skin so soft

I've been working on modeling a character for my new media a-480 class this whole semester. I had the model mostly done a few days ago, but found out we needed to also texture the character and render out a few stills. Just got the texturing done in a record 2 days! UVlayout program really helps speed things up.

I'll start with the final renders. Used mental ray to render, SSS shader for skin, and ambient occlusion pass added at the end.

Here's the model in T-pose. I will rig it eventually...

Here's the wireframe of the model.
The model as it looks in Maya.
And...here's the original sketch I used to create the character.

This was my first time using Maya for a project, pretty happy with the results, wasn't sure how it would look at first. Getting pretty comfortable with Maya now. Hoping to maybe use this character for an animated short for my senior project next semester. We'll see how that goes!

red lady

This started as quick painting of lil bro, but quickly changed into an angry old woman! Not sure what happened there... (iPhone using brushes).

city

Quick iphone painting using brushes. Read the new update for it coming out has even more brushes. This app keeps getting even better.

production keyframe.02

Reworked production keyframe. Mostly fixed up the lighting, highlights, and depth. Tried to make the character fit into the scene better too.

Production Keyframe

Here is my production keyframe for the Mr. Miacca story. Deadline extended one week so I have time to make changes or fix things. Suggestions?

I did the whole painting in Photoshop for this one. Not sure if I like painting better in Photoshop or Painter, both have their advantages. I might try to do another keyframe from a different part of the story if I have time over the break. Also going to try and start doing one or two hour speed paintings each week.....maybe.

storyboards

Here are the storyboards that I worked on for the Mr. Miacca story. Hopefully you can understand the shots and story from the boards. The boards were done completely in Painter.

I'm working on a production keyframe from the story now, should be up in a few days.

character research&design

Here are some character development sketches for the Mr. Miacca short story. This is the little boy in the story, Tommy Grimes. My sketches had too much of an anime style at first, and I didn't really imagine that fitting well with the story. Then moved into more of a Ghibli style for the character by sketching parts from their movies, but it ended up being too similar.

Ended up moving towards a simpler, more stylized character, something more like Coraline. I think this style should work well with the story.

This last image is the character turnaround for Tommy. There might be some small changes to the finalized character, but most of it is there. Next is storyboarding. Hopefully I will be able to take all this preproduction work and use it to make a short for my capstone project.