From School to Portfolio.

I've more or less finished my degree and can finally begin doing more work on my 3D portfolio, especially things that I WANT to do, ok the last year major project was pretty much all me without any restrictions but I must admit that I chose to do some pretty boring models, at least character models. I was learning at that stage so I didn't want to be over-ambitious and risk failing completely, but NOW I can start to populate my portfolio with the interesting and ......well cool ideas I've had over the years since I started my degree, and I really feel I am getting better and better at modelling and texturing, the latter just recently as I discovered the freedom of actually painting my textures entirely in photoshop without relying completely on photos.

So, I sat down the day after our degree show at Patti Pavilion in Swansea and opened up zbrush and just really wanted to try another approach to create good and sound groundwork for character creation, which is to use the default heads and bodies that comes with zbrush as a starting point, this way you get correct physical proportions for your character ( if realistic proportions are needed ).

This is a great time saver and really allows you to concentrate on the creative side of the modelling process, previously, when I first started to learn how to use zbrush, I was following tutorials that started the process from scratch and completely built a body using zspheres, which makes it necessary for you to constantly check if your proportions are getting screwed.


Anyway, this new character I am creating sprung from a concept I did when I was practicing my drawing in the second year, An alien warrior.

This is after I had done the first changes to the default head and had brought it in to Maya12 to do some retopologizing.

I am basically just going after what I think looks interesting and since the idea is this is a warrior is from a Tribal culture I also want to add maybe piercings and tattoos.

The first pass of poly-painting the head, I am doing the body and head separately to allow me to concentrate on one thing at a time, I am basically building this race of creatures and want to create the "face" of these creatures.