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.

Time Traveler Model - Senior Film production is under way!

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!

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

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...