Buster's Colors (A Start)

Heres the first shots of Buster painted up. I've painted his face and hair, the body and jetpack are up next. Also tested out the normal map transfer for his body... a lot of artifacts are showing up that I have to figure out.

A slew of new things.

Have been busy with my graduate animation project making and revising and revising again. Here are some images and type treatments that I'm playing with right now.

Buster's Hands

Did some work on his hands. Still need to tighten the design up, his fingers are losing a lost of volume from all the sculpting.

Successful Normal Map transfer

Here's my progress on Buster. Spent a few hours on hardening the angles in his hair and on his body. Also tried exporting a Normal Map to a low-poly mesh and am pretty happy with how the results are reading in Maya. There are a few artifacts I have to work out, but otherwise it looks much higher-poly than it is.

Buster Updates

Got some feedback on my model and incorporated some edits on the anatomy as well as a sharpening up of many features to make it more geometric.

Buster: Model

Here's a preview of the Buster Model. The first image is from Mudbox with 5 levels of subdivisions and the second two images are exported normal maps on the base model in Maya. Still tweaking him in Mudbox. This was an (unsuccessful) test from Mudbox to see how a normal map would render out for a base level mesh, but there is not nearly enough geometry to support it, causing the ugly shadows. Also a little lost on the textures. I'm caught between wanting to do photorealistic textures and stylized painterly look and just need to decide.

I am, however, pretty happy with the way that helmet is picking up light!

Gaston

A little inspiration for a scene in my final project. Wanted to see how a comic-bookier feel might work. Referenced the ending of Moontide.

La Femme

Another play on Cassandre. This time just using his palette. Very inspired right now by 80+ year old model, Carmen Dell-Orefice.

Maltese Falcon

As part of my final project, I've been watching tons of Noir films and researching 1940's graphic design. Here's a scene from the Maltese Falcon re-imagined as a poster by AM Cassandre. Both of the source images below.

Upgrade

Got some feedback on my character lineups. The consensus was that the first character I should model should be the Spaceman because he is the protagonist but that the current design is too simple and boring. In revisiting his design I wanted to do two things:

1. Enhance the distortion in the figure for a more unique silhouette.
2. Add lots of detailing to his costume.

I went back to my research and did a bunch of sketching and came up with this. (Special thanks to this amazing Flash Gordon book I picked up at the library with hundreds of photos from the film serials) I think it still recalls the military uniform that I was going for but feels a little more high-tech and has lots of little things to look at. He ended up with a creepy sneer in the painting which I will avoid in the actual model.