I was recently given permission to show some of my “Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing” work, so I have added some images to both my Game Artwork and Work in Progress galleries.

The Work in Progress shots are taken of the high resolution, Silo models.

Enjoy, and expect a few more soon…

Moving onto the legs now we can start and remove some of the awful creases, and fill out her butt cheeks

Here is some quick reference for you -

Silo`s “Smooth” tool comes in handy here. Selecing the faces around the crease and smoothing the area pulls the polys apart allowing you to go in and edit it easier.

The whole body still needs some tweaks, and we need to sort out the ankles but feel free to work as much, or as little on this as you like. Ultimatly she will be covered so any work we do now will be lost…we are doing this purely as a modeling excersise.

I will post a final body image when I have finished tweaking but after that we will move onto her head.

We now have our rough pose so its time to start and fix the broken areas, as well as work in more definition.

Looking at the image your probably thinking that we can delete the legs and chest as it is covered anyway. Well you could, or you could leave them to use as reference for when you build the clothing. For us, we will rework the body as a whole…consider it a modeling excersise, more of a practice

So, lets look a the shoulders first. As you can see below we first delete the polygons forming the nasty twist. With this done we can restitch the arm to the shoulder, giving a smoother result which will make it easier for us to work with.

If it makes things easier you could detach the head for now.

With both arms fixed we can now work in some of the muscles and make the whole area look more natural.

I had a look around for some reference to work from -

ALSO! With this being a SubD model its important to try and reatain as many quads as possible…

Now we need to spend some time refining and reshaping the shoulder areas. Its important to make sure the arms are streight and not bowed like in the first image below.

You can also start to work on the clavicle and armpit too…

We still need to work on the shouder muscles a bit more before we move on. Her breasts are also too large and we need to follow the muscle up and around the deltoid so spent a little time working on the shoulder muscles so they flow more naturaly, especially up from her chest.

I think we will leave her shoulders for now and move down to her hips and legs.

Here is the new video from the Wombats - My Circuitboard City, which I had the pleasure of working on early last year.

It was designed and animated by Finger Industries who asked me to model the characters.  The actual band look quite low resolution but they were supposed to look like game characters.

I will upload the high resolution versions of the characters soon.

14th Floor Records © 2008, Warner Music UK Limited. All rights reserved.
Director - 32
Production company - Pulse Films Ltd
Animation and design - Finger Industries Ltd

We are going to start with the main character in the scene, Mandy, but rather than create her from scratch it makes sense to recycle an old model if you have one. There are tons of modeling tutorials around the web, and in books, some of which are linked below -

http://www.ant-online.co.uk/Tutorials/characterMod.html
http://www.3dtotal.com/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.asp
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/tutorials/mayafeet/mayafeet1.asp
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Character-Development-Antony-Ward/dp/1598634658/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221048072&sr=8-1

Sorry for the blatant plug ;p if anyone has any better links, please post them.

Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to beaver away on your own base model. To give you a head start I am uploading my own stylized female base model for you to use. Please don’t download and use this directly in your other work though

Stylised Female Base Model

We can approach this two ways.

1. Using the base mesh we can start to rework her figure and features until she matches Mandy, then pose her.
2. We can head straight in and pose this model, then rework just the areas we need to for this image.

As mentioned earlier, if we wanted to create a series of Mandy images it would be better to work on her in the t-pose before posing etc. As this is a still image, it would save time to pose her first, so we don’t spend ages working on areas which will not be seen.

But what about UV`s! I hear you shout…Well, yes, normally you would finish the t-posed model, then UV her before posing her at the end. This is different though, our model can get away without having UV`s as we will be using a custom shader, most likely an sss shader (subsurface scattering shader). We can then add subtle skin tones, and her pale buttocks in Photoshop after, saving us more setup time.

If this were a realistic character I would suggest adding UV`s early on so you can have full control over her skin by using various maps to get the effect spot on

The base model I provided does have some basic UV`s, just in case

Enough waffle, lets make a start…

Take the base mesh into your application and start to pose her however you see fit. You could edit the mesh directly or incorporate a skeleton to help with the pose.  Me, I find it easier to throw in a quick skeleton. This not only makes posing easier, it also helps retain her proportions.

With the skeleton in I then bring in the concept art as an image plane to help me match the pose, you can see this below.

You may need to adjust the length of her limbs, her spine or the size of her head to fit the image.

There is no need to pose the fingers and toes at this stage as they will be removed later to be replaced by gloves and boots. In fact, you can delete the hands now if you like…We will keep the legs etc. though as later down the line we may decide to dress her differently.

As this is a quick pose you will notice lots of problem areas for us to fix, so we will look at those next.

Before we dive in and begin creating our scene it’s probably a good idea to take a step back and look at what we will be working with. I love to mode with Subdivision Surfaces, or limit surfaces, a method which has been around for a while now and is widely used for creating high-end 3D models.

As it stands, working on a highly detailed model comprised of many millions of polygons is a nightmare, not only for the hardware but also for general manipulation. Subdivision Surfaces give the us the freedom to work on a low-resolution model, known as a cage, base, or control mesh, safe in the knowledge that a simple button or key press can produce a smoother, higher-resolution model, which in turn can be worked further by manipulating the control mesh.

