To keep my pipeline skills fresh, I've been working on a full project, building Lara Croft in my preferred style. I plan to create a fully working next gen game asset, aiming at about 14k polys and a 2048x2048 texture.

Part of the Pixologic Action Hero contest. Narrowly missing out on the top 10, mostly due to my inability to use the youtube uploader properly, I think. It was, nonetheless, chosen to be shown at the Gnomon Gallery in Hollywood. Not too shabby, I guess. :O). You can just click through all the images and have a peek. But if you want an insight into my process on this project, simply work your way through.

Here we find a collection of works, many unfinished, that have taken more than 8 hours to get to this stage.

One of my more useful skills is the ability to work and visualise ideas quickly. ZBrush has really enabled me to do this. Initially, I was always more at home sketching on a sketch pad. When I came onto 3D design it was a much more laborious process. There was no fludity to speak of Nowadays however, Zbrush has changed all that. The line between 3D and 2D design has blurred and I am once again able to get my ideas down fast. What we have here is a selection of sculpts that took less than a day to produce.

The 3rd Dominance War rolled through the CG community, and I decided to take part, determined to see a large-scale competition through to the end. Sadly, I lost most of the entire last week out of 6 due to my baby daughter contracting the Norovirus. Poor, sweet soul. It was a 6 day marathon of misery. By the time she was better I had about a day and a half to wrap things up. You can see where things were rushed and where they had the attention they merited. No alpha on the robes. Poor texturing on the ghost's clothing. The back of the chair looks very flat. The list goes on. Despite all that it's still pretty cool IMO. And it was definitely good practice.

Garnering in excess of 220k hits between them, Eva and Olivia were my girly projects back when I was trying to master poly modelling. My rationale at that time (2006-ish) was that it was far harder to create beauty with personality than anything else. Initially I was aiming for a toon-realism hybrid, but as I devloped my own toon-shader in max, I optend for a more Toon-PinUp style instead. The Eva Wild character was reauthored for a DVD tutorials series over at 3D. Below you can see some of the anatomical diagrams I created for this.

The Junkyard: a good place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there... All roads lead away from the junkyard. This is where old work goes to die. It's good to keep the old wrecks to see how far you've come.