3D Portfolio Piece #2: Concept Art

It's summer semester and it's time to focus on my next portfolio piece!

I'm still going to be working on the GW2 armor set, as I ran into a few technical snags over the brief summer break we had, and I still have to get the low-poly made for texturing.

Regardless, time moves on, and I decided to head in a more stylized direction for my second portfolio piece. After going between a few ideas, I settled on working on a 3D model for Anne Szabla's comic protagonist, Bali from Bird Boy.

I took the liberty of making a consolidation of concept art for him:

This would be multiple pieces, including the base model (on top) as well as several props including the mask, sword, and cloak.

I'm excited to work on it!

3D Portfolio Piece #1: High-Poly Sculpt

Good morning, everyone!

As you remember, I've been working on the female Norn stag armor from Guild Wars 2. I was permitted to go up to the high-poly Zbrush sculpt for my final turn-in, as I will continue to work on this with retopology and texturing in the next few weeks (and then I'm submitting it...!).

After a lot of toil, here it is:

It was a lot of work, since I'm still fairly uncomfortable using Zbrush for hard surface modeling, but I feel as though I managed to work between the forms Maya produced and the program to make something I'm proud of... even though some of those forms (in the chestpiece, boots, and helmet especially) escaped me, much to my frustration!

Here's the concept art, for comparison:

art by Kekai Kotaki

I learned a lot about Zbrush during this, so I feel as though I'll be more comfortable to head back in there for my next project. There are a few things I still want to touch up on before starting to build my retopology, largely having to do with the face. I want to improve it, but I was having trouble with Z-Remesher so I could get a decent base to work off of. Though the face isn't hugely important, I did want it to look nice, even though I probably will obscure the eyes.

So my current plans are to retopologize this during break and then use the first week or so of summer classes to make the textures look incredible.

Thank you!