New Character Renders

I finished the snowball kid and took some new renders of the Bug Thugs. These were all captured from inside of Marmoset Toolbag 2.

 

 

I'm still working on coding my new website. These will be the first things I add once that is completed. However, with my job continuing to take up 60 hours of every week, finishing everything continues to be a challenge.

New Site Design

I haven't had a lot of time to work on the snowball kid, but I did do a few animations. The programmer I'm working with has imported these animations into his Unity scene and is currently getting the character to run around and toss snowballs and such. It's pretty awesome to see! I can't wait until we get a working prototype to the point where I can start showing it to people.

Over the past month or so I've been trying to finish up my Jason Frank model. Here are some pictures of [what I'm calling] the finished high poly mesh followed by my current progress with the textured low poly.

The biggest challenge with this (apart from getting his face to resemble the real person... (I've kind of given up in that regard)) is getting all of his tattoos correct. It took a while to ink the outlines to all of these things, but this is as far as I've gotten. I took some liberties with a portion of them; ad-libbing areas, as it were. Since this step of the texturing process, I have halted and proceeded on to rigging; leaving the rest of the texture work alone until I get the whole character posed and animated. Here's a screen-cap of my rigging so far:

I didn't know 3DS MAX bones could squash and stretch, essentially making working muscles! I found that out online and instantly through them into this model. I have only just started the skinning process so I'm still unaware of how well they are going to work. But my fingers are crossed.

The only other thing I've been working on is my new website design. I've had a number of people (most of them professionals) tell me that my current sight doesn't display my work as best as it could. Hopefully my new site will help make my stuff more appealing. This is my design so far:

 

 Above is the home page and then this will be the content pages.

I am trying to organize my work better (separating low poly characters from higher poly ones) and just making everything a lot more accessible. The only thing I have to do now is code it... We'll see how long that takes me.

I'm hoping to get this site finished soon so I can post all of the new models I have. Here are some renders of the new work I've either finished or am currently on working in my free time for Easley-Dunn Games:

This team of dinosaurs is going to be really cool. I'm excited to get back to work on them because I think they are going to end up looking really badass!

I've been rushing to get all of this done because my current job is making it increasingly difficult to have time to devote to this stuff. The sooner I can get my new site online, the faster I can start blasting out resumes to potential game industry employers.

If you are an employer or have a friend in the industry, feel free to pass my information along! It'd be very much appreciated.

Boy & Dog

Finally finished these guys up. You can check them out in more detail here

 They both turned out pretty good. This is also the first time I've gotten Marmoset Toolbag to work out well for the final render. I plan on using it for the final shots of all my stuff from now on. The biggest problem I had with Marmoset in the past, I've found, is I've always forgotten to export my .obj meshes "with" their normals. Because of that, the models always showed up with unsightly seams that I couldn't get rid of. All I had to do was remember to check "normals" in the exporter and BAM, the models come in looking great!
Toolbag did crash numerous times however while trying to apply materials and stuff, but that's probably due to the size of materials I was using for this character (2048). I probably could have scaled those down to much smaller and it would have looked just as good.
Also! When working with Marmoset Toolbag, remember to flip your Green channel on your normal map. I learned that from working in Unity 3D and it's the same in Marmoset, so I'm assuming a lot of engines need that done as well. It's kind of a pain though because 3DS Max doesn't need the normals flipped so I basically have to created two separate maps.
This project is also the first time I've made one of those cool little turn table environment platforms for a character! I think it turned out alright. Making dead dandelions is hard though. They could have turned out better, but overall, I think it adds to the piece nicely! I plan on making one of these for all of my characters in the future.

And so starts the month of June! My goal of making a character a month is going pretty well, to my surprise. The boy and the dog took about a month (started on April 20th). The next project is the leather suited, spy girl! I mentioned in my last post that I'm planning to add some more armor type pieces to her suit. Here's some roughs I did the other day: