Shockwave/Lady Loki

Decepticon Shockwave

Animation

Animation of Shockwave transforming to his Alt mode, a Cybertronian tank, which was based on the toy by Hasbro. I cut out some audios from the movies and mashed them up to make the transformation more believable. Animating him transforming was just an idea I had in school but I only have limited time. Only months later I decided to go ahead with the idea just for the fun of it. After all, I do like seeing my models come to life.

My attempt at replicating a pose from the movie. Not perfect but its close enough xD

Chose this as the main pose which was inspired by the official concept art by Josh Nizzi.

Viewport Shading

AOVs & Wireframe

Behind the scenes

Reference hunting

Blocking

I made the blocking based on a game model of Shockwave I found on Sketchfab to get a roughly accurate proportion as a start. From the blocking, I modeled the the intricate parts without care for topology just to get the look as accurate as possible. Only then I will quad-draw on top of those parts. Of course, not all parts require to be quad-drawn.

Begining Stages

The thruster parts on the back of the body as seen above are mostly reused for the shoulder joints. As a matter of fact, most of the parts inside are kitbashed parts from the head and body, some modified to avoid too much duplication. The arm and leg joints are also reused and modified. This allows me to allocate more time for UV unwrapping and texturing.

Texturing

I combined various smart materials to make one for the base texture which will be applied to the respective body parts. I even made a smart material for oil sludges for the joints and areas that will likely have some oil buildup. This helps speed up the process of having the base texture and am left with adding some storytelling.

HDRI Lighting

I used HDRI lighting and a few other lights for the scene. I adjusted the lighting for each different pose to highlight areas that may be dark if I were to use the same lighting.

Rigging

I made a simple rig by grouping Nurbs curves into the respective parts just for easy posing. Honestly not the best rig for animation. I plan to learn more complex rigging in the future. I find that it's a good skill to acquire. Yes, it may be tedious but it can be fun too.

Processes

Blocking->Mid Res->High Res. I gave him his G1 colors here in the earlier stages just to see what the Bayverse Shockwave would look like with his original colors and also as a tribute to the original 1984 cartoon.

Lady Loki

Lookdev project that was done in Term 2 & 3(8 months) during my Diploma course at 3dsense Media School.

AOVs & Wireframe

Progress Video

Here's the progress vid of all changes from start to finish.

Behind the scenes

Pose Reference & Concept

This was the original pose that was planned and executed. The idea for this was that she was on a conquest to conquer Asgard. The head was meant to be Thor's decapitated head but was also scrapped as it might be too gruesome for others to view. In the end, the final pose was her sitting on the throne, victorious, alongside her child, Jörmungandr. Her holding the spear, Gungnir, signifies Odin's defeat and the claiming of the throne.

Progression

ZWrap

The head, hands, and feet were ZWrapped using a scanned model on top of the base model that I've sculpted to achieve all the tertiary detail.

X-Gen

Hair, eyebrows, and fur were made using Xgen. This was quite a challenge but a fun learning process as it's my first time using this. Modifiers such as clump and noise including some codes were used to make the hair more natural.

Texturing

I created 3 base smart material for this project. Gold, Leather and the green paint. I then add storytelling on top of those layers. For the skin, I used multiple layers to achieve a realistic and natural looking skin as shown below.

HDRI Lighting

Hdri and a few other lights were used. 2 of which were aimed at the eyes and only reflected by the eyes using light-centric. This is for the highlights of the eyes.

Thank you!