I’m going to have to call this body/outfit “done,” even though it’s not, if I want to finish this thing on time….which I probably won’t   Her head positioning and neck are really bothering me, so I’ll be fixing that as well as some other proportional issues, but as far as detailing out the high res goes, this is pretty much it.

My entry probably isn’t the most exciting of WIPs (especially in comparison to a lot of the other killer work being done for this competition), but I think things will come together more once I get to the texturing/lighting stage. I’m planning on relying on other things aside from a heavy normal map, but we’ll see how well that goes in the end.

The sculpt  on her hair is just temporary geometry to make it easier to build the low poly alpha hair.

Lately I’ve been struggling with the design of her instrument.  It’s pretty hard to think of a cool pose with her sitting down playing a guqin, and having her play such an instrument vertically doesn’t make any sense, so I’ve been thinking of changing it to a guzheng, or perhaps some sort of guqin/guzheng hybrid.  I suppose I should do some pose sketches and decide then.  A guzheng might also give her a stronger presence, which may fit the theme of the contest better.

This isn’t the latest iteration, but I forgot to post this the other day.  Progress is going pretty slow, but at least concept wise, I think all that’s left is to re-design her instrument to make it a little more fantastic and unique looking.  I figured I would work out all the little details when I get further along with the model (though I can see this backfiring on me in many ways).  Still a long way to go!

I know I haven’t been posting much, but I’ve been pretty busy with other things.  I’ll be posting something about what’s been keeping me preoccupied for the past several months within the next few weeks.  In the meantime, here’s my Dominance War IV entry.  Hopefully I manage to finish it this year!

I decided to join the Chinese forum HXSD this time around instead of going with 3dTotal again. I was mainly attracted by the fact that their forum logo and colors fit the kind of character I wanted to make better than other forums. My Chinese is pretty bad, but fortunately the famous Fan Yang is kind enough to help me out with translating (even though she should be entering the competition too!). 谢谢您姐姐！

You can see my thread here, but you have to be registered and logged in in order to see any images.  I’ll be posting updates here as I have them

I wrote up a little guide for rendering Ambient Occlusion maps with XNormal for some people at work.  Ambient Occlusion requires a lot of settings to tweak, and after a lot of experimentation and searching around the web, I figured I’d share my workflow for setting up my diffuse textures.

Tutorial link here

I hope this proves useful to some people struggling with rendering AO maps.  Oddly enough, I usually get nicer results with my real work, but this at least demonstrates what the settings do

For those who haven’t tried it yet, XNormal is a great program that generates different kinds of maps (quickly and easily) for game model creation.  I highly recommend it

XNormal link

I’ve had the Cintiq 12WX for about a month now, and I figured it was enough enough time to write a review. Part of the reason why I took the time to do this was because when I was researching it myself, I still had a lot of unanswered questions, so hopefully this is helpful to anyone uncertain whether or not the 12WX is right for them.

Review here!

Some pictures (more in the review)

I’m not terribly comfortable with my knowledge of anatomy, so I’ve been messing around with some anatomy stuff in Mudbox.

I used the base mesh provided in the ongoing Mudbox contest for this:

I didn’t go too much higher in mesh resolution as I don’t think I defined the masses very well.

Focusing on the torso:

I have a long way to go

I haven’t done much figure drawing….though I really should. I picked a pose off of Hong Ly’s Character Designs site and decided to do a (relatively) quick copy for practice. I took some liberties with the anatomy that I probably shouldn’t have

I also tried to experiment a little with custom brushes (something I rarely do), and ended up creating something that behaves a little more like a marker.

ArenaNet art team is busy posting the uber cool stuff they’ve done for GWEN over at the ConceptArt Forums.

Concept Art

Obviously I have nothing to contribute

*Click Image for larger image*

Some small fanart of Lance Corporal Giroro from Keroro Gunsou. I felt the simplicity behind the character designs would make for nice, low stress mini paintings, so expect to see some more Gunsou fanart

Another face experiment. Not based on anyone in particular, but I did use an assortment of photo reference to get some ideas for lighting and basic forms. I don’t know if this was successful or not, but I kind of threw in the towel on this one since it was taking an uncomfortably long time to do.