I have been looking at the sand in some of shots and finding it a little dull. So to address this, I tried to take the mesh into Zbrush and work it up.Wanted to keep it lose and have fun with it. Here is frame of what I got. When I first started on the film I could not see a good way to work this sand up, not with the resources that I have. And it wasn't till Decimation Master came out for Zbrush 3.5 that I could see a way.Really helps to give the characters of feeling of being in the world, rather than walking on it. Now I dont think I am going to animating this ground, its very heavy, so have will to choose where I put it carefully.
During my last year at Yukfoo, a collegue approached me to do some outsourcing for a Wii game that he was Art Director on, California Sports. This was possible to do as I had game experience and we had a team that I knew could do it. I did the initial benchmark assets, such as the first character and building and worked out the kinks of how we were going to do this. Once that was done I just had to run schedule and do a bit of quality control. SHOo did the all the character texturing and Yoshi Harimaoto did the rest of modeling and most of the texturing on the props. I thought they did a great job as it was alot of assets in short amount of time.And there is another whole phase that I had nothing to do with.
A post of my latest model. This one I am going to texture finally. And I am also going to be adding a character. This helps to give the bot a sense of scale. The first section of renders are ones I did to check that the mesh is good and that the smooth approximation will work right. Down below this are the renders with the character in. As I thought it changes the perception of the model hugely.
So its a while since I posted an update to the film.I have done alot of work on it lately. So here is an update. I finally got around to unwrapping the interior of the house and started to texture that up. Makes a big difference. Still planning to let SHOo cut loose on those textures. The majority of my time has spent on animation. Tackling shots that I being avoiding. I have also reworked a shot that I could never render and was struggling with. I broke it into 2 shots now. Done plenty of comp work on various shots. And I have changed the ending! I have said that I would never change the edit..but it had to be done.
I got my update to Zbrush 4.0 going last night. I needed to get a larry render out. Going into maya with decimated geo is not much fun really. So I wanted to try this BPR rendering out and get a turntable done. I spent most of my time setting the SSS that you can now hook up in zbrush. I just hooked up my painted ED map to the texture and used a preset. Its not perfect by a long way, but I can see this will be getting plenty of attention.
Little bit about myself.In a previous life I was a chef. I was lucky to work with great people and learnt how to cook.I however it was my not great love, and after many years in hot kitchens it was time to change. I went to animation school at Media Design School in Auckland in 2001 worked hard and managed to graduate with Distinction and an industry award for Modeling. I was then lucky enough to be picked from an international search to be the intern for the Art Department at National Geographic Magazine in Washington D.C. I was working with the art directors. It was a fantastic time.
I then taught 3D for awhile until I was hired at Binary Star, a start up game development studio as Lead 3D. This was a great year and with a top team we won Best Startup Studio and Best unsigned game at the Austrailan GDC.
After this I was drawn into the world of TVCs. I went to Yukfoo in Auckland as Lead 3D and am lucky to work with a great and talented bunch of people.
After this I went to Weta Digital as a Assistant Technical Director in the shots department working on Avatar. This was amazing, and culminated in running 3 shots for Avatar as Lighting TD.
