Testing out the maps.

The best feeling after doing all this is seeing the end result. After all, this class was specifically geared towards creating characters for games. so how it looked in real-time was important.

Sesslyth running in real-time via Maya's view port. 

With all normal and AO maps applied, the model begins to take life. It's amazing the amount of detail that can be achieved on such a low-poly mesh with normal maps.

A side by side comparison of Normal and AO Maps turned on and off.

Above you can actually see the difference.. The model itself is pretty low-poly, only containing the basic shape and silhouette of my hi-res sculpt. The Normal and AO maps are what bring the details out, and most importantly, they do so at very little cost to performance.

Week 7. Unwrapping UV's and Generating Normal Maps

I'll just say this right now. I absolutely hate doing UV layout. It's tedious, boring, and quite frankly downright frustrating at times. However, I understand the importance. Thankfully, I'm a stickler when it comes to good topology, so usually my UV layout is as painless as humanly possible.

After manually retopologizing most of my mesh, I starting bringing it back into Maya for further optimization and refinement. I used Z-Brush's downloadable add-on Decimation Master to automatically generate some low-poly meshes for a few of the smaller pieces in my model, to save time. It worked well enough, but the topology was generally random. This made skinning more difficult than if I had done them manually. Luckily, the pieces I decimated were small enough to go relatively unnoticed.

Katon showed us a neat trick for saving UV space by duplicating and mirroring pieces that would be the same on either side. I'm still slightly perplexed as to how this exactly works in the computer, but sure enough it does. Any place where there was asymmetry needed to have its own UV layout, but generally speaking this saved a ton of room.

After arranging my UV's the way I wanted, I began generating Normal and AO maps via xNormal, a free downloadable software tool. Notice that I left quite a bit of space between pieces. That's because my intention is to add the UV's for Ezekiel (the Octopus character) and the Psychecept somewhere on my already laid out maps.

Normal Maps for the upper Torso. Image rendered at 2048x2048

AO (Ambient Occlusion) Maps. Rendered at 2048x2048

Week 6. Building the in-game mesh.

Now that the detailing was nearly complete, it was time to build (or rebuild) my low poly mesh. Using my hi-res sculpt, I began building my low-poly mesh, one vert at a time. There wasn't much artistically involved here. Just a lot of tedious point placing. The key was to retain the overall silhouette while maintaining even edge flow and clean topology.

The method for doing this within Z-Brush became quite cumbersome as the mesh became increasingly more dense. There are other software packages out there for retopologizing, and I would probably go a different route on future projects. As it stands, Z-Brush's tools for retopologizing are limited and not as intuitive as they should be.

The rebuilt upper torso. The wrist guards (once separate pieces) were now part of the overall mesh.

The completed low-poly in-game mesh. I purposely kept the cloak and vest separate for animation purposes. The belt and trinkets were also done separately.

Week 5. Detailing the armor.

By week 5, I was somewhat behind. I had underestimated the time it would take to model every piece of clothing and armor. Not a big deal. By midweek I was caught up and ready to begin sculpting the details.

Essentially the process here was the same as the first couple weeks. Start with your low-res base mesh, import into Z-Brush, and begin sculpting in the details. On top of that, I started adding details and refining my character's face.

I really enjoyed detailing the belt buckle and fish. They were almost like character's within a character, which just added to the appeal and complexity.

I went back and began refining the face. I added eye place holders, refined the mouth and lip area, added small pores around the head, pulled out the wrinkles a little more, and defined the fin.

The nearly finished sculpt of Sesslyth. I was really happy with the results. My hand was very sore by this point (from constantly gripping my Wacom pen), but I felt good about the work I had done.

Week's 3 and 4. Time to get dressed.

After getting a pretty good base sculpt, it was time to go back into Maya and begin blocking in the clothing. Sesslyth has a considerable amount of clothes and armor pieces to build. Luckily, week 4 was catchup week, so I had ample time (or at least I thought) to get everything ready to go.

For this step, a hi-res version of the sculpt was imported into Maya, and used as a guide for the base cloth pieces.

Both polygons and NURBS were used for the sculpting of Sesslyth's clothing. All NURBS were converted back to polygons before exporting pieces back to Z-Brush.

One of my favorite things about this character were all the small trinkets and pieces Michael had designed. Here are just a few examples. Form left to right: Scroll, Key, Fish Belt Buckle. Although time consuming, these pieces really help the character stand out in terms of design. To keep things clean and organized, I modeled all these parts in a separate scene, then imported them back into my original and scaled them down accordingly.

Close to completion, Sesslyth's armor and clothes. By the end of week 4, I was a little behind. I had a few more small pieces to complete before bringing them back into Z-Brush.

Week 2. Let the sculpting begin!

After modeling my low poly base mesh in Maya and importing it into Z-Brush, I was ready to begin the process of blocking in my character.

