The day is finally here and it's refreshing to say the least, while honestly I have expected to have done a lot more, for reasons I'll discuss later in the post I was cut short in one of the characters.

I would be lying if I said it all went smoothly, but for the most part it was a great ride and I've learned a lot in these past months. While the motivation wasn't entirely there, it did motivate me to just bolt out of the course and pursue my own portfolio and learn everything I can in the next part of my life.

I lacked in some aspects of what I promissed to deliver during the FMP stage, but I have been working with a personal project of mine along side friends that will be shown in full in the end of this update, so stick around, but for now I'll make a brief summary of what I talked about in each character, starting by Ulan.

Ulan, the great gladiator warrior, was probably the most time I spent sculpting of all of the other characters, and ultimately what made the production lag in the end, I have come to the FMP with a "empty the cup" mindset and spent imense time researching and learning new tools and anatomy and every nice to dish out the best I could, which unfortunaly ate up an entire month, although I do not it regret one bit. The whole point I joined the course was for this purpose, to learn, and where there were gaps in the first two years I filled it, which helped in the later characters, in the final days of the FMP I managed to pose and animate the character to give him more life and left the texture to do during the following weeks in my own time, as well as the weapons and a nice dandy plinth for him to stand on proud.

I couldn't be happier with his sculpt and how it turned out in the end, he was a lot of work, but I wouldn't have achieved the quality in the next sculpts if I hadn't sacrificed that time, but I know if I went back in time and done it all over,with what I know now, I would be able to finish it on time, no question asked.

Thinking back on it, some people would expect me to say "Oh, I wish I had done it differently and finished it on time yadda yadda yadda", but sometimes that is not the case, it is important to know your limits and push it, and that's what I did, I wasn't happy with where I was as an artist and I desperetaly wanted to improve, so that's what I did.

but for now I'll just let you guys have this pic (again) 

The urban warrior on the other hand, done and done, she was also rushed in the final week a bit, but I am happy with how she turned out, she is close enough to the concept and as soon as I finish up her jacket I'm certain she will pop. 

For her I have one regret, which is not taking the time to learn marvelous earlier, it is such a wonderful tool and I am excited to learn it in depth in these upcoming months, the jacket was the only part of this project that fell flat and couldnt be salvaged, fortunetly for me, all I have to do is pick it back up and finish it, and I'll be learning a new tool with it, as someone said "Failure is not the opposite of success, it's makes part of it.", so I'm super excited to starting this and many other personal projects to learn even more techniques.

So here is a final render of her for now, I'll do a lot of improvements to her in the near future.

My prised project (in my opinion) is the zombie dog. As I've stated in previous posts, my end go in this industry is working in horror as a creature artist, and I haven't had the time to do so prior to this project, and for a first time sculpting a "realistic" animal, I didn't do a bad job.

Like Ulan, this character revolved heavily in learning anatomy for the animal in question, and of course, making him look scary. I don't have regrets for this one besides maybe simplifying some of the gore, there were pieces in the mouth that were really tricky, nearly impossible to retop by hand and hindered the quality of the low poly, and making him slightly glossy would be a plus as well... but for now he is a wet boy.

It was by far the most fun I had in the FMP, looking at picture of dogs, brushing his hair in zbrush with the fibermesh, animating his doge dance, everything was very amusing, and for a realistic character, it only took me 3 weeks to finish it, which is an improvement in time. I created my own IMM brush for the jaw, I learned how a dogs bone structure work and how their muscles move, everything was a great experience.

Hopefully with personal projects I'll be able to go even more wild with the creature stuff, and hopefully in a couple years work on something nice and gory. Who knows?  

Something that I haven't mentioned yet because I wasn't certain it would have taken off was the fact that I opened a game development studio with friends from my hometown, I spend the beggining of 2018 and until now working on our own IP and creating a title for us to sell and publish.

The studio is called PrimeCut (https://primecut.games/) and we are working on a game which we named Zealot (https://primecut.games/zealot). So far the game has been highly regarded within the social media, even gathering the attention of a couple publishers.

This is the cover art, done by Vasco Mariano, our inhouse animator and concept artist.

Currently the Demo for the game is still under development with release in a near future, we're working out the kinks and polishing it so we have the cleanest product possible to show everyone, and if you want to know more indepth about it, click on the links and check out our devlogs.

