Bacchus - SMITE New Character

This was my first New Character for SMITE -- Bacchus, The Roman God Of Wine, Lewd Behavior and Maddness. Since he was a new god and not a Skin, I was able to fully Rigg this guy from scratch with all the bones and weighting 100% done by me, it was nice to finally get to Rigg something. With the complete Rigg, this was done roughly in about 7-8 working days as it took some time understanding how Biped works inside of Max and how to create Helpers for all the Secondary Custom Bones.

All Property Owned By Hi-Rez Studios.

For the characters being brought into the Unreal Engine 3, which SMITE uses, the bone count limit that a character can have with Weights Affecting it is 75. With Bacchus he still had some bones left over, so I was able to add some controls to his face besides just the general eyeBlink and Jaw to give him more emotions that the Animators could control to portray his drunkenness and lewd behavior.

All Property Owned By Hi-Rez Studios.

Another thing which I did for this character was to create a Physics Asset Set using the Unreal Editor's PhAT. Essentially what is being done here is taking a character which is rigged and weight painted and making bounding boxes for the major bones for the collision for when the character becomes a Ragdoll inside the game. Also you have to go through all those bounding boxes for the bones and set constraints so you can define what the degree of motions each bone can have to further help the Ragdoll aspect work correctly. It was my first one I did, took me a few hours to figure it out but wasn't too bad to learn and man was it exceptionally fun!

If anyone wants more on what PhAT is and how it works, you can check out the following link for more details: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/PhATUserGuide.html

All Property Owned By Hi-Rez Studios.

For those who may not know, SMITE the game, which is a MOBA - Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (Stuff like League of Legends etc.) is being worked on at Hi-Rez Studios. SMITE depicts a Battle Arena between Gods of different pantheons such as Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Hindu etc. It's currently in closed beta atm but can be signed up for at www.smitegame.com to get into the Beta.

As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Sobek - Pirate Sobek "High Seas" SMITE Skin

This is another character which I worked on for the game SMITE which is a skin for the the Egyption God Sobek. The skin is called "High Seas" and represents what Sobek would look like as a pirate. Just like the Artemis Skin, the base rigg for this character was already setup and I pretty much just weight painted the new model. This was my second piece that I worked on and it took about roughly about 5 workings day to get it weighted and tweaked.

All Property Owned By Hi-Rez Studios.

One thing which was custom about this rigg was that it included a parrot model which needed it's own rigg which was done entirely by me and weight painted as well. It was nice to finally get to rigg something from scratch and being able to practice weight painting wings on a bird (even though this model was pretty simple). This was all done in the course of 2 working days, from rigg to weight painting.

All Property Owned By Hi-Rez Studios.

For those who may not know, SMITE the game, which is a MOBA - Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (Stuff like League of Legends etc.) is being worked on at Hi-Rez Studios. SMITE depicts a Battle Arena between Gods of different pantheons such as Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Hindu etc. It's currently in closed beta atm but can be signed up for at www.smitegame.com to get into the Beta.

As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Artemis - Cowgirl "Wrangler" SMITE Skin

For those who may not know, I've been interning at Hi-Rez studio for the past month or so, it's been a great experience with all that I have learned so far. For my time there so far, I've been mostly weight painting Skins for character which were already rigged and just required weights for the new models without any or minor changes to the original bone riggs. It's been a good learning experience since the studio pretty much uses Max instead of Maya, I guess the main thing I learned was how much I actually didn't know about how to paint weights on a character properly.

This character was the first full character which I worked in Max with Weight Painting, from Foot to Head completely was weight painted by me, again just weight painted as the rigg was already setup. It's a skin for a character called Artemis, the Greek Goddess, for a game called SMITE with the skin being called "Wrangler" which is basically a Cowgirl Skin. Since this was my first full real piece in Max, it took me some time get it all done and polished with the weights. I think my final time spent on it was like 2 weeks or like 10 working days. I was able to post it once I got permission to since the skin went live in the game about 1-2 weeks ago.

All Property Owned By Hi-Rez Studios.

For those who may not know, SMITE the game, which is a MOBA - Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (Stuff like League of Legends etc.) is being worked on at Hi-Rez Studios. SMITE depicts a Battle Arena between Gods of different pantheons such as Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Hindu etc. It's currently in closed beta atm but can be signed up for at www.smitegame.com to get into the Beta.

