C18 Digital Imaging & Computer Art

These are the rendered images of my “drone flying” detective.

I hadn’t planned a character for the scene, so I’ve created a specialist investigator looking into a case involving an animated marionette escapee. I had planned to smooth out some things like the arms in Zbrush, but it didn’t treat my combined polygons as one object. I hope to revisit these details, such as hair/smoothing etc. The face and additional clothing detail will be textured. I learned a lot using the x-ray shading while making the coat. The last image is a screen capture to negate lighting effects obscuring contouring detail.

I did the modeling in both Maya and Zbrush, but due to a lack of experience in Zbrush, most of the work was completed in Maya. I deviated from my concept art a little bit to get around a few issues, mainly that I couldn’t achieve the hair style I had hoped, so I added a big floppy hat to the character instead. I also changed her outfit to be a bit more convenient to make. The following are a few renders of the model, including one with her in the mystery scene (even though that makes no sense cause, you know, contamination of evidence, but whatever).

For my character I decided to begin to model the most detailed part, or so I want to be the most detail in the mystery scene. This hand took me 6 hours to model and whole lot of frustration. I began to block out where the watch tan would be but it kept deleting parts of my actual hand so I am going to have to work with it.

I have some previous knowledge of ZBrush for personal projects so I actually decided to start sculpting from a Dynamesh sphere and progressively add parts. I then exported it as a .obj to Maya for some extra touches (removing the hand of one side as Anguis does not have 2 hands). I’m still getting down some of the finer points of ZBrush like extracting his shoulder to create a real looking pauldron. I did have a tough time getting the smoothing settings right as I sculpted in a pretty low poly mode. I also have no idea how to do hair in ZBrush or Maya so that will have to be figured out real soon. The thick legs were essentially my way of making his armored cloth/skirt and then the boots were kind of a nightmare to sculpt out. I might just try to do only the boots in Maya at this point. Not sure what happened on the face render but oh well. I think Maya’s smoothing algorithm may have messed up some of the more detailed features I had implemented in ZBrush that can be seen in the first render.

In my original sketch I had my character wearing a suit however I couldn’t create a suit to my satisfaction so I ended up putting a sweatshirt on my character.

Making hands and feet is hard so I’ve decided that Detective Lopez’s Trench coat is just way too big for him so his hands or feet don’t come out of it. He looks pretty blocky right now but I hope to fix him up and make him look more like an actual body shape. Anyways, here’s a couple renders of my favorite rat man:

And here he is in my scene:

Here is my character modeled in Maya. In the scene, he is starting to tap on the Macbook to try and turn it on. The hardest part of the character was modeling the fine details like the lightning tattoo and blood stain.

This is one of the prisoners from my story. The hardest part was actually the hands, which ended up coming out pretty good, so I’m happy with it!