zSketching to relieve that stress!

It's been a little while! I've been busy moving and interviewing after finishing my temp position at Fisher Price. Can't wait until the toys are released and the films I worked on are released to the public! Oh, pesky NDAs!

In the meantime I've been doing a lot of drawing and job searching. Waiting to hear back after interviews is the worst!

Here's a quick zBrush sculpt I did to flex those sculpting muscles! I tried to jump back into zBrush and do some complex things, so I had to step back and go simple. I just felt too clumsy fumbling with the tools. Had a lot of fun relaxing and putting down my other projects (such as the wolf) to sit and LEARN, rather than force myself to make a 'portfolio piece'. The key is to relax, who knew!

This is a new character I've been working on. At he moment there's no plans for his 3D debut past fun zbrush sketches, but he is involved in a little project I'm working on. More can be seen on my new tumblr: http://dinoflamingo.tumlr.com

Wolf Update

Going has been slow but it's going! I hope to finish the low res version of him soon.

I did more drawings for facial, but I don't have a scanner here! Ah the trials of living minimal.

 Stepping back from it I'm seeing now that I need to sharpen a lot of edges. He's a little to squishy now. The drawing was full of jagged edges accentuating the swoop of his back, so I really want to play on straights vs curves.

 I'm getting to a point where I'm happy with edgeflow. Needs a little more tweaking here and there, but it's a lot better than before!

 I'm not to ohappy with those hands. I think I might pitch them out and make completely new ones!

Next to add will also be teeth. Give him a big toothy smile.

Girl and the Fox nominated for an Annie!

This update is a little late in the game, but it looks like a film I worked on at SCAD, The Girl and the Fox, has been nominated for an Annie Award for Best Short Subject! We are all so honored and excited to be considered for this. More details on Base14's website, right over here: http://base14.com/blog/archives/1758

I was one of the lead animators for Baru, the fox in the film- and I have to say that this film is what made me 100% certain that this is what I wanted to do with my life. It was a lot of hard work, but I don’t think I knew that enjoyed working- animating- this much until I worked with this amazing crew. Thanks Tyler J. Kupferer for letting me be a part of this incredible film! I met so many amazing people as part of the crew, and I will never forget the experience.

I will be at the Annie’s on the day of, I am so excited! My first black-tie affair!

Base14 Website 
The Girl and the Fox Official Website

Modeling Updates

Back in September, I tried out for the ArenaNet Internship... I learned a lot from these art tests actually... I hope they do this every year! I'm definitely down.

Here's the concept provided by ArenaNet

And my submission!

 

The poly count came with a pretty loose guideline, so I milked the high count for what it was worth. 7220 tris.

This is the first time i tried retopologizing in zBrush. I'm glad I learned it, but I think I might do much more cleanup in Maya next time...

 

Some more beauty shots of the finished lo-res (click to enlarge)

 

And the hi-res zBrush models (same deal!)

Posed him a little too in zBrush! It's a little hard as I'm still working on 3.5 and I don't have those great tools in 4.

 And of course the maps- Diffuse, normal, and specular.


In other news, doing a model in my spare time- going is slow but I'm definitely not losing any love for it.

Trying to form a different sort of workflow- I made an armature with zSpheres in zBrush and pulled at the shapes until I had the sort of form I wanted. zbrush makes it a lot easier to shake forms the way you want, but it's much harder to clean geometry, so I took the low-res geometry from that lowest subdiv level on the zSphere armature and I'm working out the details and edgeflow. You can see I havn't reached the hands and feet, and there's a lot of unneeded loops on that arm- we'll get it clean and ship it back to zBrush when the form needs to be manipulated any more, or make a nice pass for hi-res modeling and normal/bump/displacement maps.

Been a while!

What a crazy summer and fall!

After graduating at SCAD, I was whisked away to help out with the ACCAD Women and Tech mentoring program again! This year was a little different though... we invited 2 groups- one returning group to make a game with both Maya and Unity, and another to do our normal program, creating an animation (in Maya) on an important topic!

As usual, the girls pulled through excellently- the Game program was new, and we had some trouble with unity, but fortunately we had Alan to help us out... Couldn't have done it without him and the other mentors!


Then, midway through the program, I heard from Fisher-Price about a temp animation job in their Viz lab! Long story short, I got the job and have been working at Fisher-Price, East Aurora since August!

I took this photo after they put these out around Memorial Day, giant toy parade!

Not sure what I'm allowed to talk about or not, so I'll just finish by saying- I'll tell ya when the toys are released!

Been working on a few personal as well as professional projects, I'll be updating those soon. Mostly modeling work, but I've been doing some character animation too! Won't be updating animation for a little bit till the NDAs run out and I finish some private work!

More Senior Film

A lot of work has been done on the senior film. Check it out!



Out of Time - SCAD Cut from Natalia Mercado on Vimeo.

And here it is! More than a year of work! Plenty of small aspects need a little work but overall I am happy!

Thompson's Gazelle Head

Taking a break from school work to work on... interior design?!

Well, more like sculpture, but I'm working on cardboard sculptures like this to be sold at Bloomsbury Loft when they are up running again. To be featured at their next time at the Country Living show here in Columbus OH. He will be on sale, but fear not, the shield will be cleaned up as well as everything trimmed to perfection.