As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Planet Hulk Facial Rigg WIP #1

I know it's been awhile since I posted something since I graduated in December, I've just been doing tutorials and stuff mostly concentrating on doing Facial Rigging as I needed practice with doing Blend Shapes.

The following model was provided by Jonathan Thomas who modeled, textured and retopoed the character based on the Planet Hulk incarnation of the Hulk from Marvel Comics. For this WIP, i wanted to show how the Blend Shapes for the eyes work and created a simple GUI and connected em to show how they can be easily accessed. I also created a control to move the Jaw around just so you could see how the eyes could look with the character's mouth open. The reason I did the eyes first was to get an idea of how Blend Shapes work and setup them to be controlled by a GUI Interface and since they are less of them for the eyes then the mouth, I figured it would be a good place to start.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Senior Project 2 / Pre-Portfolio Review

I decided to put this up, this was my first draft of the Reel which I had used for my Senior Project 2 / Pre-Portfolio Review. It's just a longer 3min reel which is mostly just a compilation of the posts i've posted before, but just shows the riggs more indepth then my main reel will.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Alien Dog Rigg v1.0

Man this was a tough one, my first attempt at a Quadruped Rigg. This was modeled by a good friend of mine Jonathan Thomas, and it was his first quadruped as well so we were both in a similar boat. I did learn a lot from this and am happy how it turned out, but I have to go fix a few things, like weight paint issue with the front legs.

As for the face, I wanted to try something different. While it does have my usual style of face controllers, I wanted to try messing with some Dynamic type rigging and so decided to make the Tentacle things on his face, his Tongue and his Ears all dynamic using Dynamic Curve Hair System. Again some of the settings like hair stiffness needs tweaking, on the tongue and ears, but this was really fun to work and and get working.

Face Controls featuring Dynamic Curve Hair for Tentacles, Tongue and Ears for controlling creature's face.



Body Controls created for controlling creature's body.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Car and Firewalker Mech Riggs v1.0

Taking a break from Organic Characters, decided to Rigg a Car. I found the model of the car from Gfx-3d-Model which was a pretty solid model as it had shocks and axel and stuff modeled out.

It has basic Controls for controlling the opening / closing of the doors, the wipers with the shocks and steering controls and a base controller for driving the Car



Also one of my friends, Nick Jackson, had modeled this Firewalker Mech for Game Design. Its based on a Concept by Alexey "Karanak", and my friend wanted a simple Rigg on it just for posing purpose so I took some time to do a Basic Rigg for moving the Legs around and basic controls for the body and Turrets.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Viking Rigg v1.0

Another fat type character, the Viking! This was concepted, sculpted and retopoed by DJ Curtin. My main thing which I wanted to accomplish with this character was to get FK / IK Arm switching AND snapping working correctly. Setting up the basic switch isn't that hard, but what was the challenge which I'm GLAD I got working was the script to get FK Controls to snap to the IK control locations and vice versa.

I found an EXCELLENT IK/FK MEL based PDF on Tim Oberlander's blogspot, yes the awesome person who created the Basic Guy Rigg, on how to get started with the MEL code. So basically using that and ALOT of trial and error I got the MEL script working AND created a simple GUI window which switches AND snaps the IK or FK bones and controls to the other's location.

Face Controls created for controlling character's face.



Body Controls, including the MEL script GUI for IK/FK Switching and snapping, created for controlling character's body.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Robot Rigg v1.0

Finished this a week so ago but didn't get time to make a video so doing it now. This was more or less my 1st Rigg I did which was more Mechanical then Organic. The biggest hassle was figuring out...yup you guessed it, the MEL coding to get the treads to work properly. The actual turning of the treads is done using a Animation Wire Tool and where the MEL came in was controlling the movement of the treds when the droid was dragged in the Z-Axis Translation.

Other then that, only other major NEW thing I learned was how was the discovery to mib_color_ mix Mental Ray Utility, it basically lets you plug multiple File Textures into the utility which u can slide AND key between easily. I used this for the face textures to go between Happy, Sad, Angry and Neutral faces.



