Here’s my first sculpt for today, and my past 2 days rendered a bit better. Also I added in my second sculpt for today. Going to do 1 more I think? 

I never get requests to create females, or have any school assignments that make me sculpt women so I’m completely lost when sculpting them. I think that about 70% of my sculpts this winter will be females and the female body.

Well.. The semester has drawn to a close but my work is far from done. My thesis presentation will be in March so I’ll be working on that every single day, and even more important is my new job search which is going to be happening at the start of the new year.

I’m 90% done my demo reel, 0% done my still portfolio, done with my resume and references and have a huge list of recruiters on hand for January 2nd. Really excited, not sure what’s going to happen or what people think of my work so I’m just gonna have to wait and see.

During the month or two I have off of school, I honestly can’t remember how long I have off I’m going to be doing lots of sculpting practice. This is going to basically be a sculpture a day for practice in different things. Here’s day 1!

Just wanted to post up my homework I did this week. Softened up and worked on the anatomy of my ecorche model and sculpted in the plates for my Stegosaurus. Not a huge deal, just like 5 hours this morning spent on it all.

This week has truly been a roller coaster for a lot of reasons. My personal work took a huge dive Monday and Tuesday and it felt as though I would never get over the technical hurdle I had created for myself without knowing it. Both days were spent almost entirely attempting to export maps and trouble shoot issues that were causing effects as severe as computer crashes. I’m assuming they were happening because of memory running out and after many many frustrated attempts I managed to get all of the information out of Zbrush I needed for the next step in the creation of my latest character.

I spent Wednesday working on a bit of freelance, rendering for my demo reel, which is about 15% complete now and will quickly be finished and the rest of the week I spent doing the same but also painting final details on my new character. Here is a render from Maya of the 5.6k poly model with his base textures on, they all need tweaking and editing to finalize them but right now I’m really really excited about the direction this guy is going. He’s my final piece for my portfolio and I’m tremendously excited to show him off.

There are obvious issues and I want to tighten the detail all over him  over the next few days. Besides my own projects, school is drawing to a close and I’m spending more and more time planning out my thesis project for a mid-point review where we have to pitch our ideas to a panel. The idea doesn’t make me too nervous, I know I’m talented and dedicated to my craft and it will show up in my presentation, so for now I better get to work on some freelance!! Cheers.

Today for school I melted my brain writing up focus design documents for my thesis midpoint presentation. It’s essentially documents describing how I’m going to get from point A “here” to point B “the presentation” and I’m a bit confused about most of the process, this is one spot where I’m really disliking the online setup. I need a teacher to let me babble and jot notes down while talking to.

Anyways, also this morning I had Ecorche to sculpt and my Dino to work on. Here’s what I did! I reduced the size of most of my ecorche guy’s muscles based on professor critique and tried to soften him up. I need to do more, but right now I don’t have the time.

On my stego I kept adding detail, musculature, and pulled skin. I also created inserts for his plates and put more detail into his face, making him older and wrinkly.

This week was sort of a busy one, I’m still in the process of finishing my resume, starting to do final renders for my demo reel, finishing up the semester in school and as always freelance is taking up some time.

I’m 100% ready to start final renders of my characters for my demo reel after many many many tweaks to my render process including texture tweaks, render layers, and lighting rigs. That will actually start tonight! So I’m excited about that.

I’ve been painting on my new character after I solved his weird shoe UV issue which ended up being kind of interesting because I taught myself a new workflow between Zbrush and Maya that I’m gonna be using for this guy. Here are 2 videos of my painting on him for his texture maps, I wanted to record the process so I can analyze it and see where I can improve on speed and/or method.
First is part one, this was right after I had blocked in the main colors.

Part 2 I got a bit more detailed but I actually wasted time painting his face and then realized that I strayed too far from my color scheme so I’m redoing it today.

Well, it’s almost December and my time to finish my demo reel and portfolio is running up. I promised my girlfriend I’d start applying for jobs by the end of December so that means it’s go time for my new reel. My new goal is to start rendering for my new reel this weekend, I have a few characters that I don’t think I can improve on anymore than I can without just wasting weeks and improving them by 5-10%.

I solved a big issue I had with my AO passes which was that they obviously only look at geometry when rendering so I created a new mental ray shader that is FG based and looks at my alpha channels so I can render hair and tattered clothing. That was a big win and it’s done right now. I’m still playing with render layers and the amount of ambience I want everyone to have. I think that’ll get tweaked as I render on a character by character basis.

Here’s a test I did today with my new AO shader, as you can see on the tabard it’s listening to the alpha I used at the bottom.

The character that is supposed to be my last on this reel (or second to last depending on how quickly I finish a project for school) is my alien general who is pretty much done being sculpted but I’m having this insane issue with one of his 4 shoes and it’s UV’s. They are basically useless and I can’t make Zbrush export any kind of normal map that makes any sense for them. I’ve tried everything I know and if I fix this problem today I can start texturing him tomorrow!

I’ve been identifying weaknesses in my sculpting, and one thing I’ve learned is that I smooth too much. I’ve been watching tutorials about how to use different methods to sculpt and I’ve been experimenting with them so hopefully I can take care of these issues soon. Anywho, this is the final sculpt for this guy, gonna be texturing him in Zbrush as soon as I fix this stupid shoe issue. Cheers! back to work I go.

I got a bunch more done on my new character today, also made some last minute changes to his hands. His paw-tentacle things weren’t cutting it. Worked on seams, some extra clothing folds and fleshing out his skin today mostly. Oh, also did his shoes, they are pretty simple so I might add more detail to those.

Second update since I started keeping track of my alien general updates… heh. Anyways! Today was just yet another day of sculpting and trying to figure out how to efficiently create clothing folds. They are still a bit elusive but after doing a few characters with a ton of them i’m beginning to understand them. (I think)

Also I began sculpting face detail, started off with some ideas for lumps and just let it flow from there. I wanted him to have something to filter the air on his planet, which I’m not 100% sure about but I think it’s going to be something that’s harmful to humans. I think the character in his face helps build on the idea that he’s a weathered, experienced general.

Also spent some more time sculpting on my ecorche model. We were supposed to do upper arms but I basically resculpted the whole thing. I still have a ton to learn and need to refine this for many, many weeks I think. I’m far from the artist I want to be and I’m just gonna keep working and refining my skills until I get there!