asymmetrical mesh and with all the hard surface stuff i had to edit it in max to fix this. The rig isn't perfect and I need to go back on it to make it better but for the purpose of one pose it does the trick. I used marmoset to render my images and you can see below the submission files for the challenge.

I look forward to going onto more projects now from this as I have learnt a lot and I feel I'm improved. This is the start of rebuilding a better portfolio and my characters may not be perfect yet but god dam they're gonna be the more I practice.

Sammy where art thou?

I'm still alive it just seems like i don't update my blog as often as I should these days. So its been a month or so and it's been a slow month, with each passing month new commitments come into play and trying to get work done is hard but I am adamant to keep improving myself even if the process is long and arduous. This month i competed in my first spit paint, i really need to do more of these. It was extremely fun and it pushes you to learn fast and hard. 

NEWT IS BACK, I can't even remember if I ever said on the blog but I'm in the process of making newt into a Dota 2 courier. I have the diffuse almost done and i have to get a normal and stuff on the go. I don't usually work backwards like this (to do the norm last) but in this instance i didn't want it to look too realistic and this way i can have a good hold on what need normals). After this though i have to do some major research into the animation process of Dota 2. I've never attempted anything like it before and it looks weird as fuck but if i can do it myself I will do my best. Below is just a test presentation template so don't worry about all the grey space lol.

I've also wanted to so some anatomy 3D studies, at the minute I've only done this one but i do intend to do more. I know what i lack in my sculpts and that's detail and i find it very hard to focus on things when I'm giving a whole character so I'm hoping this way i can manage it a lot better while improving my abilities.

 And finally Comicon, I'm onto texturing now and you can see im using Marmoset 2 to render out the process. Obviously i'm not finished but I'll walk you through some of the things I'm doing and still need to do. So first thing that's obvious is the hair still needs textured and i'll do that a dark brown or black. Trying to keep quite a limited colour palette as adding more colour just confuses the eye. The metal is too crisp at the minute and its also too light. I want it to be darker and have a strong contrast with the traditional x-men colours, also I've not decided between gold, copper or brass for the secondary metal material and that's why they are a mixture of them all. I still have to make the psyonic arm and i'm leaning more towards blue. I haven't done it yet because it will be on a texture sheet of itself because of its transparent qualities. I also need to sort out some support features with the shoulder plates to make them seem more believable. I will be rigging her soon so i can put her in her final pose but ill do that after I've textured her as it gives me a better idea on how it deforms. I have 4 texture maps at the minute and all of them will have diffuse, spec, reflection, normal. The separate arm might even have its over illumination map. So i have quite a bit to do still i might be finished it by the deadline if i can pull my hands out of my ass.

There's also other crap I've been doing...like your mum. I'm sorry that was uncalled for, like i didn't call your mum afterwards. I apologize again i hope you have a lovely week guys that read this <3