Rawdon Productions Media And Animation Blog

A blog to show off some of the work i have achieved during my time at university.. and beyond!

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Work in Progress

Here's a work in progress sculpt of an old warrior type with a futuristic twist. I was going to have tubes going into his head but i think I may give him a hat  and some hair in the future. Although the base character is near enough finished there are a few rough edges to tidy and I have yet to perfect the skin shader that I am using so hopefully i can improve that.

I haven't yet added realistic eyes to any of my characters which I think may be a large factor as to why they look so surreal. Obviously real hair would help too, which may come at a later stage!

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Code Vamp Logo

This is a made up logo i created in Cinema 4d and Photoshop. 

The mouth was supposed to be part of a bigger project but I decided that I didn't like the look of the character so managed to salvage something arty from it!

The lips were sculpted but the teeth were only a minor part of the project which i hadn't spent much time on so I'm glad they look reasonable.

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Hooded Figure

This model I created using the 'futuristic head' sculpt that I made earlier. I decided to use it as I liked the way the light caught the contours of the face in the previous picture. I played around with dynamically draping a hood onto the head which looked fine, but I thought that a lower poly look suited the model more. I used a Photoshop filter to bring out the lines on his face which I think gives a nice textured look to it. The original was meant to be a landscape version but I felt the picture wasnt busy enough and needed something extra adding.

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Animal Heads Sculpt

A Monkey, Giraffe, Penguin and Rabbit sculpture. 

With these sculptures I decided to make something cute and that could be used in real life to 3d print or make commercially. These heads could be part of a toy, buttons, erasers... pretty much anything! I also had a play around with making them look like they were hand sculpted by adding scrape marks which created an interesting look on some of the models.

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Attempt 4: Sketch and Toon Sculpt

So Ive been wanting to sculpt something with the Sketch and Toon render settings for a while. 

This time I was lazy and used the blank face template to start myself off. I ended up overlapping a sphere on top of her bald head and cutting grooves into it to make the hair which turned out to be a quick and effective way of doing it. I wanted large, verging on anime eyes and that's what I got.. combined with a 'The Walking Dead Game' cartoony vibe.

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Sculpting project attempt 3 - Mushroom Head

Here's something a bit random that I came up with today.

With my last sculpt I had a few problems with the mouth and sculpting that from scratch. This time I decided to adapt the primitive object that i was using to prepare for adding the features. I found that this helps greatly due to the fact that when you're are manipulating/sculpting the mesh the polygons get stretched so require further sub division. This leaves the model with a super-high poly area where nothing is happening and low poly area on the features. As you can see from the starting object this doesn't have to be modeled in detail, but impacts the poly count greatly.

With this model i wanted to create something odd looking  so i narrowed the original object in the middle and came up with this mushroom shape.I then started playing with sculpting presets and realised that there are alot of handy presets other than the ones that I knew of. These were used to add a bit of texture to the object.

After rendering I jusrt messed with the image a little in photoshop, and you can see the results! 

Creation time was about 4 hours (most was the texturing) so It wasn't long considering what knowledge I gained from it.

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Futuristic Head Sculpt

Here is todays addition to what seems to be turning into a sculpt a day session.This is just an exercise to improve my sculpting skills and give me another option to the traditional polygon modelling. 

It took a few hours to sculpt from scratch. It looks good like this but it was pretty much the only way i could use it to make it look nice. I realised I hadn't put any ears on the guy as I was getting to render him out so thats where the futuristic idea came from and then I just used photoshop to edit the text etc.

I was playing around with the sketch and toon renderer for a while which looked great on his features. I will try and incorporate that in a future sculpt!.

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Speed Sculpt

This took me a few hours to sculpt this afternoon. Whilst I'm still a newcomer to sculpting its obviously pretty easy to get started. I doubt this mesh would be very good for animation but for stills i think it would be great. Although there are some obvious flaws such as eyelids/lashes missing and a few stray hairs made it through the mesh i think it turned out well considering all i started with was a sphere.

If i was to poly model this i think it may take longer to perfect so sculpting in my opinion is much quicker than creating from scratch.

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Merry Christmas from Rawdon Productions!!

This is my latest project that i have sunk some of my free time into. It was all created in Cinema 4d with a little colour grading in photoshop as a low and high poly experiment.