This, my friends, is the main culprit that I have been slightly delayed during the FMP. As you know, running a studio and working on a game are two extremely time consuming things, being a team of four talented folks we were still very understaffed and it ate a lot of my schedule, but we are very happy with the result and we're excited to show it to the world.

On top of that I'll be (hopefully) graduating in a couple of months!

Anyway, heres a run through of what I did, if you need anymore information about anything, just contact me in any media, I'll be happy to chat!

Sam Out.

Hello everyone, hope you all had a wonderful Easter! 

This is the final brief I've been working on, its been really fun as I don't usually explore stylized characters, this one was based of a character done sketch done by Neon Yang (https://www.artstation.com/neon_yang).

Saddly there isn't much to say about this one, sculpting was pretty straight forward as was retopping, etc.

The only thing worth mentioning is me trying Marvelous for the first time, I must admit it wasn't and still isn't that easy, I have a long way to go. I managed to make the coat in the program but unfortunately I have to learn how to pas it from being a cool looking jacket in marvelous to a game character.

I will be exploring it more in-depth during summer for sure, it is a very useful tool and I highly recommend trying it out.

Here are some screencaps of how it turned out, its nothing to boast about, but eventually I'll make a version of this to blow everyone's top off.  

Hello everyone, long time no see.

For this post I'll be making a full run-through of my dog character since I haven't had the time to activelly work on writting the blog, I have a very fun project that will be soon be released on kickstarter and I will be posting about it very very soon as long as updates on my fmp brief that's left.

Returning to the matters at hands, as you can tell this character its different... because it's not a character, its a creature! HAZZAH! After some interesting feedbacks I received I was aware that we could actually include creatures in the FMP and I esthoic, live was good yadda yadda, finally a chance to do my creepy crawlies, except they couldnt be too crazy, so I ended up inspiring myself in something grounded, like a zombie dog, and conviniently Resident Evil 2: Remake had just come out and it was a source of great inspiration with those savage puppies running around jumping for your neck, but in order to be different I made sure to choose a different breed of dog as well as changing the design and making some original decisions.

And so it began, a jorney of studying canine anatomy before I could even start sculpting, making sure not to misinterprete anything as I went, as you can see in the image bellow I made sure to exagerate every muscle to get a feeling for the proportions and shape of the breed (Rottweiler).

After having finalized the very basic sketch I proceeded to make a base with some of the details that would be present in the final sculpt and fix the proportions while smoothing the muscles going for a more realistic mood.  

When that was done I added the final steps of the smoothing for the base as well as fixing the head anatomy, which was somewhat tricky to achieve, my method for working around an animal's head is layering it as you would in real life, starting with a very basic bone structure and adding the teeth and eyes, to which I will add levels of muscle and skin after, paying close attention to each individual bit, the challenge being that I need to make sure that each part makes sense and connects to each other properly, the hard part in the design I made was to make the destroyed tissue looked realistic enough and trying to get a reference without going "Oh no, poor doggie..." was surprisingly hard, but that's part of the job and it had to be done.

There are a number of good skinning and bone washing videos on youtube and you'd be surprised on the amount of reference they provide.  

The final step of the sculpt was to polish, ad some unique details and show where each texture would be placed, there were some bits and bobs that could have been better sculpted but since they would be covered by textures in the "game readying process" I decided to not pay too much attention to them, this step is still important as it can help showcase your work and sculpting skills.

 One of the things I made as a extra goal for this brief was to experiment with fibermesh and try to bake it onto the creature, if it is something that I've learned was that less is more, a high density fibermesh will look amazing when rendered but it is not optimal for baking as you're going to have a huge number of lighting errors and the overall look will be too noisy, but after fiddling with it I found a good safe amount and the results were interesting.

Here are some renders of the final sculpt.  

After the sculpt the rest of the process was pretty standard. In the picture bellow you can see the final result with the topology and the textures.  

Overall it was a really interesting project and a breath of fresh air since it's something I am passionate about and would like to work with in the industry, one step closer to my goals.

As always, if there are any questions about the process I am always happy to answer in the PMs.

Sam over and out.

Hello everyone, just a quick update on the character so far, the sculpt is finally done and ready to go into the whole tedious game ready process.

