JVP – Animation Lab’s Challenge
I’ve decided to do Animation Lab’s modeling challenge.
Their challenge was to create a toon like character, based on a topography they’re handing out.
This is my result, not rendered though render was not included in the task:
And the reference:
Animation Lab’s internship tasks
Through the internship we had to create two characters.
The first character was “2D” – the blue haired singer cartoon from the “Gorillaz” band.
The reference I received for “2D” was a full 360 degree snapshot serie of a plastic figurine and this is the end result:
Double click for full screen
The second character was “Jafar” – the villain from “Alladin”.
The reference I received for Jafar was drawings of him from his front and side plus a few general images of him from the movie.
Double click for full screen
The turntables are animated and textured although texture, animation nor rig were needed for the the task, I did that because I just couldn’t look at them spinning in gray while doing nothing.. didn’t take long to make but it’s not the best animation nor texture either.
The references:
Fifth project – Pilot textured
And the result after texturing in ZBrush, tried to stay focused on the color reference but made a few adjustments.
This screen capture is from within ZBrush and does not include proper material definition yet.
Fifth project – Pilot texturing reference
Took a snapshot in zBrush and started coloring the pilot in photoshop, making myself a reference before I’ll actually start painting in zBrush
Fifth project continues
I drew an orthography and modeled the pilot (in 2 intensive days if I might add) and I’m pretty happy with the result.
Started off in Maya and moved to ZBrush to push that little edge and make it simply better, the ZBrush result will be used as a displacement map in Maya.
Some of the references I used:
A new project, the fifth one.
Started working on a new project.
In this project we are supposed to create an interesting environment, an interesting character and an interesting concept.
So my idea goes like this..
The concept is made out of two shots, in the first shot the viewer sees a hangar from within, the hangar contains all sorts of hangar related artifacts, it is pretty dirty and greasy, it contains an aircraft with someone sitting on its wing, not really obvious who because of the lighting.
Outside of the hangar the viewer sees another aircraft ascending to the sky while bombs are being dropped at the whole area.
The second shot zooms into the guy sitting on the wing, now it’s obviouse that the guy is a combat pilot, the pilot rests his hands on the wing while his left hand also holds a cigarette, the pilot titls his head slightly to the side, smiling (his mouth is visible due to the mask being slightly open) and smoke is coming out of his smiling lips.
The current idea is that the whole scene, although detailed is in high contrast black and white while the bombs outside and the fire are colored and very saturated.
Modeling progress so far:
Some of the references I used:
Nir sings ! a lip-sync WIP
It’s an older version of the lip sync.. there is already a new one with hair, all sorts of fixes and addons but I need to find the time to render everything.. it will come eventually.
Hope you like it and you can download it by clicking:
Download High Quality (Recommended).
Modeled, Textured and Animated in Lightwave 3D, Displacement map for the forehead wrinkles in zBrush, edited in Adobe AfterEffects.
And if you’re lazy, you can also see the video on live stream from Vimeo, however it looks and sounds worse (Not Recommended):
Double click for full screenFourth Project
Nir was my fourth project, I know I skipped the third project, that’s because I didn’t have the time to make it but it will be done ! Promised that to myself.
Nir is a real person, he donated his pictures to the collage so students could learn to make a 3D head with him as a reference.
This render contains the head mesh with a mouth interior, eyes and hair.
it also shows some nice shader abilities, simulation of multi layered skin with gloss.
Second Project
For the second project we had to create some sort of an item with a basic background to form up a minimal scene (at least).
Immediately I thought about creating some sort of a rifle.. being a guy and still a child in my mind that was all I could think of, apparenty some other students were thinking about doing the same.. !
I googled again for some rifle references and stumbled across a Seburo MN-23 which is a non-lethal rifle but looks pretty nice none the less 
I found a great site for references, containing all parts of the gun:
http://www41.tok2.com/home/bluegale/seburo/e_index.html
The first version of it was at night without any textures, proper shaders and lighting, which looked really nice to me at the time but the hand was all wrong, the reflections were a mess, lighting was too simple and it had many problems in general.
The teacher actually didn’t like the hand because it’s not perfect in too many ways and we didn’t learn to create body parts yet so I removed it before handing it in but still, I love it with the hand which will be worked on again at some point.
The original render is more saturated and doesn’t have light bloom, both added in Photoshop after rendering.
