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.