Eventually though, because Ulan will be in a brief hiatus for a while. I spent the weeks I had planned making sure the sculpt was as close as possible as I could make him and I am entering my second project now, but he will be finished, I promise.

For now, enjoy some renders I did.

Main Pauldron  

Face Close-Up  

Ulan from different angles

I made sure to sculpt every button separately to make it cleaner and maybe I'll keep them like that during the retops, I believe it will help keep him looking sharp and dandy.

For now, I am currently missing the weapon and shield, they are a bit on the low priority list, but will be done before the hand-in (hopefully).

I also experimented a new way of doing fur using the Snake Hook Brush and the Clay Build Brush, I am happy with the results, I pretty much did the same for the hair as well.

If anyone has any question of how I did anything just message me and I'll be happy to explain.

Until the next time,
Sam over and out.
  

The FMP season has started on full steam, the proposals have been sent and mostly approved, finally this is the beginning of the end.
As a first project, I chose a concept done by the wonderful Naranbataar Ganbold, who very kindly gave me permission to use his artwork as a base.

I started the project by preparing the anatomy, making sure I could get it as close to a mix between a realism and slight stylization of the forms and shapes, in the picture below you can see a quick WIP of the character as I am currently working on the final sculpt that'll be shown (hopefully) very soon.

The sculpt tends to be the part of the project that I enjoy the most and, although there are still some parts I am not happy with, there is much more to boast about (imo). It was the first time that I used Zmodeler for example, and I am happy with the result so far, there are some armor pieces that I need to rework on, but the more I work towards "perfection" the more delayed I get on my schedule.

Zmodeler is an amazing tool and I suggest it deeply to anyone that is as stubborn as I am about using other modeling software to go and learn it out, it helped me immensely to block out all of the armor and cloth pieces in the character, it's simple and easy to use.

The next step of the project (after finishing the sculpt will be to lay out the alpha cards around the hair and fur area of the character, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

There is a lot of tweaking to do still and time is of the essence.

Sam Over and Out.

PS: Please check Naranbaatar's work if you haven't already, he is a great artist. (https://www.artstation.com/naranbaatars)

Christmas has ended and with it we enter a new era of third year, we finally enter the long awaited phase of final major projecting, but before lets do a quick recap of what happened during christmas.

As I said on the previous blog regarding one of my projects called Yugen, I couldn't finish it in the time we were given because I got lost within zbrush techniques and tried way too many things without directions. After a talk with my personal tutor I have managed to boost the quality quite significantly, but the work was not done, there was a lot to do still and I had to stop the project to move into other projects.

Well, I'm happy to say that the project is finally done to completion! and now I can bask in the glory of having something to show for it.

The workflow was very standard, after I finished the sculpt I retoped it and textured it using 3dcoat and substance painter. There weren't many issues but I learned a lot about generators and how to make your textures more interesting, which were two things I was lacking big time.

The sculpt Improve in many aspects as well, I finished all the details and changed many of the folds of the kimono, if not all of them.

Now, for the FMP I chose three characters that are pending aproval from my tutors, but will be spoken about in the going of this week.

My main goal for them is to use them to show that my sculpting skills regarding human proportions and semi-realistic style, as well as pushing my knowledge on detailed carvings and hard-surface a bit further and learning how to use xgen to create hair textures and all that jazz. 

I am really excited to start this new jorney and I cannot wait to see what I can achieve! I'll be reporting back with news very soon, most likely by the end of this week.

Sam over and out.

PS: Oh, and here are some details from my creature sculpt, hope you enjoy it.
  

Face Right Side Close-up

Face Left Side Close-up

Spine Close-up

Pregnant Belly Close-up

Mouth Close-up

Hello once again!

It's that time of the month where I try to catch up with all I've done for my previous brief, this is pretty straight forward since I focused mainly on sculpting so there won't be a lot to talk about, but hopefully the pictures say a thousand words.

This time I tried to be slightly more ambicious and implement everything I've learned so far and go all out on my itch to make a huge monstrosity. I began but roughing out a sketch that would have all the main ideas that I could start sculpting from.

I have been binge listening and reading to stories from the Lovecraft mythos and got really inspired by it, my mind was hitched by the unimaginable horrors that surround arkham and its people, but one enthety had been stuck in my mind the most, the enthety known by The Dark Goat of the Woods, Mother of a Thousand Youngs, Shub-Niggurath.

