Zagara Project WIP

This project is going to be my last major character project before starting school at Gnomon. The Desert Queen skin of Zagara in Heroes of the Storm is my favorite skin. There are many reasons why I think she is a great subject to do a sculpture on. One of them being that I have never done an HD sculpt just for the sake of sculpting. I have done a lot of sculpting in the past that were focused on being baked into a game mesh. For this last project, I want to go all out, and unchain myself from polycount limit and just have fun with sculpting.
I have a few goals I want to accomplish:

1. produce a couple beauty render that are poster worthy
2. High resolution sculpture that looks great far away and also in close ups
3. Capture the character's emotion in the sculpture
4. If time permits, texture the character and render with realistic shaders.

Here is the paint over of the skin. The skin is beautiful but there are a number of areas I don't really like, and also post some problems. One being the weird "hair extensions" clipped on the underside of the head dress. The 3 pieces of hair on each side looks really awkward and covers up parts of the model. The hair in the back looks great because it contributes to the silohuette of the character, but the clip on extensions gotta go. I also redesigned the center piece of the head dress because the decor was a bit too simple for a high resolution sculpt. The materials are also explaned in the paint over in case I can carry it into the shading process.

Barbarian

Barbarian Character project

The day has come. I put in the final touches on the Barbarian character project this morning. Fixing and color correcting various texture maps. I am happy to share with people the final result! The entire process took about 3 weeks on and off. 

The project started with Caio's amazing concept painting of a bad ass barbarian warrior. I then dissected the painting and figured out how to address the different parts of the character so I don't overwhelm myself. There are parts that can be mirrored and duplicated. The bones are a good example. I modeled 6 bones with general diverse shape, then further detailed it in Zbrush. 

The hardest part of this project is to bring about the feeling of flowing fur in 3D. Hair and fur are never easy in the 3D world, especially for gaming. Before Nvidia hairworks, people usually rely on polygon planes with transparency(which is what I did for this character, but added normal map and flow map on top to simulate anistropic specularity.) and dynamic rigged meshes. 

I got through the whole project without any particular difficulty. With every attempt at something, I always want to learn something new or do something better. With this project, I feel that I learnt to go through the workflow quicker and ended with expected results, which is good for things that might take several iterations.

Here are some more images and sketchfab link:

Barbarian Sketchfab by patrickvdk on Sketchfab

Awesome News :D

So this past weekend of the 27th I was flipping through ImagineFX issue 124, and guess what I saw? My submissions from a month ago! The editor had informed me that they would like to feature me, but I was never told in which issue. This is incredibly exciting for me, because I had been dealing with a lot of rejections lately from both job hunts and potential pitches. It may not seem like a huge deal having 2 full color pages featuring my work in a monthly magazine, but it is ImagineFX! It is an internationally acclaimed digital artist magazine that consistently delivers quality images and contents. Honestly, a much needed boost of morale and energy for me as I prepare for Gnomon in October, and the ongoing job hunt. I definitely feel validated, and that I am indeed producing work worthy of recognitions.
I am not sure if I posted an update on here about my acceptance into Gnomon School of VFX! So here it is. Ever since January of this year, I have been dedicating full time to enriching both my skills and portfolio in hopes of getting a job with a prestigious studios. The journey so far is difficult to say the least. The difficult part is keeping myself motivated and my energy level high in order to continually learn new things and improve my work while receiving rejection letters along the way from prospective employers. One thing is for sure. You have to keep going if you want something. Things won't happen if you don't give them the opportunities to happen.
My blog started out as a personal portfolio slash update site, and now I guess it turned into a record of my struggle to get into the industry. I hope that in the near future, I will have the opportunity to post an update that says "I've made it!".