artbyshaun

Kong work in progress

2012-01-16T20:51:00.003Z

almost finished the kong base sculpt, did a massive overhaul of the anatomy, will repologise and then work the fur onto the new mesh to maximise detail :D

Monster Munch!

2011-12-28T18:31:00.005Z

Heylo! Haven't updated the blog in ages, been flat out lately! Working with the guys at BlackMarketGames! Their title Dead Hungry Diner is almost ready for release!

Character 7 - Simba

2011-10-02T19:06:00.002+01:00

Character 6

2011-09-14T23:13:00.004+01:00

spent about 4 hours on this study of a red deer bust using 'Mickey' my family's heir loom wall mounted trophy Buck as a reference! experimented with a few different methods of doing fur but quite happy with the result.

Character 5 [five]

2011-09-09T02:30:00.004+01:00

Buzz Lightyear to the rescue! rather than build the hard body surfaces outside of Zbrush in Maya or XSI I tried producing these hard edges with the clip brush! It was also the first model where I used lightbox instead of the now defunct zproject feature! soo much less clunky :-)

Next up is something a little less stylised

To Infinity and Beyond!

2011-09-05T09:28:00.002+01:00

About 3 hours into a sculpt of a Buzz Lightyear sculpt, will get him wrapped up later this evening

Character 4 [Four]

2011-08-31T03:37:00.002+01:00

Finished the Alien sculpt, learned some really interesting things about modelling scales and spines with projection master :-) Next up is Buzz Lightyear!

busy busy busy!

2011-08-29T23:39:00.003+01:00

it's been a hectic week at work but just about squeezed out a little time the past couple evenings, nearly finished on the alien sculpt!

Character number Threeee

2011-08-21T22:06:00.002+01:00

Finished my third character Belle, now begining on HR Gigers 'Alien' from the Ridley Scott movie of the same name!

Character number twoooo

2011-08-14T23:49:00.002+01:00

Finished my second character Freddy, this was particularly fun and ran into around 8 hours which is a little longer than planned, next up is Belle from Beauty & the Beast.

Zsculpt Blitz Challenge!

2011-08-13T01:17:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I started a personal challenge to do blaze through zsculptures, with the emphasis on improving speed and getting used to the leap from working in zbrush 3.1 to 4! The first character suggestion was to do a Hippo in a Cup - completed in under 2 hours.

I'm currently half way through my second character Freddy Kreuger, which has shaped up to be a lot more of an undertaking, currently clocking in at 5 hours but I'm pulling a late one tonight so that I can take it easy over the weekend!

Because the emphasis is on speed I'm not concentrating on texture/colour but as I grow more confident with Z4 I'll be able to go to town with the improved lightbox/polypainting features and start experimenting with timelapsed screen captures.

Finished Eve Zsculpt

2011-08-09T01:39:00.003+01:00

Finished with this Character, really enjoyed the process but want to get stuck into something a little out of my comfortable zone this week! Zombiedinosaurs or Planet of the Apeish! :-)

zsculpt progress

2011-07-19T09:51:00.002+01:00

Start a new studio contract today! wooo! Almost finished the first pass, it's currently at 9 sub divions so I plan to retopologise everything before I get into ultra fine detail :-)

Manga Zbrush Sculpt

2011-07-14T18:19:00.003+01:00

Work in progress of a zbrush sculpt of a manga style character I illustrated a few months ago. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KfZZlqkpWFI/TNe4uP0nb7I/AAAAAAAAAY8/Zc81OsSjmUE/s1600/finalmanga.jpg I've spent 2 days to get it to this stage, concentrating on getting a good silouhette as I intend to sculpt the clothing detail over the anatomy

Updateeeeeee

2011-07-05T23:40:00.004+01:00

Haven't updated in a wee while! Finished working with Praxis. We had a roadshow at the guildhall square as part of a funding campaign, we did facepainting and a balloon release - with the weather behaving itself for the most part!

Back to working on personal art again! :-D havent done any hard body modelling in a few weeks so knocked out this! Can't wait to texture this badboy!

Puppet making fun :-)

2011-06-13T21:11:00.008+01:00

I've been busy working with the Praxis Learning age project - where I have been running the puppet making & arts workshops. I've done promo shots as the centre is trying to secure additional funding towards improvements to the facilities. Keep an eye on UTV/ITV Northern ireland as we'll be on screen this week!

http://www.peoplesmillions.org.uk/2011-finalists/utv/garden-of-eden

BlackNorth

2011-05-04T21:33:00.005+01:00

Adieu! Just finished working with the guys in BlackNorth Animation in Belfast; so I can get stuck into my personal work & the puppet workshops again! Much thanks to Blacknorth for a squeal of a time & some really amazing work :D

http://player.vimeo.com/video/21715296

Their in-house production Hear to Fall which I worked on as a 3d generalist is almost complete!
S.

