Making A Little Scene..

Face experiment

I did a fun test of Blender's texture painting tool kit, and would up with this zombie-like fellow. The strange skin tones are due to using web-cam photos as my texture images (never advisable) but this was just an experiment, after all. I won't be going any further with this one, but thought the results were promising.

I like the mesh and it might be used for something down the road. I'm getting quite a bit faster- this only took 2.5 hours to get to this point. 1600 faces before sub-surf, and with mirror applied. Here's the edgeloops highlighted.

Starting to Rig

Mrow?

Kitty WIP

Next to do: fix her weird nose hairs, add a lot more "poof" to the body, add ear whiskers, thicken up those front leg hairs, put the teeth in, and then do some skin coloration in places like the eyelids and nose. Then, it's on to rigging.

I made a silly mistake and forgot to put in a tongue before I started putting the hair on, so I will have to do it as a separate object or else I'll lose all of my hair work. Lesson learned for next time.

Something kind of cool is that her eyes have animatable slit pupils.

Fuzzy Kitty

The Evolution of Experimental Hair Tweaking

Getting closer, still not there yet..

Zebra

Here are some samples I created for MathZee.com. The model and animations were all done by me, however they are based on a 2d illustration of a zebra character found on that page.

I made this test lip sync (set to Christian Bale's Terminator meltdown), and decided that his ears needed to be rigged up.

This next animation is supposed to demonstrate the character as a cheerleader in a game for children. He would be in the bottom right corner of a game's interface and react and encourage kids as they play the game.

Cat

Very early kitty. Our fuzzball Ophie is the inspiration for this project. The goal will be to make some long, fun hair.

Contortionist.

Well, the new rig works- but there is a major amount of weight painting to do again. Another unfortunate side effect of this is that the hair needs to be redone, and a solution found for the deforming buttons.

Rebuilt The Entire Skeleton.

Because bones are not happy when they are their own grandparents, I scrapped the whole rig and started over.

I still have no idea why why I copy a pose reversed, it does not mirror in the expected way.

Oh well, the skeleton seems happy enough.

Sidekick

Extremely early on for this character, but working on a horse for my general.

I have learned quite a bit about topology reflow, and have used the "making diamonds" technique to attach the medium-poly head to a lower poly body. This trick prevents edge-loops on the horse's face from running all the way down the length of the body. Edge-loops across the "forehead" still run the length, however, and I may still do something about that.

Architectural Sketch

It appears I have some weird normals calculation going on with the doors that needs my attention, but I like how this is coming together.

Facial Rig

There are some very serious bone weight issues going on, so I will probably have to delete all the weights and start over with defining influences, but I was able to proof-of-concept my rig by making this smug expression here.

Meanwhile, here's a horrific illustration of why I still have a lot of damage to repair:

Crimes Against Fashion

Started out with an ugly spider-monster looking thing (above), but the final result looks ok (below).

As I look at him, I am considering adding more buttons up both sides of his coat.

Here's a bit of a flyaround:

Hair and Bling.

Uncanny Valley

Coming along..

I created some eyes using a pretty good tutorial found here:

http://vimeo.com/groups/10834/videos/2830890

The technique involves creating a modeled geometric iris inside of the eye and using transparent, blended textures with an alpha channel to gently reveal it.

The tutorial doesn't seem to use the same set of defaults for material settings that my Blender setup does, so getting it to work was way more trouble than I expected. I think results are pretty nice, however.

I haven't decided if I am going to use this to bake a low-poly version for use in a game or not. I'm just enjoying the modeling process and seeing where that takes me.

Still to do: Hair and eyebrows, a medal for his chest, more believable texture on his jacket and skin. Hopefully, I'll be on to rigging him up for animation in the next couple days.

Big Hat is Big

Makin Some Clothes and Fingers

Almost ready to make the absolutely gigantic hat.

Napoleon: Freaky Cupie Doll Edition

Made his freaky head, but I'm sure it will look much less freaky once I get some pupils, hair, eyebrows, and his iconic hat. Starting on the uniform now.

There is always more tweaking to do and I'm not yet satisfied with the overall look of this guy yet, but the practice is paying off and this is some of the best topology I've done yet- good flowing of edge loops around key features that will ensure clean deforming.

Finally, Round Tires

I have no idea why the merging on the tire was not working, I just kept trying different settings and it finally worked. Sometimes Blender acts up in insane ways, but I have learned that if you "apply scale and rotation to objdata" (control a) it can go a long way solving these issues.

Thanks to Blender Cookie for the tip!

Starting to Look Like a Car

Tires don't have hubcaps yet, and they are merging strangely. The Blender curve array tools can behave very strangely sometimes.

Learned About Trees and Such

A Few Yafaray Renders, Progress on Car