Milestone 1

As we now have finished our animatic, It's time to recap and show some of what I've done during our project so far.

I've drawn our two main characters John Doe and the security guard. I also did the first 6 shots of our storyboard. I have modeled a few props to the apartment as well and for the moment I am working on modeling our main protagonist John himself.

Now I'll post screenies and renders and do some comments as I go



Scene 1 shot 3

This is a random drawing I did on our storyboard. It shows John as he goes into his freezer. Yes, you can actually feel the cold:p





The Guard and John Doe Right View

Here is the right view I drew of our guard and John. Proportions here is a bit off as I'm no Picasso but the main deal with this was for me and Tommy to get sort of an idea on our characters looks before modeling. The guard is overly huge and a tad dumb while John is sort off this normal lad, everyday exhausted worker.





Everyone in the group participated on modeling a few parts each for our apartment scene. My tribute was the Fan, plant and trash can. Even though we were 5 different modelers on the scene I believe everything blends in perfectly and has a nice overall style.




I have focused on keeping John as one whole mesh to make it easier for our animators. I gave John big sets of feet, hands and ears and one quite exaggerated nose to complement our cartoon style. I have still not approached the texturing part but stuck on some simple materials to add some more flavour to these screenies.



Front face

I will get back to tweaking the eyes a bit and move a couple off the edge loops from the eye to the mouth a tad more towards the chin. Maybe even add another loop. Who knows?



Underside of hand smoothed. We decided to make a 4fingered hand to enhance our "cartoonish" look.

I'm actually quite happy with this as I usually have a hard time modeling the hands. I might have to come back and tweek the thumb a bit as I sort off never get satisfied with it. The hands are the only part not attached to the character mesh at the moment as I wanna find a good solution on bridging the hand with the wrist. (too many edges on hand at the moment). I'll certainly fix this next week.



One of my first hair and fur test renders (without eyebrow for now;)). We still have not decided if we should go for H&F or go for something more predictable or less time comsuming when rendering. 3ds max often shuts down when I use this mod, this might only occur on my home computer though. Here I have made the hair emerge from a separate invisible "half-skull" inside the main model rather than having it straight on the meshes as I feel this makes the computer handle the mod more smoothly.

It should also be noted that these eyes are just a placeholder as I will get back and make them
more appealing later on.



John in Zbrush

This is a effort I made trying an alternative source for a hair solution in Zbrush.


To sum things up I think I've had some good weeks so far and our short seems to come along as planned. I will hopefully finish modeling John next week and then start the texturing as soon as possible making sure it's done by the end of winter holiday.

On a side note I will sincerely try to keep my blog updated more frequently from now on!
(No promises applied)

I hope you enjoyed reading and if you have any suggestions, comments or questions please write to mardy22@hotmail.com or just hand me a comment on this blog.

Have a nice day;)