Student Portfolio 2023-Present

Leviathan

My mentorship project- made with the help of my mentor Alex Sizov and concept art done by Nick Bray.  This project really pushed me to take a full character from start to finish with hair cards included over a 16 week period.  Started in Zbrush with some help from Marvelous Designer.  High polys were brought into Maya for retopo and UVs then textured in Substance Painter.  All rendering was done in Unreal Engine.

Background created using Quixel bridge assets and unreal scene created from the metahumans 5.2 project in order to use the eye material they have as well as the hair card material from metahumans 4.0.

                                                                                       Clay

Hair card renders- the first time I have tried to make a full hair system for a character and it may have made me lose a few of my own.  Would never have been able to without my mentor Alex.

Some of the marvelous creations for this project.  Mostly using a workflow of Zbrush/ Maya for base mesh to bring into marvelous.  With Maya its possible to create clean shapes and use the UVs to make the patterns upon which the cloth will be placed.  This is important because I am freezing and cloning on top to get the fabric to look how I need while still maintaining the proper shapes and with clever UV cutting I can get a great start.  I do not feel some of these designs would have been possible for me without this workflow.  After designer all of these were worked on in Zbrush to add extra details and fix any problems.

Wanted something cool with the glasses so I made a little material mask option to use a gradient to color the glasses based on viewing angle.  Its not perfect but I like how it turned out.

                                                                             Lighting Setups

Concept art by Nick Bray.  Was a no brainer to do this character as it was the most interesting concept I had seen in a long time and thinking of turning it 3d really got me thinking.  As a bonus the creator Nick Bray liked my project (in particular the face sculpt) and I cant think of a better compliment, especially after spending so much of my life recently studying his work! 

                                                                                    Textures

Spent a lot of time sculpting the hands from scratch.

                                                                                   Zbrush Sculpt

                        Mindflayer

Another scene I created in Unreal using mostly Quixel free assets. For this project I had significantly less time to work on it and so was happy to get a full character done.

This character was my first attempt at making a more game ready character and so I spent extra time to make his jacket removable instead of hiding things underneath it.

Entire character is under 70k triangles with 3 UV sets.  Tried my best to make sure the topology was animatable.

Clay render and my render passes for the face.

Octohog

This was a quick project I took up to renew an assignment I had created in my intermediate semester where I sculpted a creature bust over 3 weeks.  My intention was simply to take the Zbrush sculpt and get into unreal engine to render it. In order to do this I needed to retopo +UV the mesh and then bake and texture the model before bringing it into unreal.  I figured if i was going through all these steps why not try out UDIMs as I knew painter marmoset and unreal were all capable of it!

I was able to get this octohog from zbrush file to unreal in 6 days.

Original Zbrush renders

Original concept by Taran Fiddler with some draw overs I did to better understand the anatomy.  Also some early block ins of the muscles as I figured they would exist.  No concept of the back so had to just do it best I could.

The process I went through to get UDIMs to work with a pipeline of Maya -> Marmoset -> Substance -> Unreal.

                Empire Greatsword

The first big project I had at Think Tank Online this time around with David Tyler Young as my instructor.  I say this time around because I had tried my hand at 3d school once before 3 or 4 years ago but only made it 2 semesters before I threw in the towel.  Covid lockdowns had come and life happened,  I also knew that my skills were not what I wanted and decided I would work and study before committing to school again. So that is what I did and was proud of this as evidence that this time around I was more prepared.

For this project I was also under a shorter time limit of 4 weeks.  I was glad to take this project from Dynamesh -> character in that time frame with a full character.  All rendering was done using Marmoset at this time.

Warhammer is always a source of inspiration to me.  So many styles and levels of detail, the fantasy era are a bit more toned down so I added some extra skulls on the sabatons. 

Original reference

Lighting

143k Triangle character. Looking back on it I feel that my skills have come a long way, hopefully that reflects in the projects as well!

Thank you for having a look at the work I have done this year at Think Tank Online!