I’ve been sculpting this guy off and on when I get a moment. He’s eventually going to go into a game engine, much like the Shepherdess character.
If the above doesn’t work for you, try the YouTube version.
His slightly slack-jaw look is intentional; it’s meant to make him function better with FaceFX when I get around to setting up his facial animation.
A work in progress of a character I built from scratch. I started with a base mesh in 3ds Max, then sculpted and hand-painted it in ZBrush, and finally rigged and animated it in Max before export to Unity3d. Within the Unity editor I applied a skin shader from the Unity asset, “Chickens Shader Bundle” to give the skin some life.
Below is an embedded version of the Unity3D web player for the character. Click to rotate, alt-click or mouse wheel to zoom, middle-mouse-click to pan.
If the above doesn’t work for you (if you’re on a mobile device for instance), you can see a clip of the character in action at the start of my demo reel:
ZBrush sculpt:
Concept art for the character:
The underlying costume comes from the painting, “Young Shepherdess Standing” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
Recently Portland Streetcar released a safety video called When I Ride. The video was directed by Bob Richardson, and I did the computer graphics and animation.
Here’s some coverage on BikePortland and Portland Transport. And you can see all animation excerpts here:
The goal is an illustrative look – more painterly than photorealistic – that is enhanced by hard-edged, toon-style shadows. What’s kind of fun is having a ton of detail in something like cloth wrinkles (as sculpted in Mudbox and baked into a normal map), but then having only a hard-edged, two-tone shadow describe it.
The rigging is pretty basic, but includes individual fingers and some vertex weighting for the eyelids so that the character can blink. More importantly those eyelid bones make it so the eyelids can conform to the eyes as they look around. This lets the character’s eyes be active without getting the crazy-eyes effect that results when too much whites-of-the-eyes are revealed as the character’s eyes rotate.
Bicycle-Riding Character Test Render from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.
Below are some shots from my final animation.
Finally, here’s an example of the detailed construction that went into the rider and helmet:
And my concept art for the character:
Character and accessory design, modeling, texturing (diffuse, normal, spec mask), rigging, and animation for Emoko, a a virtual social space and web browser for the PC.
The look we went for was naturalistic, but a little on the stylized side. A combination of model swapping, texture layers, and infinite range of base colors allows for a wide range of customization for a given character mesh.
The male character had similar customization options, though much of that was handled by other artists once I had generated these basic elements.
(Background environment, men’s jacket, women’s jacket textures, tank top, and jeans by Matthew Nolan, hair sheen effect and some parts of the male texture by Weston Tracy, character shader design by Brian Ramage.)
Bicycles, Rolling Stops, and the Idaho Stop from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.
I created this video – everything from the writing to the narration to the art to the editing – to support the Bicycle Transportation Alliance‘s effort to pass a law that would allow people on bikes to treat stop signs like yield signs: carefully, and if and only if they have the right of way. Blowing through a stop would still be illegal, and under this law would have carried an even stiffer penalty.
It was a fun project, and an interesting challenge in that I had to make most of basic 3D graphic techniques, within an extremely limited schedule. I wrote the script (with much input from the BTA), did the voice over, and edited the the piece together with some wonderful music by Lucas Gonze.
Surprisingly enough, this video that was mainly intended to educate a few state legislators about a relatively obscure law managed to go a little bit viral, at least by bicycle activism standards. 67k views at last count! It showed me the potential for this medium’s ability to explain things that are otherwise difficult to convey.
My work on the Idaho Stop led to a work on another bike-themed video, called On the Right Track. It talks about Portland’s new experimental cycletracks and buffered bike lanes, and how road users should use the new infrastructure.
My role on this video was strictly animation; the video was written, directed, and shot by Matt Giraud of Gyroscope Pictures.
On the Right Track from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.
Ava and Adam, characters I built for use in the GarageGames Torque engine and sold as art packs (AvaPack and AdamPack) on the GarageGames developer site. Ava is 1308 polygons, and Adam is 1216 polygons. They started out first as a means of learning how to export to Torque, and then of showing others how it was done. And of course they were meant to be generic enough and stripped-down enough that they could be turned into any character in any genre. They ended up selling quite well. Even better, they led to a number of good freelance jobs and business connections.
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