This is a character I created for my demoreel. He was the first character I modeled, and I struggled with him a lot because I was trying to use Zbrush before I had properly learned it. But I made it through and he's one of my favourite pieces. Here's my finalized concept:


Zbrush detailing



The only real criticism I got was that the head was too dog-like, so I changed it to a more lizard-like look, which suits the character better.


Here's the original pose in XSI, on textured decal mode.


You can see most of the bones here, as well as my original lighting rig (which got scrapped). Every fin has a bone chain and, in theory, is animateable. If anyone is crazy enough to try, I'd be happy to let you, cause there's no way I'm animating ever again.


This is the final render, but I still want to add a scene in the background, or at least some some murky haze and a couple bubbles so it looks like he's underwater.

I decided to make an environment as one of my big projects. My original concept was large, middle-eastern style towers that were built into cliffs. I was going to have large, canvassing trees with long gnarled roots, water falls, cliffsides, flags, and more, but ended up losing interest part of the way through after it not only got extremely repetitive, but I realized that I wasn't as interested in making the environment as I had been in creating it on paper. Nonetheless, here's what I did finish.

This spartan helmet was an assignment from 3DAM202.


"Lucifer's Head" was my first project for my Zbrush class.


This was another Zbrush project, where we had to create a muscular character. I decided to make an Amazon, creatively named Amazonia.

This was way back from IGG in my first semester. This was actually the first time I'd ever used photoshop, and we had to paint this wasp following a tutorial. All done with a mouse...ouch.

One of our other projects was to paint a landscape and include water and smoke/clouds.

Thanks to Tim Searles for being such a great instructor, I would surely be far worse with photoshop if he'd never taught me.

So I've resisted the pressure to start up a blog until now, at which point I can't anymore because I have to start this one for a class.

Let's see here, I'm Michael, and I'm a student at the Centre for Arts & Technology in my final semester of the 3D Game Animation program. I guess I better throw up some work, and I may as well start at the beginning so you see not only my improvement, but my method as well.

I'll post some work soon so there's actually something to see here.