New Project: Reflections

Well it has been like for ever since I posted something on my WIP board but here it is. My next 3D scene I am calling: Reflections. I will be modeling the environment, boy and dinosaur as planned in the sketch below. This piece will be considered a "fan art" from the painting and book series Dinotopia by James Gurney. For those of you that know me well you know I have always been a huge dinosaur geek and love James Gurney's work.
This scene his highly inspired from the Dinotopia digest novel: "Dinotopia: Chomper" by Donald F. Glut. My goal is to have everything modeled (low&high poly), textured, rigged and animated for a short 30 seconds then with a looping animation.

For those of you that have read the book I have been using a kid from my home town pool as Perry. I hope to keep it a surprise until I am finished the model of the boy Perry. So those that know him please keep it on the low down.

So far I have finished the base body structure of the boy model. I will be modeling his hair and cloths soon but so far it has taken me about 7hrs to get to here, 10hrs if you calculate searching the internet for images to find simlar body type of a boy between 12-16 from a front and side view. Not bad I guess... but I am hoping to cut the time down with more practice and less searching needed as my gallery of reference images fills.

I will keep you posted as I work on this between work and what not.

31St Century Warrior - Update 25/07/07

Update:
Well its been a while since I last updated. Above I was playing with and SSS seeing if I could get it working with my normal map for it seemed to be over riding it. I tried everything from a Fake SSS, Reel SSS and no SSS. In both the no and fake SSS I could easily see my normal map working but in my Real SSS I found that it didnt want to work what so ever. I've tried pluggin it into both the SSS's bump and displacement with no luck.

Well I did some research to see why this was not working and it turns out that it does work in the SSS bump its just that with the 3+ colours mixing in the SSS it diludes the look of the normal map causing it to look flat. The ways to go around it is to push the normal in your textures that you are using for your SSS. It also helps to have an AO map and or Light map.

While I was doing some research I disided to do some work on the armour seeing how I wanted to look like metal wise. That is what was my metal material generally going to look like. I wanted the majority of my armour to act like a cars surface, reflecting 3 different colours depending on the angle you are looking at it.

In the image above I am using grids with transpency. I still have to make a spec map and play with the diffuse to give the hair more valume but it doesn't look that bad. Using grids is a low poly approach, and though my character is not lowpoly I thought to try it out to see if it will work well or if I should go with generated hair. You can see from the picture that up close it is noticable that I'm using grids for hair, but from a distance its harder to tell.

Thats about it. I'll post more as time progresses.

31St Century Warrior - Update 11/07/07

Alrighty back into action. I had a nice brake but its time to get back to work while I am searching for work on the coast. My hope is to finish this guy within the next couple of weeks while I work my current job at a warehouse and apply for jobs within the industry.

Anyways enough of a recap of were I'm at. At the moment I am only focusing on the face's defuse so the specular is a little daughnting but will be fixed in the near future. Thinks that adding a texture helped me see is that I need to fix the meshing around the eyes. There is large black space and for anywone thats a no, no. There is stretching in the ears and other areas besides the hair(which will be left as is). As soon as I get the difuse working to what I want I'll be adding grids for the hair. I was considering doing hair particals but I want to cut down on render time and I've seen some realy cool grid hair that worked in Dominance War this year and I want to see if I can get the same effect.

I'll keep ya posted.

31St Century Warrior - Update 24/06/07

Well I'm not calling it quits on this character for I still plan on making him all nicely textured and fully animatable I have reached a state were I am happy enough to post him on OrrieWalls.com my porfolio site.

I'll keep you guyz updated as I progress on the character more over time. Once again to see more continues updates and progression visit my thred at Digimill.net

31St Century Warrior - Update 19/06/07

Well its deffently been a long time since I have updated here and I believe it is safe to say that I've come along way from my last post. I have finished modeling the armour and have now started unwrapping the model, a process that is on the lowest of my fun list when it comes to modeling. I have over 30 peices of armour to unwrap but I hope to be done today.