This part of the class was both fun and frustrating. Up until this point, I had only used Z-Brush once (about a year and a half earlier), so I had to do some quick catching up in terms of interface. Not a big deal, but it did delay my progress a bit.

After wrestling with the software for a couple days, I was finally starting to feel comfortable using Z-Brush. With my Wacom tablet in hand, I began sculpting in the muscle areas of Sesslyth, all the while receiving feedback from my peers and Katon. By the end of the week, I was both exhausted and excited with my progress. I really felt I had accomplished something at this point.

The first rough sculpt. At this stage, only major muscle areas were important. The smaller details wouldn't come until a couple weeks later.

After feedback, and a few more hours of sculpting, Sesslyth began to resemble what would eventually be the final piece.

Sesslyth & Ezekiel. Week 1 of class.

The task for our first week of the workshop was to select a piece of conceptual art and begin to model a low-poly base mesh. Katon recommended we choose a character with a good mix of both hard and organic surfaces, in order to present a well rounded piece.

It didn't take long for me to find some concept art that I really loved. Enter "Sesslyth & Ezekiel," an unlikely pair of fantasy characters that I absolutely fell in love with. The artist, Michael Dashow, had a bunch of great concept pictures posted on his page. I chose this character for several reasons:

1.) The piece met the criterea set forth by Katon. There was a good deal of organic and hardsurface pieces for me to work with.

2.) Michael not only had done a full color conceptual piece, he also had several orthographic sheets already drawn. He created the piece as though it were to be used in production, so everything was already conceived from the get go. This made the image setup for modelling very easy.

3.) The art style. I naturally gravitate towards more stylized character design. I don't know why, but I've always loved it. The oddball cartoons like Ren & Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life that I watched growing up may have something to do with it.

4.) It hadn't been modeled in 3D by another artist (at least not to my knowledge). That to me is very important. Too often I see countless "Star Wars" pieces, or other duplicate characters, in demo reels. The problem is that so many other artists have modeled storm troopers, Darth Vader, and X-Wing's, that unless your piece is absolutely phenomenal, it won't stand out. If you model a piece that an Art Director has seen before, he will always compare yours to the original, which in my opinion puts you in a disadvantage unless your piece totally kicks ass.

For the sake of time, I only worked on Sesslyth throughout the course of the workshop. I'm currently going back and doing Ezekiel.

Image by Michael Dashow. All rights reserved. This is the piece I used for my class. You can view more of Michael's work at his website: http://www.michaeldashow.com/

Here are the results of my first week of the class. This is the low-poly base mesh of Sesslyth, created in Autodesk Maya, imported into Z-Brush to begin sculpting the details.

My Workshop Impressions

A couple months ago, I took an online workshop through CGSociety.org called "High-End Fantasy Game Art Creation." First off, I can't emphasize enough how much I learned from this 8 week course. My teacher, Character Artist Katon Callaway of Sony Santa Monica Studios, was fantastic. The guy is an amazing modeler and artist, very down to earth, and extremely patient and helpful with any and all questions. Along with receiving valuable training in the areas of character modeling, I also met some really great people. Just a heads up for those interested, Katon will be teaching the class again starting February 21st, 2011. This was my first online workshop taken through CG Society.org, and I would enroll in others if money wasn't tight. Regardless, it was a great experience, and most certainly gave me the tools and knowledge necessary to get my portfolio up to industry standard.

I'm still working on finishing the character, and I plan on posting quite a few progression shots that I've captured throughout the process. I have a few on my portfolio site, but not that many. Sadly, my site is a customized pre-made Flash template, so I haven't been able to attach any text descriptions to my images. This was my main reason for starting this blog, because I feel that a description is important for some of my work. So, until I figure out how to do that on my site, my blog will have to do.

Testing, 1, 2, 3. Is this thing on?

Hello everyone,

Just testing out my blog spot page. I've never "blogged" before, as I find the whole idea somewhat asinine. Regardless, I see many fellow artists using it to their advantage, so here I am today "blogging."

A word of caution to the reader, I use (or attempt to use, rather) proper grammar when writing anything on the internet. Not to sound pretentious, but I'm tired of the "LOL's" and "LMFAO's" strewn across countless message boards, forums, and social networking pages. Personally, I believe the lack of grammatical regulation is dumbing down society as a whole. I understand the internet is supposed to be an informal venue for expressing opinions, but would it kill someone to type "you're" rather than "UR," or some other low-level form of abbreviation or enunciation? It just might, I suppose. That said, I'm in no way perfect and am not implying otherwise. I make mistakes like everyone else, but there's a difference between a simple typo, and using stereotypical internet acronym's and phrases out of sheer laziness. I think the real problem will become apparent when students no longer have the mental capacity to write a grammatically correct sentence for a term paper. Or worse, using grammatical shortcuts on their resume's.

Okay, enough of the pompous rambling (for now). The purpose of this blog is to feature my CG work on an additional platform, complimentary to my personal website. Moreover, it is a way for me to explain my thought process on any given piece, which I believe is important.

Until next time.