Daily Anatomy Studies

Over the summer I'm going to chop away 4 hours of anatomy studies every day. It's going to be tough but I'm gonna do my best. My boss Shon advised me to start with hands as they combine elements that are reoccurring in most body parts, like proportion, soft form, bones, tendons, wrinkles, etc.

So here is my start. It's a few days worth and not as much as I wished, I need to speed up ans stop getting caught up in detail and rendering. From now on I will be doing these largely in 3D, but I may mix in some drawings depending on my mood or whatever is the most practical.

A couple of WIP's

More hard surface stuff. I'm making a suit of armor piece by piece instead of doing random objects every day. It's going slow though so I'm not sure if it's the best idea...

Oh, and this week we're making a building. Modularity is fun! Allows me to tweak and noodle without wasting time.

Hard Surface Homework

I mentioned one post down that I had to do the daily sketches in addition to normal weekly homework. Here are the weekly projects. A pair of AKG 741's and one of those ornate street lamps that are scattered all over San Francisco.
These are technically two week projects, we did the whole model the first week and then we spend the second week doing fixes and revision. We got another week for the lamp so I'll do some small fixes after I caught up with my sketches.

I'm planning on building these into lowpoly game assets and pimp them out in Marmoset or something like that. I had extreme lowpoly and now I'm doing highpoly assets, but I don't have much in between those two extremes. It will be fun to try out.

Daily 3D models.

All righty. This semester I am taking a hard surface class with the amazing Shon Mitchell, a 3D modeler from Massive Black. In addition to the weekly assignments that are tough enough he has us do one model a day. Very intense but also very rewarding.

I will update by a weekly basis to avoid cluttering up the blog too much. This first update will contain several weeks.

Week1:

Week 2

 

Week 3

 

 

Week 4:

Week 5:

I am slightly behind this week so I need to do two sketches today, I will update this blog post when they're done.

The Rook - Final Model

Sheesh, I didn't update about this guy a lot did I? Well, most of the work since my last update went into doing corrections and hcanges to proportions and topology so there wasn't really much to say. Most of the detailing was done this last week! For a long time I really regretted going for an original concept instead of doing a realistic bust as the teacher recommended because he knows a ton about realistic human modeling so that would have made better use of his resources, and also because I feel I'm not experienced enough with sculpting to be able to convincingly sculpt something imaginary. But in the end I'm pretty pleased with the results. I learned a lot from both my mistakes and from trying to jump into something new and different.

Realistic head assignment.

This week in my Organic Modeling 2 class we got an assignment to render a realistic head using a SubSurface Scattering material in mental ray. The head model and texture is a free 3D scan from Infinite3D, but we had to take care of baking the normal map, creating other maps like spec and SSS depth,  adjusting the SSS shader, and finally lighting and rendering the model ourselves.

I'm pretty impressed with the results myself, but I still see room for improvement. At least a lot of the mystery surrounding the mental ray SSS shader has been lifted. :D

All the images are rendered in Mental Ray using Maya. In all the setups I use a single light with an HDRI probe to provide additional ambient light through Final Gather.

The Rook - Model

Remember this guy? I'm done with the basemesh and ready to send it over to zBrush for sculpting. I still have to UV him, but that's not a very exciting step to blog about...

The model is much denser than I would usually make it, but our teacher insisted that we put most of the detail in the basemesh to avoid having to retopologize the model after sculpting. I also felt that I had more control over the shape despite there being more manual work. I want to try a different workflow some other time where I instead start from a really rough basemesh, do all the detailing in zBrush and then retopologize  the model when I'm done. I think this could be a lot faster and looser, but it kinda depends on me finding a good retopo workflow which I've heard zBrush lacks.

Enough about that though. Here is my guy: