Ursula Finished (Somewhat)

So here is the Ursula update. I actually finished modeling her on Saturday night, but I haven't had time to take rendered images of her and post them. Here they are now. This entire model took me about four full days on non stop work to finish. I really learned a lot about Maya just from doing this model. I think I'm becoming obsessed with the program... ha ha. I was going to model Ursula's hair in Maya, but as it turns out, her hair has to be done with Maya Dynamics which means I would have to create the hair on a separate cloned polygonal object layer copied from her scalp and using the Maya paint effects to paint the hair on and sculpt the hair curves that are created. Then I would have to render the hair as a separate layer from the body and compost the final rendered hair object , using Photoshop CS3, onto the final rendered body image of Ursula. I'm still going to do that but I wanted to move on to other models that I want to work on for my portfolio. I also still have to model the teeth and jewelry on Ursula; but I got the main part of the character here. I hope you like it. The lighting is done with one spot light which is the main light casting the shadows and two point lights. I turned on the ray tracing for the shadows and I think came out with a fairly decent render. I'm not really all that good with rendering or lighting, but given the fact that I'm still pretty new to Maya, I think I did a pretty decent and ambitious job here. But that's for you to decide and not me. My next project is going to be really fun actually. I next plan to try and recreate a realistic CG model of myself. I was going to do a full body model of me, but I decided to just do my face and maybe my torso. After that's done, then I may go in and do the legs... it depends on how much time I have. Anyway, here's is Ursula.

A four panel View of the model : Top, Perspective, Front, Profile

Rendered Images along side the image plane that I used

Demonstrating the model the with the wire-frame

showing to give an idea of how animatable she is

Two close up images showing the eyelash detail.

Thank you for stopping by and looking at my work. I would appreciate comments, tips, suggestion if you have any of them. I accept good and bad comments so don't censor yourself. Thank you. Enjoy.

Ursula Update

So Ursula is gonna kill me... ha ha. But I'm having fun modeling her. It's been about two days of work and I've already got pretty far. I just have to model her hand, tentacles, hair, and jewelry and then she'll be all done. I'm still not sure how much time I'll have to rig her or create blend shapes for her. But I'll do my best. For now, enjoy what I've done. This is the result two days of non stop CG modeling. This is only a temporary basic texture that I added to her model using the basic Maya colors. I just did it to give this model the Ursula feel. Comments and suggestions are always welcome and appreciated. Enjoy.

"Poor Unfortionate Soul" - CG Ursula

So this week I decided to try and model Ursula from The Little Mermaid and this is what I got. It took me one day to model Ursula's head. I still have to do her ear and hair, but you can see what I have so far. This week I'll be modeling her body, and hopefully I'll have a chance to add some blend shapes to this model and make here blink talk and squint. We'll see where we go with this. But so far I'm having a fantastic time. Enjoy.

A four panel view of my Ursula Model - Modeled in Maya 8

Front and Profile view of my Ursula model - Maya 8

MAYA will be the death of me!

So in my efforts of trying to keep my progress up to date on my blog, I'm posting my accomplishment on my CG model since last I posted which was two days ago. I spent ALL of Sunday creating and refining that eye which was posted. And I spent ALL of Monday, again, locked in my room trying to further my CG character along as much as possible. One thing about working on the computer is that nothing is ever predictable. The act of actually modeling and creating a character isn't what's slowing me down. The bugs and errors that I encounter on Maya is what's slowing me down. But, non-the-less I suffer the love/hate relationship with Maya and must carry that burden. I'm actually having a lot of fun with this character and learning a lot. One thing I love about maya is that it allows me creativity with how I construct a, or part of, a character. It allows me to see the body and certain material as shapes and forces me to decide on the quickest and most effective way to build that shape either by manual polygon building, or by cheating and constructing those shapes by importing already build shapes in Maya and refining them to match your image. So yeah. I'm having a good time even though it's a pretty slow process. Today, however I'm not going to work on Maya... I'm giving myself a break and am going traditional and old school. I'm gonna go around with a sketchbook and draw. So maybe tomorrow I'll have one or two new drawings to post. Anyway, enjoy. And as always, comments are welcome and appreciated. Thank you so much for stopping by. There's a LOT about this character which I hate right now, so let the viewer of my work know that I will be refining and rebuilding a lot of things on this character that I don't like (such as the nose and mouth).

A quick Render of Half of his untextured face with the glasses on.

The four panel view of him : Top, Perspective, Front, Side

A closer view of the Front and Profile view. I kept the wire frame on shading so you can see how the character was built.

A simple pair of glasses that I made for my character. I'm still gonna tweak a few things on these glasses, but I added a few details like a small screw in the hinge which you can't actually see from this perspective.

The four panel view of my simple glasses. You can see the screw better with this image on the side view panel.

Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy

Too many things on my plate!!!

So I've been extremely busy for a long time now and I've just gotten even busier. Let me give you a brief run down of my busy life:

1. Working as a substitute teacher bribing the children with drawings of Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson, etc... if they don't give me a rough/hellish time.

2. Working freelance graphic design stuff for friends when they need it.

3. Taking two, online, flash animation class which requires for me to dedicate about five hours to each lecture and assignment.

4. And this week I decided that I'm going to try to build at least one CG model per week to help build my CG portfolio. Once the models are build I will either try to make time for rigging them that week, or slowly rig them within a few weeks after completing them... unless rigging is giving me a hard time which I KNOW it will... then I may have to pick and choose which models I want to rig.

5. And finally, the big thing that is also keeping me busy is... LOOKING FOR A JOB!!!

so if anybody has any leads on jobs, I would be most greatly appreciative.

So I thought I would try to update this blog more regularly with my progresses in art, and CG stuff. I will start off with showing you the progress for my CG model I'm currently building.

I came up with a quick design of a silly angel character. I spent all of today modeling the eye and glasses and smoothing things out. The texture that is currently on them is just a temporary texture until he is finished. After that, I'll apply a nice UV texture map which I'll create on Photoshop CS2. Good times... As always, comments are encouraged and appreciated. Thanks for looking.

The Drawing above is my template for my model

And here is the day one of his construction.

And here is the front and profile view against the template.

Enjoy,