Updateeeeeeeee

2011-03-06T19:22:00.008Z

Have since reworked the rig for the Ural character in Maya 2011 to get up to speed in that, notabally I've set up set driven key expressions hand clenching & I've stopped using ik's in the arms in legs as I've found it easier to animate joints manually. I didn't enjoy the leap from 8.5 to 2008 a couple years ago but 2011 has restored my faith! Next on the to do list is to test the GoZ! link with zbrush plugin.

Aside from this I've begun using Illustrator and have started a little test animation projectlett to test out workflow between this, flash & after effects.

Blendshape Research

2011-02-16T09:57:00.006Z

Doing a little pet project in lip sync and blendshaping, reworked the engineer model, paying particular attention to cleaning up the uv seams. I was experimenting with mirroring UVs; on the maya end this isn't a problem, but Zbrush doesn't support shared uv space at all.

Ordinarily this wouldn't be an issue but I've found it more efficient to sculpt the shapes in zbrush rather than pushing the vertices in maya. The biggest benefit doing it this way is being able to mask the geometry at will and mirror/flip the X axis deformations.
I've done 50 variations of facial expressions, 10 major phoneme shapes and more mechanical actions such as the jawing opening/closing & breathing.

Comparative anatomy

2011-01-18T15:50:00.006Z

I just begun this study of Lion anatomy last night, so far about 4 hours into it

once finished It would be really nice to pose and get a nice render akin to the Lion of Lucerne
monument in Rome.

2D Collective: Christmas Childhood theme

2011-01-10T01:13:00.003Z

This months theme with the collective lads was childhood cartoons and Christmas so I did this quick little piece with Pooh & co! :-)

Final Low Polygon Submission

2010-12-20T18:04:00.005Z

Character Rig in Maya

Final Submission

Dominance War V final sculpt and texturing

2010-12-11T21:31:00.003Z

Retopologised and Uv mapped

Texture References

Final Hi Res Sculpt

Dominance War Update

2010-12-07T22:02:00.002Z

After retopologising the model I want to go back and do another sculpt pass particularly on the boots and include fishnets on the legs, once finished I can finally worry about uv's and baking an AO pass

Dominance War 5 sculpt progress

2010-12-02T15:50:00.004Z

Will have the base sculpt finished by this evening and worry about retopologising and uv'ing tomorrow. Was going to do her hair as geometry but it'd just kick up the polycount so will just do it as alpha textures.

Dominance War V Concept Illustration

2010-11-30T01:15:00.004Z

Finished with my character design, now the fun part of modeling and texturing ! :D

S.

Dominance War V

2010-11-23T21:32:00.004Z

I've just begun working on my entry for the Dominance War character challenge - representing the cgtalk forums. So to start things off I've roughed out some silhouettes for a character and then photo-montaged my basic concept for a reference, this was pretty fun to create, every limb and accessory is from a different source and I used the liquify tool to exaggerate the curves of the chest and legs.

I'll get a refined character drawing up and then start blocking it out in 3d! In accordance with the cgtalk rules I've used the team colours and integrated the logo. there will be strict limits on the texture and poly count budget as well as normal and displacement maps not being allowed! Fun :-)

S.

sketchy sketchy!

2010-11-11T02:02:00.002Z

Have the base sketch more or less done, will start painting it up tomorrow and spend a few days on it

2DC. Manga Final

2010-11-08T08:51:00.003Z

The final image for the manga theme this week on 2dc.

S.

Manga inks

2010-11-06T17:14:00.003Z

Completed the outlines and have a fair hang of the pen tool now so i'll start painting it up :)

2D Collective Mangathon!

2010-11-04T13:25:00.005Z

Joining in with the craic with 2d collective guys and this week the theme is manga so my immediate thoughts were mechas and chicks with guns! :D Ive never done any manga before so this should be interesting!

I did a photo montange first taking references from all over the shop to come up with the basic composition i had in mind and references I need. Im going for conventional proportions but gonna mangafy the facial features and cell shade everything. Generally I do my line work free hand but everyones work at the 2dC is soooo crisp and I feel a bit out of my depth! so i'll have a wack at pen tool.

It took me about 2 days on/off to get the pencils/roughs to this stage, I'll get the refined inks done by this evening and a day or 2 to block the colours and add highlights, I havent done any serious 3d in over 2 weeks so if I have time I'll have a stab at one of the characters!
S.

P.shoped portraits

2010-08-30T22:11:00.008+01:00

took a wee notion to photoshop some nice classical style portaits! v. fun :-)

LRRH finished

2010-08-27T18:10:00.004+01:00

had gotten tied up lately with updating my site, but spent a few hours today wrapping this up, there's a couple things still not sure about but I was just trying out a few painting techniques with PS CS3 and didn't want to spend too much time on it. S.

