As it’s my birthday I’ve taken a break from work and instead did some 3D for fun in the form of a Magog from Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda…
Pretty pleased with him for the most part, I think the fur could be better. The eyes are modified versions of the ones I’m working on for my dissertation, don’t look too bad either.
The Mechanical Modelling module required us to visit a museum and take reference photos of a vehicle . Using the gathered reference we had to design and model both a vehicle form that could transform into an alternative robot mode, in the ‘Transformers’ style with the final model being able to transform within Unreal Tournament 3.
I selected a WW1 British Tank or ‘Landship’, and had a trip to The Museum of Lincolnshire Life in Lincoln to take reference shots of one of the few surviving today.
Original Series Megatron
The ‘robot’ form is based in the Decepticon characters in the original animated series of Transformers, specifically the character ‘Megatron’. Additionally he is embellished with elements from WW1 artifacts and a ludicrous Kitchener-esc Mustache.
For this project we were asked to create a UDK environment made up of a small number of modular elements.
This project was to create a Unreal Tournament 3 character to be playable in-game. I chose to model the character Tyr Anasazi from Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda.
UDK environment based on the bridge of the original series of Star Trek. Animated and accurate down to the console layout.
The result of my first attempts at sculpting in Mudbox. As a Maya user I found it very intuitive, the controls are practically identical. Similarly, the hair was done with Joe Alter‘s “Shave & Haircut” as a play around. Certainly far better than any of Alias’s own hair/fur solutions. Quite easy to get to grips with and a fairly good system for controlling the hair follicles, if still a bit unwieldy at times.
This was a project for SE Controls, a specialist provider of smoke and natural ventilation solutions.
The brief was to produce a virtual residential block to serve as an example of how the company would approach fitting out a building with their products. Additionally their product range was rendered for a consistent aesthetic.
This imagery was used throughout the companies new promotional material, including catalogue, video and website.
A few years ago I worked with Falx Air, an aviation company based in Staffordshire, in the creation of presentation material for a pitch to investors.
We took rough designs for their array of hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft concepts such as medevacs, police, military and personal air transportation. My mental ray skills having improved since then, I decided to re-render some stuff.
An experiment in stylized interior architectural visualization.
The CGI in the new series of Battlestar Galactica is absolutely stunning… except for the Cylons! The new Cylons are extremely bland and completely lack what made the originals so awesome. Naturally I had to have a go myself
One unique element to this piece was working out a way of rendering the bright lens flares glimmering off their chrome armor. I needed a solution other than Photoshop fakery as this was originally an animated sequence and therefore would require a more procedural solution. I achieved the effect not through the native Maya solution of camera lens’ but through a modified specular render pass.
