The island

This will be my next task - to try and bring this place to life. I need to get some more variety into the ground and maybe a trodden path running down the middle - but havent quite figured out the best way to achieve this in Unity (gonna have to ask some devs). 

It's all gone a bit Mental Ray!

In an attempt to bring all the characters Ive made recently together in one composition, I thought I'd create a kitsch holiday souvenir from the land of Eternal Springs. I got a little carried away, but Ive learnt a lot in the process (or at least become aware of more known unknowns :) )

Its the first time that I'v rendered using mental ray. When building for games I wont need this, but I thought it would be a good chance to play with some nice shadows.  That said, I have found it a lot harder than expected to get the lighting as I'd have liked (the shadows have come out a lot darker than I would like).

Ill put this one to bed now and concentrate on something in Unity next (as well as creating another character for the game (a fisherman).

Bearsuit Bob

Managed to get a lot of the detail incorporated into the texture so managed to get the tri-count in the 700's.

744tris in total. Could probably have gotten it down further around the neck area, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Please let me know if there any glaring mistakes. That issue by the armpit is one Im coming across a fair bit, where the quad is twisted. You dont notice anything once textured & I suppose this would be fixed in triangulation - but would be nice to know of other solutions.

Sneaky Postbox

Got round to animating the postbox. My first foray into animating bones (albeit not at all by the books :)  )

Accessorise

Added some accessories.

The Tourist

The 2nd character for Jons game. The tourist. I had lots of fun UVing this one (NOT). The stripes proved quite tricky to get straight and I totally gave up with tripes on the shorts (I wanted them to be a tartan originally). As usual I could muck around for ever with the texturing - but I've another 3 characters to do - so onto the next one!

Joe's got some colour

Finished the texturing (still need to give him some fingers and smooth off a few edges).  Did a quick rigging test in Mixamo.com to see how he'd animate, initial tests seem to look quite good. Just a little crumpling beneath his arms when walking. Rigging and animating him myself will be a different matter altogether though! (one for a later date perhaps)

Joe Normal

Here's a character Im working on for @thecodermonkey 's game idea (any name suggestions?). Modelling was fairly quick and stress free, the UV'ing was the usual time consuming pain in the butt, but its done now. Next the fun task of texturing him. Im not even thinking about the rigging yet, needless to say that I will probably have to come back and revisit all that Ive done in order to get him moving properly :)

unlit - lit - unlit - lit?!?!

Having trouble deciding whether or not to render with lights and shadows or just leave it unlit. Shadows undoubtedly make things look cool and more realistic - but Im not sure...  one things for sure, It would have to be unlit if it was to be used in unity.

All Ship Shape

Think Im going to have to draw a line under the ship soon. Its a lot more detailed than any of the models Ive made previously and it's proving a lot more time consuming to texture. I'll come back to it later once I've looked at the bottle Im sure.

Well that's the boat taken care of. Still need to do the sails and rigging mind you, and I can see those being raaaather tricky!  Might bash it up a bit still though and make it a bit more rickety.

Ship in a bottle

This is what I'm currently tackling (well a very rough sketch of it anyway) Dont ask me why I chose a ship in a bottle, I think perhaps Im subconsciously recreating the kit models I made as a kid :)

Ill be posting the 1st pass of the ship soon...

and we're off!

ok, that ends the retrospective of my 3D work. From now on Ill be posting as I go - Please stay tuned!

postbox

Well the obvious progression of my journey into the Z, is to place my daughter in a postbox :)

Actually it started by me having a couple of hours to spare and modelling the postbox as a little modelling practice. The addition of the legs is basically a way of getting me started with some rigging. My plan is to have her lift the postbox and then slowly side step off the screen. I'll post the results when finished (It may take some time!)

The little princess

Call me cheesy, but I've modelled my daughter :) Simplifying my models is proving quite a nice, almost zen like task.

The puddles reflection is actually a little trick that somebody showed me in Unity. It's actually a duplicate of the model flipped and placed beneath. I think getting an effective light reflection would have taken me a LOT longer.

Keyop

Thought I'd have a stab at modelling Keyop (based loosely on this figure bit.ly/PjiVli) I wasn't overly happy with the outcome - not sure the cell shaded look suits him that much (although I havent really spend much time finished him off).

King & Queen

Eventually I bit the bullet and tackled a character. I started with the king (or my new 3d land) , my original intention was to have his crown and hair covering his entire head so that I could avoid worrying about his face. As it turned out, the style and resolution of the character meant I didn't have to fuss to much over his facial features.

After finishing the queen I added more shading to the king and attempted to optimise his texture map.

Well

After the castle, I thought I'd have a quick try at a piece of scenery dressing. I think this probably took me the best part of a day to do including UVs and texturing.

Castle

My first piece of 3D! I made this with the intention of putting it into Unity and being able to walk around it (I was probably reminiscing back to the halcyon days of 3D construction kit and Castle Master) It's quite crudely constructed with not much consideration to the tri count.

I did get it into Unity, and a kind developer coded me up a character to walk around it. It quickly became apparent that designing buildings and landscapes for a first person was going to be a very interesting proposition. Relative scale, angles and distance wasn't something that I hadn't initially worried about.