I'm pretty proud to be at the stage I'm at though I would like to have been further. I hope to have this guy Zbrushed, rigged, posed with an AO rendered turn by Friday.

To see more frequent updates for this character visit: Digimill Student Forums.

31St Century Warrior - Update 12/06/07

Well I'm due for an update. I've finished blocking out the base model for the armour as you can see below. I've recieved comments on the forum that at this point in time it looks really bulky and that his arms couldn't move...


Well not to worry my friends I've knew what I was doing believe it or not. as you can see from the images below (in this example the lower abb plate) when I pulled it out it looked pretty bulky but so did the rest. As you can see the upper pieces which were even bigger then the lower abb plate now appear less bulky then the lower abb plate. But I've been slimming it down as I model the finer look to the armour.


So... I finally finished the front part of my characters plates, that is from the Chest Plate to the Crock Plate. Still have lots to do and very little time to do it (22nd due date...) I'll post more soon.

31St Century Warrior - Update 09/06/07

I'm due for an update on my progress so here is a rundown of what I've been up to for the past 3 days. I've took my character in to Zbrush and puched the forum alittle more and then added details.


With that done I exported a normal map and tested it out in XSI. So I through on an quick AO shaded gave the scene a couple of lights and I ended up with this:


Fairly satisfied with my normal map displacement I've now been working on the armour which I started this morning. I've been using the body to help create the plates of the armour. Selecting the polys and Pushing them out after extracting them from the bodies mesh. I've pretty much blocked out the torso and shoulders and am in the process of mapping out the leges.




Anyways I'll keep ya posted. To see my progress more often check out Digimill Student Forums > Critique My Work Please > Modeling Critique > 31st Century Warrior.

31St Century Warrior - Update 06/06/07

Ok its been a while since my last update, partly cause my computer died and so I fell behind until it got repaired. So I moved around the mesh to suit the structure that I wanted for my character from the base model I last posted. I then spent some time added more detail to the face, arms and hands of the base model, extracting and deleting the lower half cause I wont need it until later. Mashing around on the base model I kinda got carried away with the hands but finally was satisfied to unwrap it and take it into Zbrush.


After hours of unwrapping I finally got it into Zbrush this morning for a bit before I had class. I pushed around the base structure bit in Sub2/Sub3 untill I had to get to class to work on the game.


Some time after class I returned my attention back the working on the body structure this time mainly focusing on the face. I'll be spending alittle longer on the face then move onto the hands and arms again. I should be finished this either late at night or some time tomorrow evening.



Back to work, I'll keep you posted :)

31St Century Warrior - Update 01/06/07

Ok so its been a while since I last posted for this guy. While doing the last compo I also worked on my character model off and on, so here is the underlying body. I'll be building over top of the body so there is going to be no more added detail besides to the parts that will be showing (the face, arms and right hand).

At the moment the face is looking quite young, I'll be working on makeing it older looking before goin into Zbrush and making it look pretty. I will also have to do alot of work on the hand cause as you can see it pretty lacking.

Like the model? Down load this Base Model Here.

31St Century Warrior - Emporers Fist

I've pretty much finished my characters gun because it was a part project/contest entry for Digimill Student Forum's "Future Personnel Military Weapon Design" Challenge. All thats left to do is make a texture for this bad boy and give it some nice shaders. But that will come later. Now to move on to the character. Look for updates that should be comming soon :)

New Front Loader

I'm over joyed to announce that OrrieWalls.com is now a workable workable domain and will direct you to the enter page were I will post top viewed art peices, news and what not.

