Eternal Re-Birth (Another One)

A few months ago someone who had stumbled on my blog contacted me asking me about my first "Eternal Re-Birth: Earth, Air, Fire, Water" drawing. She was interested in that drawing as a tattoo and had written to me asking me if, 1) She could use that image as a template for what she would like to have tattooed on herself, 2) If I would be willing to help her out with the design of the tattoo and add/modify things. I was very flattered that someone was even interested in that drawing and I gladly agreed to help her out. I know that it has been a very long time since my last drawing. I have been buried in my school work. For those of you who don't know, I am back at school yet again for, this time, my teaching credential. I have decided to slow down my pursuit of a career in Animation/Arts and try to become an Elementary School teacher and do freelance art and illustration on the side. It was a tough decision but I think ultimately it may be the right one. Time will tell. Anyway, here is the second version of my Eternal Re-Birth:Earth, Wind, Fire, Water drawing. I think this one looks a lot more cleaned up and I feel like it has a better flow to it. But it is not my job to critique my own art. That job is yours; So feel free to be as harsh as you want, or as kind as you want. Any feedback is greatly appreciated and welcome. Enjoy, Sincerely, Sergio Rios

P.S. since I really haven't posted anything in a really long time I suppose I can post another drawing that I did a few weeks ago but didn't feel inclined to post it on my blog. I'm not really a huge fan of this drawing that you see below. But I figure that I'll just post it now since I haven't put anything new up on my blog in about five or four months. So I'll include it with work I have done during this time of my absence. Enjoy,

Karate Kip and Ninja Ned

Today I was sitting at Barnes and Nobel Book store and drawing. This is a fun one that I came up with. His name is Karate Kip and Ninja Ned. They are bad-ass high school students who double as crime fighters. Not a very original concept, but the drawing was fun. Enjoy!

Character Sketch of my friend Sarah - For "The Adventures of Sarah and Sergio" comic

Below is a quick character sketch that I did of my friend Sarah. Sarah and I have an ongoing comic where we battle each other out in the form of a comic. Since she currently lives in Los Angeles, and I'm in Temecula trying to get to L.A. she and I have to do our comic battles online for the world to see. If you scroll down to my links section on this blog you can catch our comic. The title is "The Adventures of Sarah and Sergio". I had to stop working on the comic for a little bit since I'm currently trying to focus my attention and energy into finding a job. But I decided last night to start working on a drawing for my new comic. This is the drawing that I will use for the comic. If you want to see how this drawing will fit into the comic, you'll have to check into the site some time this week and find out. It should hopefully be funny.

This drawing was sketched with a Col Erase pencil on animation paper, scanned into the computer, and painted on Adobe Photoshop with several layers. The drawing and painting is still not complete but you can still get a pretty nice gist of the whole picture. I hope you enjoy it. And as always, your criticism is always welcome. Enjoy.

Click on the Thumbnail Image above to expand it and see it clearly.

Random Charicature

Today I was sitting at the Town Center Mall in Valencia, CA waiting for to go check in on the portfolio day at Cal Arts. While I was sitting at the mall I saw an older man and I really liked his exaggerated face. So I drew him into a caricature. Here he is for you to see. Enjoy.

Curly Fry's Trick and Treat

Here is another drawing I did for "Diary of a Couch Potato". Dressing up on Halloween, for the Fry family, can be a difficult thing. Most years Curly Fry is either an Avocado, a pickle, the McDonalds McNugget, etc. But this year Curly decided to attempt a Mummy disguise. Well when you're a potato wrapped in toilet paper, it's easy to confuse the outcome. Enjoy,

Ursula Grew Hair

This is my first time ever attempting to create any CG hair using Maya. I figured that since I spent so much time modeling Ursula, that perhaps I should spend the time to figure out how to add hair to her. So these are my results. The hair, when rendered, is extremely lit with no shadow maps. I'm still trying to tinker around with the settings to figure out why the hair seems to glow, but it's still a mystery to me. I think it has something to do with the lighting system I had created to illuminate my character. The rendering is done using Maya's rendering software which isn't good at all. I am trying to get either Mentalray or Renderman to create a much better and much more defined render of the hair dynamics created. For now you will have to just accept what I have here since it's beyond my control. But keep in mind that I am working like a mad man to figure out a way to create nicer and more believable hair. It's all a work in progress. Enjoy.

Front and Profile screen capture of Ursula with her hair.

A profile render of her hair. I'm still trying to figure out Maya hair and and still trying to figure out, also, why this hair is rendering super bring and almost glowing.

A render of Ursula with her hair. I'm still learning a lot about Maya.

