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Wolf Character Progress 5

The model is done! The eye was definitely the trickiest because of its odd shape. To achieve it, I had to make the eyeball itself a plane, then soft select, pulling vertices out so I can get a bit of roundedness.

In my previous entry I was not happy with how bug eyed my character looked, hence the change. But working on a flat plane isn’t really easy either, so I had to do a workaround. I filled the hole, then extracted the shape. Following that, I quad drew directly on top of the odd shape to get the topology … Read the rest

Wolf Character Progress 4

The Quad Draw/retopology is now done! At this point, I go in and manually edit vertices until I’m happy with the shape. I will add hands and feet, and clean  up the model a bit more.

I’m going to have a challenge with these eyes. Since I want to animate them (or at least, a blink) I’ll have to work out how to squish them, perhaps with a lattice?



Wolf Character Progress 3

More of the same, just plugging away at the Quad Draw in between other illustration work. The hard part is done, joining the face to the body is always the trickiest thing to do for me. I still have some tidying up once finished, e.g. even distribution of polys across the surface. I test my mesh by mirroring it to the other side, seeing if the shape is what I’m looking for, and it is!

Wolf Character Progress 2

I continue to sculpt until I am happy with a basic silhouette. I don’t bother with details or anything, just enough that I can easily retopologise.

If I want to add more detail, such as in the nose, I will take my new retopologised model back into zbrush and subdivide from there. But anyway…

Once I’m done with the basic sculpt I export it as an obj to Maya. From there, I can make my model live and use Quad Draw to redraw my mesh. I need to keep in mind that my loops need to have even numbers so … Read the rest

Wolf Character Progress

I’m going to spend the next week or so working on this wolf character. What I plan to do with it is:

  • Make the base model in ZBrush, retopologise in Maya
  • Rig the wolf character
  • Apply XGen for fur
  • Give the character an idle animation
  • Give in nCloth clothes (maybe a cloak? something to not hide the fur too much)
  • Render

So to start I’ve concepted my character, and dropped the references in zbrush. I use zspheres to block out the shape, make it an adaptive mesh, and then start sculpting on it until I get the body right. It … Read the rest

Kiro Plush

A medium-difficulty plush, a character known as a Dragon Kiro. I have also designed a Puppy Kiro in the process. The dragon has armature wire inside of it so the wings and tail are completely poseable. Both toys feature needle sculpting, custom machine embroidery and applique. The collars are from the pet store.

The dragon’s colours were slightly modified. The secondary color in the tummy, paws, and eyes were changed to blue from the concept art.

Design Process

To get the proportions right I am going to use Maya as a start for my pattern. For something like this, Maya … Read the rest

Week 1

Starting to model a character for animation. I want to get back into rigging and get better at it. Looking back at when I first started working in Maya, I can’t believe what would once take me a week to model now takes a couple of hours.

I started doing that mech over there but realised I can’t do much with it yet. So I put it aside for now and modelled this little Trickdragon character of mine. With this character I can do a muscle simulation on the belly to make it jiggle and add some fire visual effects!… Read the rest