New Tutorials

I've got two new tutorials: XSI to Zbrush and Back Again and Making Normal Maps in PhotoShop. You can check them out at either:
- OrrieWalls.com
- Digimill Student Forums
- Digimill.net

My Portfolio Site

Orrie Walls.com is now up and running. I am currently using blogger for it and in tend in the future to have an actual site. I hope to have my demo reel up and running on there soon. Check it out :)

31St Century Warrior

So I thought I should finally post my latest concept of my up and comming model. I desided to challenge myself with creating a character that was a mix between StarCraft, WarHammer 40K, Gears of War, Hellgate London and Halo. After many failures of design I've came up this this concept that was more what I was going for.






To fallow my progress more closely or if you want to comment on my stuff check out my post at Digimill Student Forums. I am more likly to update there more often then here. But now onto more homework.

Interview with Shawn Woods of Relic Entertainment

I was lucky enought to have Shawn Woods a Senior Character Artist and Art Supervisor at Relic Entertainment conduct an interview with me even on his busy sckedual. To read it click here.

Gyro

So ya I've finished Gyro and he is now ready to be downloaded for your amusement. If you have any comments or suggestion (cause this is my first viral character) please post them in the comments or at Digimill Student Forums.

Created by: Orrie Walls (Me)
File size: 1,163kb
Formate: XSI 6.1
Download File: Gyro_XSI6.1.rar
Notes: This character is a free character, the only thing that is asked is that you give credit due were needed. So if you use him in your demo-reel please mention that the model was created by Orrie Walls and give a link to his website at Internal-game.com.



Here's an animation test done my Nathan Hibberd.

Stewie Replacement Progress Update:

Well here is a update on the Stewie's replacement, Gyro. The legs seem to be working which is great news for me. So now I have shipped it off to Nathan Hibberd to make a test animation so see how sexy he looks animated.

Robot Model#3

Stewie Replacement Progress

Long story short my school that I am currently attending ran into some problems with using Stewie (a character that is used by Animation Mentor) and so the school needs another simple animation character to replaced the borrowed one.

Though I was not asked to do this I started created a character to replace Stewie. I've been working on it for a week now off and on and its come through a number of stages and is still not finished.

Robot Model#1





Well simply stated my first attempted at modeling this character had some ups and downs and I really didn't like some of the elements (mainly the feet). So... I did some remodeling.

Robot Model#2





And... found that adding colour to the model problably did it wonders cause I didn't change the body very much but I've did do some major work to the legs and its already looking better. I thought to myself "Alright! The cats in the bag." but when I rigged this sexy beast I found that the legs were a little problematic, model wise. And if I were to release this thing I'd some smelly animators crying that their animation would be better if only the model.

So... back to the drawing board, litterally.

Sucess!

Finally some sucess on rendering! I have in the past ran into problems were it will only render until frame 9 and then crash. I fooled around lot and tried different shaders and I got to render. Now I just need to fix up the normal mapping and spec maps and the texturing will be complete and onto weighting the rigg to the character.



((YouTube is slow at uploading videos so this may take time before you maybe able to view it.))

Returning...

Went to big old Vancouver and met some great people at Relic, EA and Propaganda Games. You guyz are great and I would like to thanky ou for once agian for your time :) You really made my trip to Vancouver worth it.

Comming back I've started working again on my two latest entries. The EA's: Reveal compotition and Digimill's: Animal Within. Currently lighting up Guishnu and making him look pretty and making it that the deformation map doesn't crash XSI. I found the best way at the moment to get around the hole crashing problem was to make the body use a normal map mixed with a displacement.

Heres what I got:


Still need to work with the normal map cause there are some stupid seems but I should have those fixed here soon. If I get this working without crashing I'm going to get an older save were he is not in pose and use the rigg and play with some minor animatoin for the turn around.

Dominance War: Finished Concpet

Winning Pose:


Beuty Shot:


Construction Shot:


Texture Sheet:


Concept Sheet:


I have finished this dude. Thankyou everyone for your suggestions and support it really helped shape this guy to what he is now. I've learned alot by joining this compotition this year.

Now to focus on my other school work. Good luck to all you guyz out there doing Dominance War I hope to see you bad ass models at the finish line :)