Cartoony Hammerhead Shark

Hi again, everyone! I'm on winter break now after having finished a great online semester at the Academy of Art University. So that means I've got the time to make a lot of new things to show you all!

My first completed winter break project is my Cartoony Hammerhead Shark model. It's not rigged because I plan to take this month to really focus on my modeling, texturing, and lighting skills. I'll be doing animation practice, too. I got Tangled and Kung Fu Panda 2 on DVD for Christmas, which means I've been able to go through them frame-by-frame and try to figure out what makes them great. But this post is supposed to be about my new hammerhead shark. By the way, he's unique in that he's the first model I've textured for both Blender Internal and Cycles. All you have to do is turn the nodes on and off to switch between renderers. Anyway, here he is!

Here are some wireframes.

 And a turntable.

As always, you can see more images and download him in .OBJ and .BLEND formats here.

Until next time!

A Bobcat That was 2 Years in the Making

I've finally finished making Bobby the Bobcat! For a while I thought he'd never be complete. But I've learned that while it may look like I abandon some projects, I always come back to them eventually. This goes for 2D art and CG work. I just can't stand starting something and not finishing it. But I think 2 years is the most I've let anything drag on. I think I let it go on for so long because school made me forget about him and college kept me too busy to work on him. But now that it's summer break I've been able to relearn/remember everything that I forgot about Blender (since I had been using Maya so much in college) and I was finally able to finish him. The confidence boost I got from my cute bunny turning out well also helped.

Here's a render of Bobby:

And a turntable:

And finally, here's his walk cycle:

He's a lot of fun to work with! I can't wait to do some more serious animations with him and with my bunny character!

You can download Bobby and see more images of him (including his wireframe and rig) here.

Until next time!

The Cute Bunny is Finished!

I finished my Cute Bunny model! That's what I'm calling him until I can think of a good name. Anyway, he's all rigged and tested and ready to go! He's really a lot of fun to animate! After all those problems with Bobby, it was nice to make something that didn't fight me every step of the way. Rigify helped a lot with that. I still had to adjust and add on rig pieces, but it really sped the whole process up tons.

Here are some screenshots of the Bunny, with and without his rig and jacket.

Here's a new turntable:

And a walk cycle:

And finally, an example of how his jacket reacts to movement.

You should definitely expect to see more of this guy in the future. I want to try compositing him into a photo, and do some lipsync with him. I'd also like to be able to animate him with his jacket. That shouldn't be too much of a problem, render-wise, as I've set up a tiny sort of render farm! It's just this computer (my stronger 64-bit Windows 7) and my last computer (an out-of-the-box 32-bit Windows Vista). I transfer files between them with a USB stick, because I can't get the Vista online. The Vista renders slower, but it's still nice to be able to share render loads with another computer.

Anyway, if you want to animate this little Bunny, too, he is now for sale on Turbosquid.

Until next time!

A Cute, Nameless Bunny

Hi, everyone! I've got a new character that I'm working on that I'm excited to show you. Poor Bobby the Bocat has unfortunately been put to the side again, this time perhaps forever. It seems that working on him in little spurts over two years has allowed me to create all sorts of issues, and since I can't remember how I made him, it makes it very difficult to troubleshoot. If you think you can help, you can read the details of my problem, check out the rig, and try to help through the BlenderArtists thread I started.

Unlike Bobby, the little guy I'm about to show you is completely new, and so far hasn't given me much trouble. Modeling and texturing is done, so next I'll be rigging him. Here's a turntable render of him:

I'm not sure if I'll be keeping the jacket. I'm going to have to think about it for a bit. It's not really the possible technical issues that it gives that I'm worried about, I'm just not sure if he's cuter without it.

Here's what he looks like in Blender. The jacket is wrinkled because I baked a cloth simulation, which came out very nice without going through his mesh or fur.

Here's what he looks like in edit mode (without his jacket). I had Photoshop lighten the image up so you can see his wireframe better.

So he's coming along very well! I hope to soon have some images of him with a rig. I may also soon have images related to an animated short I'd like to make, probably in Maya (I'm using Blender so much, I'm afraid I'll forget how to work in Maya, and I use Maya in college, so that can't happen).

Anyway, until next time!

Leyendecker Man Bust

I just finished my first Mudbox model! It's a bust of a man stylized to look like one of the men that J. C. Leyendecker drew. I've always loved his style, so I thought it would be fun to see if I could translate it into CG. I'm very happy with how it turned out! Here's a turntable animation of it:

Until next time!

Bobby is Complete!

Well, I actually still have to do some little weight painting tweaks, so he's more like 95% complete. But that's complete enough to start making renders and animations. And the good thing is that making those will show me what areas need tweaking, so it all works out.

Bobby has a pretty advanced rig. His face is controlled by bones, which are actually drivers that control shape keys. He has IK/FK functionality for his whole body, and his tongue is controlled by bones outside of his head that can be scaled and moved about freely. In IK mode, his fingers are controlled by single bones that can be scaled to automatically curl them inward. Lastly, though this isn't really a rigging thing, his materials are set up so that he can be used with either the Blender internal renderer, or the Cycles renderer.

Here's a Cycles render of Bobby (slight post-work in Photoshop):

He's very happy to finally be out of that T pose! Here's what his finished rig looks like on the IK layer:

And here's what it looks like on the FK layer:

Here is a list of the tutorials I used. They're all very well done!

• Foot/Leg Rigging 
• IK/FK Leg Rigging 
• Spine Rigging 
• Face Rigging 
• IK/FK Arm Rigging 
• Hand Rigging 
• Alpha Mapping in Cycles 

I'm really happy with Bobby! It took a week of day and night work to rig him, but it was worth it! Now to make more test poses/animations and do the final tweaks. I'm also going to make him a walk and run cycle, a lip sync animation, and probably a pantomime animation. I'll post those on here when they're done. When I'm done with everything and Bobby's completely production ready, I'll make him available on Turbosquid.

Until next time!

Introducing Bobby the Bobcat

Well, the model is actually very gender neutral, so it could be a girl, too. But I started calling it Bobby a while ago, so now it's just a habit.

Originally, I was just going to post some stills of the model once I got his textures back on him, but instead I've got something better: a turnaround video. I found it when digging through my old files. It was made a little over two years ago, on February 15, 2010. Here it is:

I've got to make some tweaks to the model (some areas look too square), and then I'm going to get to rigging. The whole experience should be pretty interesting, since the last time I used Blender it was just 2.49b. Now it looks completely different. On top of that, I've been using Maya for months. I'm setting all my Blender presets to Maya, but that makes it a little difficult to follow some tutorials. Oh, well. I'll figure it all out.

Until next time!