A passion for CG - 2022 progress

Metropolis 

This is a more recent composition, I wanted to create a scene that relies less heavily on details such as textures and focuses more heavily on the colors and composition of a scene, and as a result, this scene was the result of that methodology.

Sleeping dragon 

I created this scene to further develop my sculpting skills in hopes of one day becoming sufficiently proficient enough to create larger scenes entirely based on work done through sculpting.

Ornithopter Fanart

I wanted to create this to get an understanding of the effort that Dune VFX artists went through to make a movie of that caliber, it turned out to be a good test of my hard surface modeling and rigging skills and it gave me a new level of appreciation for professional VFX artists 

Early ventures into CG and game development

As a child, I loved being able to think of any concept and with enough dedication, I could bring that idea to fruition, I was introduced to software such as Autodesk Maya and Unity around the age of 8, and I fell immediately in love with this software combination and the creative freedom it allowed me, and ever since this concept of work without limitation has kept me improving and gave me motivated to produce more.

Hiro the game development itch

Hiro is a game I've been developing on and off for a couple of years, as game development has always been of great interest to me having a project I can work on alongside my CG/VFX development allowed me to satisfy my game development itch. Hiro itself is a simple third-person sword game involving concepts and ideas from the brilliant artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi where you fight through monsters and scenes based on woodcuts and prints produced by Kuniyoshi.

The game mainly focuses on the visuals and environment of the scenes and uses gameplay to tie the scenes together more seamlessly, I took a lot of inspiration from filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa in reference to the cinematography of the game, taking principles such as never leaving a scene without some kind of motion and life which intern helped with the atmosphere of the game.

Commissioned work

Towards the end of 2020, I was contacted by a band looking for small animations for their promotional media, they asked for a combination of SciFi Bladerunner cities and African art and to take inspiration from Senegalese taxis, to produce a loop that would fit their music, I took this as an interesting challenge and this was the loop I created for them. 

After the positive feedback I received from this loop, I was asked to make a full-length music video for their song Xaalis Amuul, looking back I had nearly no experience developing a video of this length and within the limited time I had, there were some big issues and room for improvement, but overall I'm still happy with the work I did for them.

Character work

After the music video, I returned to simpler work by creating fully rigged characters for an indie game, these characters helped me improve my rigging and character design ability and challenged me to think with regard to hardware limitations and performance optimizations as the game was targeted towards lower-end hardware.

Star-Wars fanart

In early 2019 I switched from my normal workflow with Autodesk Maya and the Autodesk family to software such as Blender and Substance-Painter, at first this transition was scary to me and I only started to see the benefits of using this software when I returned to something familiar to me, and in this case it was Star-Wars.

Japanese prints 

Very quickly I started to experiment with the boundaries of Blender by trying to create work along the lines of Japanese prints by Hokusai, again looking back this was me getting too ambitious too quickly as the work did not stand up to the brilliant art of Japanese artists such as Hokusai and Kuniyoshi, although the curiosity to push the boundaries of this medium has still stayed with me since.

Conclusion

I'm very happy to look back at my progress from the young age of 7-8, and even happier with my motivation to continue improving as a CG artist, and hopefully, this submission although only showing a limited amount of my work gives a good reference for my passion for VFX/CG art.  I'm very excited to see where my progress as a CG artist leads me.