Bret McNee

Hello all!  Well let’s not waste any time today.  I have not been posting for a bit, because I have been quite busy… But today I have a good amount of stuff to show you.

The last few projects you saw were some lighting projects and some mudbox projects.  Since then, we have done the following:  3D animation projects like a pre-visualization project, and some lip sync stuff.  When the teachers give me some feedback on these and I get them online I will put up another post.  In classic animation we have been learning Flash.  I have previous Flash experience, so this is a breeze class for me.  When I get my final cartoon finished, I will upload it for you all to see as well.  In digital imaging we have textured a realistic head and added hair to it.  The hair was rather difficult and did not turn out well for me… But I am here to show the good and the bad, so I will post that project.  In modeling we have started our final project, and I will explain that in greater detail towards the end of this post… I have also done more mudbox.  And finally in production class we have started to learn more about character rigging; but right now I have nothing to show you.

(Please click the continue reading button, and I will show you some more projects!)

As I said above, in digital imaging, we had to texture and add hair to a head.  The first head I planned to do was my own, but the images I was using were turning out to be too low resolution to look realistic.  So changed my project and textured my teacher, Peter Hogan. He currently works for Propaganda Games, a company owned by Disney. I feel like the skin and eyes were a success, but the hair was not. Peter is bald in real life, so I had to create some simulated 3D hair for him. It was quite difficult and I don’t think I will be a hair artist any time soon.  The first image is the incomplete head of myself.  You can see that because of the low resolution, I look very tan and you can barley see the details of my face.  The second picture is of my teacher Peter.  I used very high resolution images, and he looks almost real.  The final image is with the hair I added.  It was quite a struggle to get that damn hair looking good!

Moving on from digital imaging, the only other projects I really have to show you are from my modeling class. I have two projects to show you. The Pokemon project and my final project. The first I will show you is the Pokemon project.

Pokemon are little creatures from a very famous Gameboy game, Pokemon. They are little monsters you can capture and use to battle other Pokemon trainers. For our project, we had to pick two Pokemon and sculpt them in mudbox. We were allowed to do them in any style we wanted, realistic, fake, or cartoons. I chose to try and sculpt them close to their original designs. Here are the two I picked:

The top one is named Exeggutor and the second one is Pinsir.  Once again, I had to sculpt these in mudbox, so here is what I came up with…

I quickly want to talk about my current project before I sign off here for the day. Right now we are in the last few weeks of my first semester here at Think Tank. (Crazy!) Our final project is currently in the works. This is what it entails: design, model, texture, rig, pose a character and put them in an environment that you also have modeled, textured, and lit. We have 2 weeks, and the point of this project is to make us sweat and stress out, haha! Because that is a lot of work.  To help us with this project, a current industry professional art director has come to give us a workshop.  Her name is Zoe Evamy, and she currently works as the art director for Bardel Entertainment.  They do shows like Viva Pinata and Zeke’s Pad.

Zoe came to help us design out character for our scene.  She started by making us do quick gesture drawings and then filling them in and then creating a character on top of them.  Here is the example of my sketch.

From this I discovered my character “Beat Down.” He is a super hero who most of the time takes more of a beating than the beatings he is supposed to dish out.  After working my my line drawing I had to come up with a concept sketch, here is what I created:

Zoe did not care for this version of Beat Down, and so she wanted me to go back to the drawing board. She also wanted me to show her my scene idea and what he would look like beat up. So here are my final concepts. My scene, and my final drawings.

After these images were approved by my art director, I had to model Beat Down. Here is the current stage of my model. He needs to be approved before I add in detail to him (like his cape). After he is approved I will begin to texture him. I am also currently modeling his scene. So expect another post on the process of this project soon! Here are the final images, thanks for reading today!

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Bret's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave your thoughts, or trackback from your own site.

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