Work in progress

Thumbnail comp

Mule character design

Painting in Progress

This is number one of four in a series of paintings I am doing about the Wild West and the days of the Gold Rush. This one is about 80 percent finished, with a bit more to do here and there. As always I like to show preliminary drawings that I have used along the way when creating an image. So here is the initial thumbnail, character design for the mule, and the final painting in progress.

More renders

Here are a few renders of Guan the monkey, who is now rigged, weight painted and ready for animation. Now I need to give him eyes and teeth, as well as his cape and hat. These renders show how blend shapes are used to deform the models mesh in order to create different facial expressions.

Getting ready to animate

Over the past few months I have spent a whole lot of time in front of a computer screen working on creating a short animation. In past posts I showed some preliminary character designs, poly models, as well as z brush sculpts of both Ganesh, and Guanteen. These will be the main characters in the animation.

At this time I am finalizing the models and getting them rigged for animation.

Below are some screen grabs of the rig in which I built for Ganesh. This is an image of the controls in which will drive the character and allow him to be animated.

Here are some mental ray renders of my low poly model with its texture maps, displacement maps, and normal maps , applied. These renders show how Ganesh will appear in the final animation, as produced with Mental Ray in Maya.

Looking to have a simple walk cycle of him animated soon.