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.

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.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

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.

Demo Reel 2012 from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.

A sampling of work in motion. Demo reel contents:

1. Character design, modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation for a work in progress shepherdess character.  Base mesh in 3ds Max, sculpted and hand-painted in ZBrush, rigged in Max and exported to Unity3d. Video captured from within a Unity3D web player.

2. Character design, modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation for Emoko, a virtual social space and web browser for the PC. (Background environment, tank top, and jacket bump map by Matthew Nolan, and hair sheen effect by Weston Tracy.)

3. Waves and surf Environment FX via textures and animated shaders for The Suffering, an action game by Surreal Software, for PS2 and PC. (Character creation and animation by Surreal Software artists.)

4. Environment design, modeling, texturing and animation for Yourself!Fitness, an exercise game for the XBox, PC, and PS2. (Character and animation by PBdigital and Kevin McMahon.)

5. Rigging and animation for Greysoul, an indie RPG for PC. (Character modeling by Project Greysoul artists.)

6. Character design, modeling, texturing, shaders, rigging, and animation for a work-in-progress freelance project on bike safety.

7. Character design, model, textures, rigging, and facial animation for Quin, a work-in-progress personal project. I used FaceFX for the lip-sync animation.

8. Environment design, modeling, texturing, and animation (of trees) for Intel technical demo Horsepower. (Horses and horse animation by Jason Baskin.)

Music by Air France ”Collapsing at Your Doorstep”

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.

(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.)

Intel created the tech demos Smoke and Horsepower to show off the power of multi-core processing for games. In these demos flocks of swifts and herds of horses (animated by Jason Baskin) are dynamically generated, and their numbers are expanded to push processing power to its limits.

Here’s a clip from my demo reel of Horsepower in action:

I designed, modeled, and textured the environments for these demos. In Horsepower I rigged and animated the custom-built trees to sway in the breeze, and  animated the skydome clouds to give the vast space more life. All the different pieces came together via the Ogre3D open source game engine.

Here’s the lightmap I created for the terrain after sculpting it in Mudbox:

A shot from my Horsepower environment (and one from Yourself!Fitness) ended up being featured pretty prominently in the June ’09 issue of 3D World, in which I was interviewed about working as a freelancer:

In Smoke (below) I did everything except the fire and trees – which were generated procedurally – and the birds, which are by artist Jason Baskin.

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.

Environments and props for iPhone game Touch Pets: Dogs by Portland, Oregon game company Stumptown Game Machine (which got bought out by mobile game giant ngmoco).

I constructed many of these environments by directly converting artist Bill Muldron‘s excellent concept images into low-poly levels. Many of the detail textures in these levels originated as layers within Bill’s concept images.

These levels are extremely low-poly, enough so they can run smoothly on the iPhone, even with multiple dogs, items and props on-screen.

And here’s a few of the props I constructed:

Touch Pets Dogs Launch Trailer on YouTube:

This concept image was my first step:

Once in the game, players choose a team, and their own distinctive icons:

The colors and icons let players more easily spot their tanks on the field:

Players could populate the map with bases, bombs, and barriers:

Around the same time Intel hired me to create some art for a simple demo that would allow users in a public theater to interact with a puzzle on screen via mobile devices or laptops. Users would choose from a variety of distinctive hands to manipulate the puzzle. My job was to come up with some vector art hands, and make them distinctive:

This is a sample of some rigging and animation I did for a small indie project called Greysoul. The rig is a standard biped skeleton with some additional bones attached for things like cloaks and wings. And I made use of IK for the sword and staff, and for planting the feet solidly on the ground.

The models were built by Project Greysoul’s art team.