Gallery

This is some of my most recent work, mostly characters and stills for now. You can find older work, which features more hard surface modeling and visual effects in my old work gallery!

	This was my first realistic character, created in spring 2004. After doing celshaded characters for years, creating something realistic was a nice challenge. I am happy with the illustrative look I achieved.
	Early this year I storyboarded a short based on some images and emotions that had popped into my head during a snowy winter night. This is the main character for the short, right now I'm just calling her "Wintergirl". I got sidetracked a couple of times during her creation, first in figuring out clothFX for actual clothing (check out the Garage for other things I did with clothFX), which turned out to be quite frustrating. Then in getting a grip on skin shading. I spent a lot of time experimenting with different shading and lighting methods to get believable skin. I'm still not satisfied, but its quite solid and her pretty flexible in handling different lighting setups. I also simply learned a lot while reading up on the subject and experimenting, which is also never a bad thing. She is fully rigged, her face animatable (some facial expressions can be seen in image #3, she's also ready for lipsyncing) and the coat is using clothFX to follow her movement dynamically.
	I created this cabin for the short I mentioned above. It's Wintergirl's house and is intended to be one of the main sets of the short. Modeling, texturing and lighting was a lot of fun for this piece.
	I posted an early WIP of this character about a year ago, about the same time I did the Sinclair character. I never was happy with how smooth he looked though, despite heavy bumpmapping. Since I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with ZBrush, I figured this could be the perfect test of a possible LightWave - ZBrush - Lightwave workflow. I modified the mesh to have a more even polygon distribution in Lightwave, then sculpted and detailed the mesh in ZBrush and exported back into LW as a displacement map. The end result is now much more satisfying, it would've been very hard to achieve a similarly detailed result with just Lightwave alone.
	I haven't done much hard surface modeling lately. The cabin was a start, but I wanted to create a coplex solid object. As it happens, I own this pretty little digicam called IXUS II, by Canon. It sits here beside my desk most of the time and I like the design a lot, so why not give it a shot? It's deceptively simple looking, but the devil, as always, is in the details. The first mockup only took about an hour and probably would've been passable from a distance. I really wanted to get very close and personal though. So I spent a lot of time examining my camera and studying reference material, measuring every tiny detail etc. It took me a bit more than a weekend to actually build the detailed model. Then of course some more time to surface and render. It's a very accurate replica of my own IXUS II now though, except that it still is a bit too perfect. I need to make a "used" version with some fingerprints, scratches and stuff sometime. Every detail is modeled (even engraved fonts), there's not a single hard edge anywhere. The whole model still only weighs in at just over 65k polys, as I always try to model as effective and clean as possible. I like the overall look of the final renders, even though the flashlight and some parts of the surfacing could do with a bit more tweaking.
	This panda teddy was a speed model inspired by a challenge at the Spinquad forums. The challenge was to build a model or whole scene within the 400 vertices limit of the Lightwave Demo. Subdivision surfaces were allowed.