A Continuing Ballad of 3D Art, Pt. 3

Forest Elemental by Alex Papanicolaou on Sketchfab

And it's finished!

After a lot of work (and trial and error, with the cards for the leaves), I finished the forest elemental I'd been working on since... August. I'll have to make sure I work a little more expediently in the future, but it was easier to finish when I wasn't working.

Stay tuned for what I'll tackle next!

A Continuing Ballad of 3D Art, Pt. 2

Hello, everyone!

That was quite a delay in updates, but what can I say, I got wrapped up in my internship at Zynga! I continued to work on the portfolio piece I detailed last time, and I've made a lot of really good progress. Now I'm just hitting a few technical snags in texturing and 2D cards in finishing it up.

So let me show you what I've done!

First thing I did was sculpt out the body and hands. I wanted to start with this, as this is what I could do in Zbrush, while I decided to hold off on the foliage until I was in Maya. After sculpting, this was the product I ended up with for the body:

Then I took it into Maya and decided to do the topology and map-baking from the high-resolution sculpt before I started to get into the nitty-gritty of the rest of the project.

Here's the resulting game resolution mesh of the body in UE4 with all of the proper maps:

(The body and hands are 3740 tris.)

So now I'm working on the rest of the elements of the character: the mask, the foliage, and the tail. I'll go over how I'm dealing with those more in detail next time, when it's finished, but here is an in-progress shot of what I'm doing with these parts:

Until next time, everyone! Happy new year!

A Continuing Ballad of 3D Art, Pt. 1

Hello, everyone!

I'm pleased to announce that for my final semester at FIEA, I am actually going to be in San Francisco doing a 3D modeler internship at Zynga! I'm really excited to move to a different place and learn hands-on about what it means to be a 3D artist in the games industry. Of course, I will not be able to share anything I'm working on at Zynga, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be totally silent! I still want to force myself to continue improving so I can continue to build my portfolio for the future.

I had a lot of fun with my previous creature project, so I decided to go for another. After a little poking around, I stumbled across this fellow:

(I wish I could find a better link/reference to the original artist besides the watermark on the image, but my extensive reverse Google search hasn't brought up much. Credit goes to mDD, wherever you are, thank you!)

I picked this creature for the challenges it presents. The leaves and flowers and butterflies would provide challenges with cards, which I haven't really used as of yet. The bulkiness of the hands and the junction of where they join the arms also seems like it would provide a challenge.

I've already started working on the body, as I plan on doing the trunk-like body, legs, and arms with a sculpt and then adding the foliage, mask, and tail to that body in Maya. The next time I update, I hope to show off the body after it has been sculpted in Zbrush and retopologized in Maya! Thanks for reading!

3D Portfolio Piece #3: Textured and Ready to Go!

Hello, everyone! I'm here to show you the fruits of my labors over the last few weeks. I retopologized Bwompers to a game resolution state (those tentacles were kind of a pain!) and also painted up some textures for him. After you put everything together, he ends up looking like this:

"Bwompers" by Alex Papanicolaou on Sketchfab

Over the next few days I am going to be looking to bring him to life either through 3D printing (depending on facilities...) or giving him a posing rig and giving him a small animation. Time will tell!

3D Portfolio Piece #3: Meet Bwompers!

Hello everyone! It's about time I shared with you the next portfolio piece I am working on.

This time I decided to do a creature, which is something of a return to roots for me as I was always most interested in creatures and monsters and critters growing up. As an homage to this, and my first video game obsession (Spyro the Dragon), I decided to pick a concept from Creaturebox (who do work on Ratchet & Clank for Insomniac) and work on it.

So after some deliberation, I picked this guy:

After consulting my friends, we named him Bwompers.

I started in Zbrush and, after making sure proportions were correct with Zspheres, I began sculpting. After several laborious weeks of this, this was the end result of my high-rez sculpt:

And here's a fancier render in Keyshot:

Next I'm going to do a game resolution model for him and begin texturing! See you in a few weeks!

3D Portfolio Piece #2: Posing and Animation!

Hello everyone! In addition to finishing the models and the texturing, I tasked myself with making a posing rig for Bali and giving him a very light idle animation. Here it is! (Apologies for the low quality; I'm trying to find a better way to record my screen.)

And here are some (slightly higher-quality) stills of the pose!

I will be getting this into Sketchfab (both with the cloak and without) very soon, so I'll add those here when they are ready as well!

The total polycount (for all objects) ended up being 31,967. Bali was 25,283, the mask was 4,164. the sword was 2,244, and the cards for the cloak were 276.

3D Portfolio Piece #2: Textured Up!

Here he is, all textured up!

There are still a few things that I want to do, if I should have time; I plan on adding a posing rig onto the character, adding the scarf and the belts attached to the sword, and then the "life" I want to add to it is get some cloth physics onto it in UE4 so it can have some light animation.

But... that's for next week. (: Thank you for viewing!