Clever Gerl

Wolf Update

2012-01-26T16:12:00.000-08:00

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!

2012-01-18T11:17:00.000-08:00

This update is a little late in the game, but it looks like a film I worked on atSCAD, 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 detailson 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 tosay that this film is what made me 100% certain that this is what I wanted todo with my life. It was a lot of hard work, but I don’t think I knew that enjoyedworking- animating- this much until I worked with this amazing crew. Thanks TylerJ. 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-tieaffair!

Base14 Website
The Girl and the Fox Official Website

Modeling Updates

2011-11-13T12:42:00.001-08:00

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!

2011-11-13T09:35:00.001-08:00

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

2010-11-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-04T14:15:00.001-07:00

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.

Time Traveler Model - Senior Film production is under way!

2010-07-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not taking summer classes... but I still need to get ahead! Here is a render of the hires model (without texturing, of course.)

There are more images of the same model over here.

Wireframe soon to come, as well as the dinosaur- who is halfway modeled!

Senior Film!

2010-04-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

Well, it's the beginning of the end. Time to start work on the Senior Film. It's preproduction up until September, and updates will go on yet another blog!

I'll post some more final stuff up here, but the rest of the content will go over here.

But I feel the need to put an image up, so here's some character sketching...

Nanny Ogg Final

2010-03-31T11:34:00.000-07:00

Final aside from sanding and a coat of grey, of course. She's the only one that's been baked, aside from another one that may get up soon...

War Horse Turnaround

2010-03-12T18:24:00.001-08:00

Possibly my favorite maquette 've done ever.

He's going to get a knight pretty soon. Have to start work on that soon!

Click images to enlarge.

Greebo Final

2010-03-12T17:33:00.000-08:00

Update time. Finals are done so more to come!

Here is the Greebo final.

Click images to enlarge.

Greebo Maquette Pre-Production...?

2010-01-14T14:57:00.000-08:00

Going to do a bust maquette of Greebo from Discworld...

I had a lot of trouble coming up with the character. I whipped out a lot of really awful drawings that hopefully shall never grace the internet.... I just wasn't feeling it. So I decided to sculpt instead. I did a small cat head in plasticine, just trying to figure out the general shape...and then i played with it a bit to get some of the character in.

But that wasn't anywhere near what I wanted. I turned to sketching in zBrush for a faster result.

Woah! I figured out how to take video! This BLEW MY MIND.

Then I drew a more finished looking turnaround from that for the sculpey maquette.

And critique happened, so I made some changes...
The new is on the left, the original on the right.

A little closer. He's less leonine and more like a cat now... but still close to demonspawn. Or at least that's the aim. Now to redraw the turnaround...

Pneumatic Clay

2009-11-21T18:36:00.000-08:00

So I spent the day watching zBrush tutorials and being generally overwhelmed and intimidated. After quite a few hours of that, I spent the rest of the day playing.

I'm getting the gist of combining alphas and brushes... but are they kind of cheap? Like Photoshop lens flare? Better look at more professional work and figure out what's good and what's out.

Haven't done much with asymmetry with this guy yet. Let's see if time is better spent on other things.

Need To get something up here.

2009-11-07T17:08:00.000-08:00

Need to get something up that isn't a youTube of Jurassic Park.

A bit of classwork for my Constructive Animal Anatomy for Creature Design class. (What a mouthful.) This class is heaven for me, I've learned so much. Well, I'll have a full post on the finished project (after finals, phew) but for now, here's a really bad presentation of the head turnaround.
(click to enlarge)

It's a pretty complex class, and my first ever sequential one, so i decided to go much less stylized. Want to make this guy believable.

Anyway, for the head, I mainly used turtle skulls for construction, and then added a little of a spiny tail lizard for teeth action (to mix in with that beak). Also, instead of the flat tileish scales turtles have, more overlapping scales like the lepidosaurs (spiny tail lizard and mosasaurus) Ah again, I'll have a whole thing on it later.

Because... we're being... hunted.

2009-11-06T17:04:00.000-08:00

Right, so I finally stopped procrastinating and got a blog for that whole 'art student's shameless self promotion' schpeal. A real one mind, the one for the trip doesn't count.

Well, I've been a bit of a dinosaur hobbyist from the very beginning, (well, I suppose moreso biology and archaeobiology) so it seems that a Jurassic Park reference is in order.

She is a clever girl.

Hope everyone will like it as I build... next is the logo... can anyone guess what it will be?