Quick Update with a video showing off the facial textures changing to showoff different Emotions.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Robot Char Hand Rigg WIP #1

Testing the opening / closing set driven key animations on the robot character's hand.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Revenant Rigg v1.0

Posting videos showing off the Revenant Rigg. This was my first real Rigg that I did more torwards a Gaming Engine. Again it was a model done by Brian Tsang based on the concept done by Scott Purdy.

Face Controls created for controlling character's face.



Body Controls created for controlling character's body.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Robot Turnaround Redo

So I decided to go back and add more details to this character. The torso has been changed the most and I redid the design for the core. I decided to incorporate design elements from more type of robots and cyborgs as well while still keeping the idea that the top be more elegant and the bottom be more machine engineered. Also asking a around, quite a few people suggested to make the robot like a new model instead of old and rusted, so I got away with the rusted textured look as well.

Also wanted to post this, I will be rigging his hands so they'll open up and reveal its hand turrets which are hidden inside.

Just screwing around with some HDR Image Based Lighting

As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Robot Char Tread Rigg WIP #2

2nd WIP of Tread Riggs, with help from a professor from a school and mostly just trial and error, figured out the MEL Expressions I needed to get working so the treads move properly with the controller.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Robot Char Tread Rigg WIP #1

Testing Rigging Treads on my robot character.



Testing out some turning features for Rigg



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Revenant Rigg WIP #1

Rigging this model for one of my pieces for Senior Project 1. It was model by Brian Tsang based on the concept by Scott Purdy.

Bones set with skin bound and weight painted. I need to mess with the skin weight for the neck to make it deform better.



Bones set with skin bound and weight painted. Again, I need to tweak the weights around the top his leg around the Hip.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

McRanty Rigg v1.0

Basic Rig completed. I do plan to make an updated 2.0 in the near future and fix ANY issues once I learn more about rigging. But to be honest, this being my first FULL character rigg containing body and face, I was really intimidated by rigging when I first got into it, but after going through this, it wasn't too bad and I actually kinda enjoy rigging it :D

Oh, also I found a MUCH better program to capture maya with, I was originally use Fraps, but this new program lets me capture Maya's Interface as well, so you can see the simple Interface I created for the creature's face.

Face controls, including a simple GUI, for controlling the character's face.



Body Controls created for controlling character's body.



As always, comments and critiques welcomed.

McRanty Rigg WIP #1

Basic Bones set and Weight painted for character's face and bottom teeth parented to Jaw Bone. I might have to tweak some of the Weights for the bones for his Fin or w/e.



Basic Bones set and Weight painted for character's body. Basic IK applied to character's left leg. I probably have to tweak it's spine bones weights some, some of them are not deforming the body correctly.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

McRanty Turnaround WIP #2

I didn't like the textures and shaders of my original character so I redid them:

As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

All Things McRanty

This creature has long been in the making, I've used variations of him on and off, but I liked this version the best. This character will be modeled, textured and eventually rigged and animated.

And look, he has a tongue too :p

As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Indoor Materials Scene

Forgot to post this, this was for a Materials and Lighting class. We just had to take objects we had already made for other classes, put them in a room and using just MentalRay mia_material_x material give it different material properties.

As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

"Getting Blamed" WIP #1

A WIP Scene of someone getting blamed for something. The lips still require more working with the syncing.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Hot Air Balloon - Dynamics Test

This was done for a Special Effects dynamics class. We had to take a number of dynamics inside Maya and use them to create a scene so I decided to do a Hot Air Balloon. It includes nCloth for the balloon part with an nParticle emitter shooting particles into the balloon part causing it to rise up and when the mass of the particles reached a certain point to pull itself and the basket up which it was constrained too. For some extra dynamics, I added a quick hair to the grass fur system on the ground with a wind blowing into it. And for a final touch, I added a fire fluid dynamics where the emitter was located. Always appreciate any comments or concerns.



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Yoda

I'm a huge Star Wars Fan and always wanted to do this so did it as a side fun project. This was done with a  base mesh in Maya then exported into zbrush for sculpting detail.

I started messing with spotlight with zbrush 4 and started some basic texture work, AMAZING FEATURE!

As always, critiques and comments welcomed.

Darth Maul / Abe Sapien Head Bust

We had to make a bust of character for a class I'm taking at Art Institute of Atlanta. So I decided to do a mix between Darth Maul from Star Wars and Abe Sapien from Hellboy. I hope you guys like!



As always, critiques and comments welcomed.