Shub-Niggurath is known for birthing dark spawns through her many mouths and either eating them or using them to fulfil her errands, I decided to make a 3D interpretation of what could come out of one of her mouths.

Sam over and out.

This post is overdue but better late than never.

It has been a really busy last three weeks, and it is safe to say that this projects had many ups and a whole lot of downs. The weeks were well structured and I followed the plan as closely as possible, but during the final stretch of it, there were some technical difficulties that hindered the speed of its completion.

The second week was focused on creating the retopology and unwrapping the character. it was a quite straightforward workflow and I didn't find anything hard in particular, the result was clean and functional as you'll be able to see in the marmoset player at the end of this post. Although it is far from perfect, I have learned a lot and many of the problems I encountered had to do with issues on the high-polies.

After completing the unwrap, my next step and what would be related to my third week of the plan that was to create materials in substance designer, something I wasn't too familiar with so I made sure to take enough time to learn and get acquainted it. I ended up creating five different textures which I am happy with overall, with the exception of one, the sugar material.

The sugar material was the first one I decided to tackle, the idea was to simulate a sugar cube, the biggest issue I had with it was trying to replicate the feel of shiny sugar grains along the shape and give a sparkly look to the character's main body as long as helping understand the hardness of it, eventually as I went with the project I decided to make a one-eighty and figured a different approach and used a different kind of material for the body.

The second material I decided to work on was a burnt crusty marshmallow so I could make some accents in the character and give the feeling of "burning rage" to him. This one was tricky, trying to get the flaky shape and the weird lumps and colors seemed like a big challenge, after some thought I remember a tutorial that made a material resembling intestines and studied it, the basics of Substance Designer started to seep into me and I understood what I had to do to get certain shapes and effects, I do have a long road to go still, but I like to think of this as a beginning of a fun relationship with the software.

After finishing the burnt marshmallow I needed to create an actual marshmallow, this one was quite easy compared to the burnt one, no tricky shapes, just needed to look at a marshmallow and try to mimic the feel of it, I think I nailed it, but like everything I do, I know that it will only get better with time.

The final two materials that I had left to work with went as the marshmallow, the fondant material (the purple one) was the simplest one, basically a color with a matte-ish material. The melted lollipop material was a little bit trickier as I had to work with opacities and glossiness and whatnot, the lollipop material ended up looking as good as I could make with the time I allocated to it, it might not be the best looking melted lollipop, but it is far from the worst.

After completing the materials, came the time to texture the character. I wasn't so happy with the design of it anymore and failed to see how it would relate to anger after a while, so I made sure that before I got into the workflow I would get some solid critique from the tutors. In doing so I realized after that, indeed, my design had some weird choices, as you can see below.

The mustache, although comical enough, had no purpose and the idea of melting sugar wasn't present except in some specific places, after a paint-over done by one of my tutors, I felt like the art juices got unclogged and I went back to the sculpting part and retweaked some parts, and I was a lot happier with the result.

Here you can see the final result:

  As always, if my dear readers find anything interesting and would like to know more about anything, feel free to contact me.

I will be diving in my next project very soon and hopefully one I will have even more fun than this one, until then.

Sam over and out.

Sadly, the first deadline has ended and I haven't even got close to finishing the sculpt, there are some things I wish I knew how to do better before I started and would have helped to speed up the process a lot, but I learned as I go, and sometimes that is also an important part of being an artist, you learn from your mistakes, never be afraid to experiment new things. This was by far the most ambicious project I had in uni so far, but overall I am happy with the result I reached, and it will only get better from here (at least on can only hope).

Some of the biggest issues I had with it were related to the head details and the cloth (which I never fully sculpted before), they are the main part of the sculpt I'll be tackling again and basically re-sculpting from scratch, but, if you can remember from the last post, overall it is already a huge upgrade in design and look from it's original "sister", sadly redoing the head the first time took some extra hours from my planning and didn't allow me to finish the arm armor and remodel the leg pieces. 

As I start the new brief I have to leave this one on stand by for a while, although I am very eager to get back to it in a very near future and see what I can come up with. Plus, when I return to this project, I will have learned even more and be able to improve it by the tenfold. But until then this will be the last time we'll see Yugen.

See you, Space Geisha.
Sam over and out.