Little Boy CG character

During my senior year at Cal Arts I took my first CG modeling class and this was my final character that I created for the semester. It was through that class where I began understanding the level of difficulty in CG modeling and the tedious process. But through that class I developed a fascination with MAYA and its seemingly endless capabilities that I want to learn. Today I decided to re-visit that character and fix things on him and add hair to his model. I fixed the lips and actually bridged the open gap between the upper and lower lip so that the character can actually shut his mouth without showing his teeth. I fixed his occipital portion of his head and rounded it a bit more. The original character took me about 3 days to finish. He was modeled with Polygons and his hair was created with Maya's hair dynamics. His teeth and tongue are also fully models which I will show on a later post. For now, enjoy what I have.

Made using Maya 6.0 and Maya 8.0. Polygon modeling with Dynamic hair.

Four Panel view. (The hair is different in this one. I'm keeping the orange)

The Diary of a Couch Potato : Meet the Fry Family

Here is another drawing that was inspired by a student in middle school that I was subbing for. He had asked for me to draw him a drawing of a couch potato, and from that drawing of a simple potato watching TV I came up with the idea of creating an entire couch potato family. That's where the Fry family comes in. There is Spud Fry (The Father), Frenchie Fry (The mother), Smally Fry or better known as Small Fry (the Baby brother), and Curly Fry (the older brother). They get around town either hopping since they don't have legs, or they ride on a couch-like wheelchair for paraplegics using a switch that they can control with their mouth and tongue. Well, enjoy the Fry family.

Meet the Fry Family : Spud Fry, Frenchie Fry, Small Fry, Curly Fry.

An image of their Couch-like wheelchair that the fry family uses to get around in.

Cowboy Kitt and Giddy-up Cow Dog

Today I was substitute teaching for a sixth grade class at Margarita Middle School and the kids in my class caught wind that I draw and that I use to work for Disney designing characters for their games. To make a long story short, the kids all started asking me to draw things for them. One little boy asked me if I could draw him a "Cowboy Kitty Cat" and I told him I would do it, but he would have to pick it up during lunch. This is the quick drawing that I came up with. I gave the little boy the original drawing; But not before I asked him to run it up to the office and Xerox me a copy of it. Here is the digital outcome of the drawing I did. The coloring was done with Photoshop CS3. I figured I would give 3D a little rest and show you that I can still draw the old school way. Hopefully tomorrow I can upload another cute drawing idea that a student wanted me to draw for him. Enjoy.

Above Image: Cowboy Kitty AND Giddy-up Cowdog

Update

So here is an update of the last character I started modeling. I should be able to finish this guy tomorrow and start a whole new character this weekend. I'll try to rig this guy also and depending on time, may do a simple animation test with him. Enjoy,

Different Views: Top, Perspective, Front, Side

Character's Animatable topagraphy

Jiz Another Model

When I was a sophomore at Cal Arts I developed a film concept which was later called "Jiz one of them Days". I had developed a fun sperm character and thought it would be a cool idea to create a film around the idea of the dangers sperm face when leaving the body. I won't go to graphically in detail but it was a funny film which combined live action film editing with CG animation. I never finished the film because I didn't understand the concept of how to model or rig a character very well. So instead of building this detailed model that you see below, I decided to spend two weeks locked in my room learning the basics of 3D rigging, modeling, texture, lighting, and animation. After two weeks I came up with a very simple 3D film, about a minute and a half of animation that I did in my self teaching adventures of Maya. It's not the best film in the world but seeing as how I did it in about two weeks, I had no idea how Maya worked, and I taught myself how to use Maya with that film... I think I did a pretty damn good job.

Well seeing as how I never finished the film the way I wanted to finish it, I never showed my simple Maya project to anybody. Another friend at Cal Arts (Lissa) was on my case about wanting to see my sperm film and how I HAD to finish. Well I promised her that I would finish it, but I never did. So I decided today to start modeling my sperm character the way it was intended to look. Below you'll see what I have of the character so far. I think I'm really diggin' the fleshyness under the eyes. Below you'll find the drawings of the sperm character that I did at Cal Arts, and then below that you'll see the model I'm working on. It took me about an hour or two to get to the point that I'm at right now with the model using Maya 8, and doing a Polygonal modeling.

Above is the original drawing I came up for of the sperm character during my sophomore year at Cal Art.

The four pannel view of the CG model : Top, Perspective, Front, Side

The image above shows the topography of the face so far demonstrating the possibility for facial animation in the eyes and lids.

Comments and suggestions are happily accepted and appreciated. Enjoy.

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,