A Most Excellent Adventure

The theme for the challenge was "time travel", so I entered a render of the phone booth from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright...

An M26 Pershing.

Cannon

My first Weekend Challenge entry rendered in Cycles. The design of the cannon is loosely based off a Civil War howitzer.

Shallow Seas

This is perhaps my most ambitious project to date, texture wise. The mermaid character in the scene uses two materials each with its own set of textures.

A vertex color map was used as a mask for the texture. I made extensive use of image maps when creating her – color, normal, alpha, specularity, and specular color for her ‘vest’. Her dolphin half is loosely based off Fraser’s dolphin, which in hindsight may have been a mistake, given that it’s a somewhat obscure species.

Shark progress

An updated version of my shark model, rendered with SSS.

Harpy (WIP)

A work in progress.  I modeled a fairly low poly character model and created a texture, a partial normal map, and an ambient occlusion map to help show color variations. The wing are still untextured, however hopefully I will be able to bring my experience with a similar project to bear on it. It isn’t complete by any means – I still need to finish up the normal map, as well as create a specularity map – but I do feel like I’ve pushed my boundaries.

As a mythological creature, a harpy doesn’t really make that much anatomical sense. Birds (excluding flightless birds) are basically blobs with wings, a head, and two stick like legs. The pectoral muscles on a bird are enormous in comparison to the rest of its body. Given this information, I decided to bulk up the the deltoid and pectoral muscles while maintaining an aesthetically acceptable form.

Sculptris

Now that I have a new computer, I've been able to really push the envelope with regard to polycounts. For the most part, I've focused on faces, but I've also experimented with designing cratures from scratch, as well as refurbishing some of my older, lowpoly models.