Second Year Projects

PROJECT 01 - DIGI DOUBLE OF MY DAD

Hi! My name is Louis and I am a second year student at Herts interested in a summer internship to progress my skills and get some experience. Alongside my academic study I like to have some personal projects and online courses to work on so I decided to embark on making a digi-double of my father as a nice challenge. The process involved taking polarised and cross-polarised images of him from every angle possible to both inform my sculpting decisions and also to neutralise with a Macbeth chart and undistort to allow for projection in Mari when creating the albedo map. One thing that I would definitely do next time which was a bit of a regret for me was not taking an HDRI with my reference because it made it much harder to assess the accuracy of my forms when the light hitting it was coming from different angles to the reference. This is something I made sure to do on the next project (the Jordan shoe). A handy workaround for me was setting up a handful of different lighting setups in Houdini and then constantly adjusting the model, exporting it into Houdini and switching between them so I can get more accurate feedback than Zbrush's matcaps.

PROJECT 02 - JORDAN 1 SHOE

I got through this project from start to finish in about 2 weeks which was a really good opportunity to develop some speed as an artist. This was mostly due to all the things I learned in the digi-double project as well as doing a photogrammetry scan to help me align my cameras in Maya and build the model really fast. Once everything was blocked in I took the model into Zbrush to sculpt on top of it and give it more of a worn in leathery feel. Unfortunately due to the tight deadline of the project I didn’t have time to push the textures as far as I wanted to and it also would have been nice to add more creasing in the toe area as well as give the laces some more time and attention.