View on high res and it looks much better.

For more information visit my Behance page: http://bit.ly/1dtme2l 

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Cinema 4d Grass Shader

Ive just experimenting with the R15 grass shader. 

It seems to work pretty well and by layering grass of different lengths and densities you can make something like the above.

I added a random red ball for contrast, its not meant to look realistic just to add some interest to the picture. You can see the soft shadows of each individual blade on the ball. I think with GI switched on it could make the shadows look much more real.

Grass takes a while to render and if i was to do a better quality, zoomed out version with GI and all the trimmings it would take much longer than the few minutes it took for this.

Something that I haven't tried, but doubt exists in the shader, is to see if collider objects can affect how the grass lays. Obviously if you have something resting on the grass it will change the angle and also squash some of the blades.  As the shader uses the C4d hair engine i guess that this is possible somehow.

On a side note: My Bad Santa project is progressing nicely. I managed to render out a full quality copy last night and was pleased with it but ive had to make a few minor adjustments so it should be completed in the next few days.

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Bad Santa (Work in progress)

I thought Id work on something festive for a change so I adapted the head that i modelled in my previous posting and added some accessories. Im not going to animate this but i will rig the character and pose him and try and create something cool!

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Behance page

I've just set up a Behance page to display my work in a better, portfolio style manner.  I shall still be updating this blog with more in depth information into what I create. I think the Behance page will be better visually for sending an employer than a page littered with my ramblings.

http://www.behance.net/RawdonProductions

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Misc Cinema 4d Renders.

Here are a few miscellaneous Cinema 4d renders that I had laying around on my hard drive from earlier this year.

The glass swan paperweight and skull objects were sculpted with the inbuilt features in r14, while the bike and human head models were created from scratch.

The Swan - Other than the sculpting, the hardest part about making this image was tweaking the render settings so that it looked realistic. Using refraction and caustics added to this realism by calculating the way the light bounced around inside the glass.

The Cheeky Skull - What I learned from this was how to bake the sculpted material onto the object. This allowed me to work with the object quicker because it showed a much simple version of the object by keeping the sculpted data in the displacement layer. 

The bike - This was originally going to be a futuristic motorbike but i decided to switch to a much more realistic design. It was mainly an exercise of using the modelling tools and the physical renderer to create a more photorealistic look.

The Human head - This started off as a single polygon. I then created and positioned all 300 polygons by hand with an emphasis on topology for movement. The eyelids and ears were probably the trickiest parts.

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Messing around with Low Poly.

This is a little scene I've quickly put together with using the Polygon Reduction and Displacer deformers.

I'm not too keen on how it looks but its main purpose was to research on how the polygon reduction affects the polygons for texturing. You can only select polygons before they have been deformed. This means that if reduction has combined two polys together the texture applied to that polygon could change to either of the two materials previously applied to each polygon.

I like the effect but think with objects that need little details like the castles roof its not ideal because the polygons cant be reduced whilst keeping to that level of detail. A more abstract approach to the object could be more effective.

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My hairy monster.

(slow) Progress is being made on the bunny project. The rig for the bunny is not perfect as its one of my first real attempts so I thought Id take some time to improve my skills with rigging before i progress any further. 

I have the character in the picture running along but 5 hour renders for half a second is slowing things down a lot!

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A small progress update

Having rigged the character, i have more of an idea of the direction that this project is heading. I decided to structure the story line without any storyboards to allow me to be more creative and push my 3d abilities further as I progress... Already I have brushed up on my rigging, weighting, pose morph and pyrocluster abilities/knowledge so i think this project will achieve that.

The aim of what I have been doing so far is to avoid using textures and to use the lighting to colour the shots and set mood. Providing I get enough material made i would like to use this as a music video as Im not too interested in adding much sound and it would also allow me to expand on my editing skils.

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Modelling progress update.

Since I have completed the flag scene (see my Motion Graphics reel for a clip) I have decided my character animation needs some work on. 

I've started modelling so kind of action bunny character. It was originally going to be low poly but I liked the Hypernurbs look more polished. 

The body was made from a cylinder quickly so will need some work to look better, but its coming along nicely.

I've rigged the eyebrows/ cheeks/ mouth to move but after i complete the model I will have to consider the best way to rig as its made from separate objects which could get tricky.