Denarii Sculpt

This is the the sculpt of Denarii I mentioned earlier. The final step will be a 7 inch, 3d printed figure produced as a reward for one of the tiers of our Kickstarter campaign for the Outcasts of Jupiter comic. Here are some of Shobo's words to describe the character:

'Powerful and ruthlessly efficient, all wired energy and tension, Denarii is gifted with absolute fearlessness and the unique ability to infiltrate just about any structure with extreme efficiency.

Shof designed him as a man of Afar ancestry. Denarii is a descendant of the once great Kush empire in Northern Africa, where the Blue and White Nile's meet.  He is quiet, noble, and kind, with a strict personal code of honor and a character stained by a black temper and a weakness for drink. 

A man of few words, he prefers action to chatter and harbors a strong dislike of the facade of modern civilization.

If Sulesh is the brains of the group, Denarii is its conscience, its beating heart, its compassion and its instrument of swift, terrible justice.'

Here are some sketches I based the model on as well as turnarounds. If you'd like to see some WIP images, head over to the Coker CoOp blog for an excellent read on this sculpt's progression from an idea to a fully fledged 3d character. Seeing the WIP images collected in one spot, it is astounding to see how much the character evolved. Enjoy!

Denarii Mini

So the comic my brother and I are working on is coming along nicely. It now has a name- Outcasts of Jupiter. You can read about the process it took to develop the name here. We are gearing up for a big announcement for the comic, so please check back soon. This cute little guy is a mini version of a larger sculpt for the project. Denarii is one of four of the Outcasts of Jupiter. If you want to see some WIP images of the sculpt, head over here. I also got an earlier version of him 3d printed (My first 3d print!) and it looked much better than expected. The print below came from Sculpteo. Exciting times!

Deep

Some time ago, I worked with Shane Acker and Benthos Studios to create this character sculpt for an upcoming project called Deep. Some of the character concept art, created by Laurel D Austin can be seen here. The project uses Valve's engine Source Engine to aid in the creation of its cinematic visuals. It was a great experience working within an art style I thoroughly enjoyed and with an art director I learned a tremendous amount from.

I thought her eyes were green

Continuing the lunch sketch series (dropped since January, haha), I decided to reinterpret one of my favorite movie heroines. I'm a great fan of Miyazaki. The sense of wonder and hope that he infuses into his worlds/stories is enviable. I rarely create reinterpretations of already existing characters, but I thought I'd break that rule this one time.

Cauliflowers

Fin

Prince

The idea for this sculpt came thanks to a Costa Rican fellow I play soccer with on Sunday.

New Habit?

I'm trying to make lunch sketches like this a habit.

Isaak sculpt: Drawing and sculpting

Every time I look at the sculptures and maquettes of Kent Melton (a great sculptor I was introduced to recently) you understand why Disney and Pixar and recently Laika have trusted his 2d to 3d translations for decades.
Whenever I sculpt a drawing, the relationship between the two practices is always quite striking. I never feel that I need the sculpt to look exactly like the drawing. I'm looking to capture the spirit of the drawing and hopefully improve on the definition of its personality.
When done most of my personal sculpts become references I use for a project either 2d animation or comics. Having a sculpt to refer to for drawing proportions and technical details is great, but more importantly the sculpt is a solid base to build on. The sculpt gives me insight for better visual consistency, weight distribution in my drawings, expression, etc and even aids muscle memory involved in drawing the character. To summarize, the manner in which the two practices inform one another is just a fantastic cycle.

You look so familiar

Have you ever tried to draw a face based on an impression of a person's expression? I find you always  come up with interesting results, so I tried it on this sculpt. Of course everyone unconsciously does this with whatever creative process they work on (implementing the familiar that is), but consciously applying this technique is quite fun. Five naira to the person who guesses who this sculpt's expression is based on.

There is a turn around image of the sculpt here.

Ending the year with style

This here is Jonah's adventuring partner, Funlola, as mentioned earlier. Again, her design is based on my brother, Shobo's concept here, and although I changed some things about her I'd say I stuck pretty close to the original design. It must seem kind of annoying posting these character images without describing their back stories, but I must as I don't want to harm any story element Shobo intends to use in the future.

Well, I'm glad I got this final post in before the end of the year. I'm thinking 2010 is going to be a pretty interesting year, lots of exciting projects in the works for me. Also who knows, maybe some Croatian scientist is getting ready to unveil the worlds first functioning matter teleporter... fingers crossed.

Jonah lives!

So over the last few months work on Jonah has admittedly been slow, as a combination of freelance illustration work and learning new techniques hampered speed, however I learned several new things in the process of creating a fully rigged character from scratch. A lot of toenail-biting frustration and ludicrously long technical problem solving hours finally added up to the fact that I can now animate Jonah with a decent animation friendly rig that is not the rubbish, buggy rig system I used for my animated short earlier this year. I've also almost finished rigging Funlola as well so stay tuned for a very short test animation in the near future. For now enjoy Jonah's first hero shot in full Technicolor glory.

N:B: Been forgotting to mention that Jonah won the Best Bust/Character award at the Queen of the Rocketmen Hardcore Modeling Challenge at CG Society earlier in the year. You can see the work in progress thread here also.

Funlola is bald!

Another character from my brother's comic. Her name is Funlola and yes, she's bald, uber tough, and she's Jupiter Jonah's fellow intrepid adventurer on their quest to find the Eye of Oduduwa. I stuck pretty close to my brother's original concept design above because it captured her attitude perfectly. Her suit also appealed to me because of how simple and striking it is. According to Shobo, she is part human, but mostly Jovian, an alien race of his making. My interpretation of Funlola is below.

With the pictures of her and Jonah below, I was hoping to achieve the intimidating physical presence that I perceived Funlola commanding over her peers in the comic. Right now I'm at the stage where I'm rigging the duo and all the texture work is done. So when I finally get some decent rigs done, you can all finally see them in color and maybe some animation... hopefully.

The Space Faring African

As promised, the sculpt of Jonah. Still to come... the fully pose able, animated leading man.

Eniola

Some may have noticed that the last few updates on my blog have been Zbrush models. Well, over the last few weeks I decided to move past my usual tinkering with the program and really try and create presentable models with it. I was really unprepared for how lovely Zbrush is to model with. Simply put it is the best 3d modeling software I have ever used. I mean you see zbrush models on CG sites and think it must take forever, or deadly amounts of skill and time to achieve sculpts like that. While knowing other 3d software helped a lot in learning Zbrush, the program really does make you feel like you are actually physically sculpting clay. So anyone with real world scuplting experience will find it pretty wonderful. If only you could animate in Zbrush, then I would dump 3ds max in a proverbial heart beat.

Anyway, I finally realized this character design I've been trying to develop for ages. As stated above her name is Eniola, and she is a somewhat mischevious girl, who is in love with everything Bruce Lee. She has hand tailored a customized "Game of Death" banana yellow jumpsuit and a pair of lady Bruce Lee tiger shoes. Her physical attruibutes are modelled loosely on my sister who has a mole on her nose as well, and mother (both have scars on their chins). Like her idol she considers herself a citizen of the world and has great philosophical aspirations. Stay tuned for a high resolution, color post of Eniola.