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UpsilonEexe — Primal Portrait WIP
Published: 2010-06-14 03:16:07 +0000 UTC; Views: 928; Favourites: 14; Downloads: 25
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Almost done.Related content
Comments: 19
Holy @$@$@# ! That is impressive!! the modeling, textures and hairs on him are GREAT....... tho my only critique would be the eyes, they are too small, it kinda throws the proportion out of the loop. but thats my only one..
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Thanks! A lot of people have mentioned that about the optics. When I go back and do the rest of his body I will tweak them a bit. I don't mind how it looks now but if enough people have mentioned the same thing it's worth looking into I suppose.
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Ah... i also wondered if you had the rest of him, took a peak in your gallery to see, and notice some stuff i had seen previous and went WOW back then too
Ill be very much looking forward to a full Primal, or any other BW character you might do!
Keep up the good work!
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I only did his head and shoulders for now as I was doing this snapshot to enter in the Botcon art contest (and I won first place in the 2D Computer Generated category!). I didn't have the time to model out his entire body, but I will be going back to it before too long.
Beast Wars is what lead me down the path into the CGI/FX industry. I intend to do a bunch of BW guys eventually, even if it's just robot mode models for now. I have a Jack Skellington model I started before Primal that I need to finish up and get him and Primal demo-reel ready then I will be moving forward with some more BW projects.
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looks awesome! it's nice getting a glimpse of what a series would have been like with the right budget and technology!
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Thank you!
One of these days I would love to do a couple of complete models and do a small animation sequence. I don't know if I can pull off transforming models though, that's an area of technical know-how that I'm not so good at...
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watching the old series, it looks more like moving and squishing, probably about 3-5 different stages. if i may, what software are you using?
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The old series does cheat quite a bit to pull off the transformation, especially in season one. They also might have completely different models for different things too, a beast mode model, a transforming model, and a robot mode model and they switch them out as needed. Bits swirl around, and randomly vanish into other bits and all of that. It's not so much the figuring out how to transform them bit that gives me issues, but the rigging phase to make it so I can animate it.
I run Lightwave 9.5. I've not really had any experience with any other 3D program beyond it, although I really should learn Maya one of these days.
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I use Softimage and 3ds Max. I know in Softimage an easier way then rigging it would be to use a shape deformer, the same technique used to animate mouth movements. And maybe some parenting, or constraints. I'm not sure what they used to know the limitations on it, but for the stuff I use, it's the easiest way I could figure doing it...
I'm just trying to get some feedback, I find most people don't know what i'm talking about :S
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shape deformer sounds similar to the Morphs Lightwave uses. In the Modeling program of lightwave, we can save morphs to the model, such as minor movements, facial expressions and the like then use sliders in the Rendering/Animation program of Lightwave to animate and use the morphs within the model. With Lightwave though this is not a good alternative to rigging for complex motions as the morphs do not save "curves" in movement. It goes straight from A to B instead of making a curved arch if you rotate something using a morph.
I just need to sit down and practice rigging, weight mapping, and laying in bones on things so I can get a better understanding of it to eventually do complex things like a multiple-part transformer.
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yeah rigging is a pain... so far i've found watching at how real skeletons move helps, but sometimes characters can get awkward depending on how they're designed...
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Putting the basic skeleton into place and doing basic rigs i'm okay at, it's just the more complicated things such as multiple parts and layers of clothing that I flail at a little bit.
I am also discovering that trying to work on 3D stuff (trying to tweak the morphs for Primal's facial expression a bit before setting him to render high resolution for the final print) while cracked out on allergy meds is a bucket load of *fun*. Note to self; no more allergy meds on an empty stomach.
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i tried doing a winged centaur once, and there were just so many moving parts, it killed me. plus rigging the groups of feathers was a pain. my comp kept crashing because it couldn't handle it 
i even have a hard time animating while listening to music, i can't imagine what being on allergy meds would be like... 0.0
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The idea of rigging something with feathers just makes me cringe terribly. Ugh. I wouldn't even know where to start with that. My computer handles most things fairly decently, at least most of the things I have done it's handled well.. It was custom built for me to do 3D work on when I went to school at DAVE in Orlando. It got rather unhappy about the fact I had nearly 600MB of textures on Primal at one point before I went through and re-sized all of my texture maps down though. It also gets fussy if I try to render too large. Primal sort of caps out at 3600x2700. I attempted to render out at double that to make an 18x24 print for the Botcon art contest, buuut the computer wouldn't have it. My detail obsession ran away with me and the MB's racked up quickly.. lol.
I do pretty well doing work wile listening to music, in fact I have my headphones on now even while cracked out on allergy meds. Double whammy. Hot-dog. I got into the habit of wearing headphones at DAVE to drown out the background chatter of the class during worktimes. Strangely, other than going to the next song or so, the music does not distract me much.
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i'm incredibly lazy when it comes to texturing my own work... but i become finicky when it comes to the animating. mainly because i find animating gives a faster result and i don't need to bother too much with lighting. i tried doing a regular centaur, but found a creature with 6 appendages is surprisingly unbalanced, whereas adding the wings did even it out a bit, but the rig was still a pain because of how awkward it was.
feathers are actually really easy after working out weight maps and about 3-4 different feather models.
i don't find it distracting when I'm doing 3d, but when I'm doing 2d animation i find i need alot of concentration.
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