World's first cinematic-ready Millhouse Manastorm and more

Millhouse Manastorm

The iconic gnome mage from the Blizzard universe as seen on the Hearthstone card (image above).

I chose this character primarily to practice making hair and clothing and incorporating these elements in an animation workflow with simulation. It turned out to be a really fun and rewarding project with lots of challenges along the way.

I believe this is the only recreation of Millhouse Manstorm in 3D outside the game.

I created this character and all its components from scratch. I began sculpting in zbrush before moving on retopology in Maya. I laid out UVs over 6 tiles and moved on to high fidelity sculpting  before baking a displacement map. I made a full custom body- and face rig. I created the clothes in Marvelous Designer and retopologized those as well. I textured everything using Substance painter and Photoshop. I created all hair using Xgen. I created the ice- and arcane effects as well as the background in Maya (fire in post from image source) and rendered in Arnold. Final touches in Nuke.  

I made this animation to practice face- rigging and animation.

The scene is inspired (and narrated) from the event where Millhouse was first encountered in World of Warcraft. I hope to one day perfect this scene with proper hair simulation and render it using PBR.

I'm currently practicing hair simulation and the ambition for this project is to animate Millhouse casting spells to practice incorporating real particle and fluid effects. My ultimate goal is to make this piece look like it belongs in a real Blizzard cinematic.

Skeleton Guardian

I made this "skeleton guardian" a while back to practice hard surface- sculpting and modeling. I started out with the Ryan Kinglien skeleton that ships with Zbrush and refined it to fit my vision. I then designed and modeled the armor and axe.

Inspired by the game cinematic for Diablo 4; I wanted to go for a more realistic art style for this project. Once done with the shoulders and boots I made these turntables below (also see wireframe in video).

Both pieces are modeled in Maya, textured in substance painter and rendered in Arnold. Boot straps (and velvet for comp) is made with Marvelous designer, and the runes are made with a font I found online. 

Once finished, this skeleton guardian will be rigged and duplicated to be included in an underworld throne room scene I'm currently working on

Succubus

This was the second character model I made in 3D, halfway through my education. I created this model from scratch and I learned a lot of great modeling techniques during this project, especially making the wings.  I'm excited to revisit this project and I have made some sketches for her armor and high fidelity sculpted details.  She is going into the underworld throne room I mentioned on the previous project.

Algorithmic Design in Houdini

As part of a special Houdini workshop, I recently started this project to learn algorithmic modeling and animation in Houdini using VEX coding. I created everything procedurally using the attribute wrangler node wherever I could. 

I'm planning to make the soil and and all leaves dynamic for practice and for a more realistic result. All yellow will be emissive and emissive butterflies will fly off as the bulb lights up in the end. I'm currently practicing custom attribute driven shading in Houdini using the Mantra render. 

Gravity racer

I recently made this gravity racer, or soapbox. For this project I created a custom node in Houdini that transforms black and white 2D images into inaccurately cut pieces of wood. I was able to reuse this node for every piece of wood which saved time, allowed for procedural modeling and helped achieve an overall continuity. I created the tyre pattern in substance designer and baked this as a displacement map. I sculpted the pillow in Zbrush, simulated the rope in Marvelous designer and rendered with Arnold.

Creature in the woods

I started working on this character two years ago and it is the first complete character I made in 3D. I wanted to make a character inspired by the creature Gollum. It actually ended up looking more like Gollum than I originally indented. I made everything from scratch starting with box modeling in Maya. However, the texture for the ground in this final render I found online (Poliigon).

Underworld Brazier

This was the second hard surface model I made, designed by me and created for the underworld throne room mentioned earlier. The creature carrying the brazier is an edited version of the creature from the previous project, reposed using transpose master in brush. The coal inside (see Marmorset Viewer) is simulated using a MASH-network in Maya.

I also created this second version of the same brazier, only instead of the stone statue carrying it, there're four legs holding it up.

Underworld Beacon

To accompany the braziers in the underworld throne room I also designed and modeled this lesser beacon. These will carry flames and work as a secondary light source in my scene.