You can see the control mesh on the left, below. This is the rougher, more angular model that is built initially.

Next to this is the model converted to a subdivision surface. Notice how nice and smooth it is. You can also see the wireframe from the base mesh traced across its surface, showing its origins.

Finally the subdivision surface model has been converted back into polygons. When comparing this to the previous model you can see how much denser the mesh is, meaning it would be more difficult to edit or manipulate.

Here’s the Science Bit

So how do they work? Well, in laymen’s terms, all that happens is the surface of the control mesh is subdivided—hence the name. New vertices and faces are added with their position calculated using the original vertex positions and one of two refinement schemes (see below).

The two schemes, “Approximation” and “Interpolation,” differ in that the latter will try to retain the original shape of the mesh, whereas approximation will result in a smoother surface at the cost of the original shape.

Popular applications like Maya, 3D Studio Max, Silo, and Softimage XSI rely on an approximation algorithm called Catmull–Clark, created by Edwin Catmull and Jim Clark in 1978. The creation of the algorithm landed Edwin—the current president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios—an Academy Award in 2006 for Technical Achievement.

Memory

Working with subdivision surfaces gets better. Even when you’ve converted the model into a subdivision surface, you can still work on the control mesh, viewing any modifications you make in real time as they move up the chain and affect the smoother model (see below).

Now thats out of the way we can move on and start building Mandy.

So where do we begin? Well, before embarking on any major project its a good idea to spend some time researching and gathering reference. Lets have a look at our image…

Well, for starters we will need to search out some more images of Mandy and her dog. Below are some links to a few sites I found…feel free to post more if you find them.

http://www.cagedbeagle.com/
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~mcfadden/yeagle_wallpapers.htm
http://gallery.bellefree.com/dabeagle
http://www.comicartcommunity.com/gallery/categories.php?cat_id=143
http://cilm.estoreadvanced.biz/index.php?p=catalog&parent=24&pg=1

We don’t need to go mad, in the end we only need to see her from a certain angle but it helps to know how she would look from other perspectives. If we were to create a series of Mandy images then I would recommend hunting out a model sheet, or good orthographic views to work from.
The sketches are a great place to start but we want to go further with our 3D work. So, if your not confident with cloth you could search out some good images of clothing, trying to match Mandy`s pose so we can refer to the creases and folds in the fabric.

Next we can turn to the environment and start searching for some rocks, grass and trees. We can do a simple Google search for cliffs so we have more to work with than the simple one in the drawing. I chose the following, but feel free to move in your own direction.

I like this cliff because it has some nice defined rocks, plus more shrubs etc. to help break up the surface.

So, spend some time now building up a library for you to refer to before we move onto the modeling. Feel free to share your finds with the rest of us

In the next post we will look into Subdivision Surfaces before we move onto modeling.

Hi all and welcome to this Open Tutorial

Throughout this thread I will be sharing my process for creating my next piece of artwork. Rather than this being a standard work in progress thread, or a tutorial, where you follow each step I post I though you could all work along side me. By doing this we can help each other as we share and discover new techniques. Hopefully in the end we will all learn something.

Its going to be a bit of an experiment, but if your interested in joining please subscribe to this feed, or joing the CGTalk thread and feel free to chirp in with comments or even upload your own versions of the work.

So what will we be doing?

Well, late last year I posted a thread allowing early subscribers to choose what image we will recreate. The result was The Tug of Danger by Dean Yeagle.

This will be quite a good piece to redo in 3D as it has many elements we can cover. As well as modeling and texturing we can also look at skin, hair, fur, grass and other elements of the environment.

Its important to add here that we are not going to do an exact copy, line for line, colour for colour. Instead we will use this as a base concept to work from. Yes, we will try and keep true to Deans work, especially Mandy, but the environment will probably change slightly.

What software will you need to use?

Well I am using Silo, Maya (8.5) and Photoshop (CS3) but feel free to use 3D Studio, XSI or whichever you like. I will post steps in an open, non-app specific way but when we come to hair and shaders, which will be Maya specific, it would be good for you to post other ways to achieve similar results in your chosen package.

You can find trial versions of the software here -

Silo - http://www.nevercenter.com/download/
Maya - http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7635018
Photoshop - http://www.adobe.com/go/tryphotoshop

What will I be sharing?

As this is a tutorial I will be more than happy to upload models and shaders etc. as I go along, as well as lots of images. I will be using the final render in my portfolio, and converting this thread into a proper tutorial but I will only include my own posts, so don’t worry.

How frequently will I be posting?

I can`t commit to uploading updates on a daily basis, it may even be a few days between posts depending on how busy I am…but the beauty of this thread will be that you can all upload your work for the community to comment on. I will however check in once a day, and leave feedback where possible.

So, sign up, subscribe or just pop back from time to time…I will post the first step shortly

Using the magic of Animoto, I have created, and uploaded my new modeling showreel. This reel shows my work spanning most of my 3D career.

This is the 6 minute version, but if you like you can download a 3 minute version below.

6 Minute Direct Download

3 Minute Direct Download

A higher rez version is coming soon.

Just a quickie update to tell you about my new shop.

As you will see on the menu above, a new “Shop” button has appeared. Under here you will find links to buy my books as well as prints of my work, and also t-shirts

Please feel free to stop by and browse.