LRRH

2010-08-11T23:12:00.005+01:00

Inspired by some recent doodling I decided to try & paint up a fairytale scene as Ive been getting to grips with a new block colouring technique. Ive more or less done the background but the girl herself and the light shining through the trees in front of this again still need loads of work.
S.

updateeeee

2010-08-10T15:49:00.005+01:00

have been busy lately so haven't been able to update in a while, completed this character recently & afterwards redid the textures and modeled a base to make it a lil more presentable
S.

topologyyyyyyy :-)

2010-07-07T02:32:00.003+01:00

retopologised the base mesh, not only does this mean in the long run that I can have a better deforming mesh but also that in zbrush it can subdivide more eloquently, allowing for higher sub divisions with a smaller memory footprint weeeeee!

update :-)

2010-06-30T17:51:00.005+01:00

havent got round to update this in a wee while, did a new business card design, want to spruce up my website too

In the past few days I've been inspired to do a little ecorche and anatomy stuff by a new book by Spencer Scott I bought :-) I So Ive been sculpting out this character from an older project - who when finished will sport 60's era fashion, I seen this guys tutorial on sculpting fabrics [http://www.selwy.com/2009/zbrush-clothes-tutorial/] so Ill try and storm through this so that I can have a go and then maybe start a similar studies of male and equine anatomy.

PolyPaint

2010-05-18T22:29:00.005+01:00

Carraig is now completely textured but im still in the process of fine tunning baking the texture maps to capture as much of the detail from the original polypainting.

Before I started texturing I had in mind that he would have skin like a hippo/boar and in my research - end up going for a dappled skin pattern adapted from a sow and a fawn. In the process of polypainting I wanted to add a few details and wanted to refine the detail on the horseshoes so create a number of custom alpha brushes.

I then plotted out rough projections of the textures both as a plan and as reference to project with the zproject brush.

Carraig [update]

2010-05-09T16:46:00.003+01:00

have had quite a bit on my plate lately so progress has been held back. The sculpt is complete

and have retopologised [2717 polys] and uv mapped the base model.

for ingame application I've generated a nice normal maps but I seriously want to get my head around blending displacements with blendshapes

all that is needed done now is texturing, rigging and blendshapping. TBC

S.

Carraig [WIP]

2010-03-30T01:19:00.001+01:00

since discovering the wonders of the clay brush zbrush has been a dream!

particularly the abdominal muscles and the knuckles of the hand are holding me up

Second Life Pipeline

2010-03-29T20:06:00.002+01:00

Doing a little research on using zbrush to sculpt/texture prims and then bring assets into second life.

Also had a little mess round with the Linden scripting language, this simple script makes an object 'say something' in this instance 'what is the craic Shaun!? upon being 'touched' allowing me to trigger a basic event.

I then set about creating a basic car and a scipt to allow it to go. one of the key elements of this is linking [parenting ala maya] tools>link and setting the root prim. I also set it up so that upon starting a 'car sound' would load from the libary!

Dare 2010

2010-03-29T16:27:00.000+01:00

The past week have been working with a team of programmers from UOU Magee on a bid for Dare to be Digital 2010, for the application I helped the guys edit together their programming showreels and did some concept work for them, it was an intense week getting everything done in time but ya gotta love those late nights! S.

Carraig! back from the dead!

2010-03-21T01:00:00.000Z

Carraig is a character I doodled years ago n have always toyed about with but hadnt touched in ages, had a go again at him in zbrush and things started snowballing! :-) to be continued...
Shaun

sketchy sketchyyyyyy

2010-03-03T11:45:00.001Z

just a little doodle, messing around with sub tool and the retopo tool

S.

Alphaaaaas!

2010-02-27T19:27:00.000Z

just been sculpting and detailing in zbrush, used lot's of elephant images to create some nice alpha brushs,

finished polypainting but I want to bake the normal maps [in greyscale as bump maps] on to the textures to get out more detail!

the finished product complete with normal and texture maps

hunter wip

2010-02-07T19:07:00.001Z

rigged, blendshaped & skinned wireframe

texture references
texture mock up

hunter wireframes

2009-08-17T10:04:00.000+01:00

this little guy is gonna be vector-rayed but once the topology is finished I'll still uv map him should I decide to texture/tart him up at some point

without further adieu..

2009-08-04T17:37:00.000+01:00

I havent updated my blog lately but here's the DAA work,In other news I've been working on an E4 sting, which I shall get online asap!

S.

Presque Fini!

2009-04-27T22:51:00.000+01:00

Almost finished all the designers against aids work, tidied up the beating heart sequence today, little bit creepy but effective!

i'm a lead famerrrrrr fo sho

2009-04-20T18:12:00.000+01:00

Almost finished the first 2 skits, on to the next! got fed up trying to line draw + animate a revovler for the russian roulette skit so made a nice wee maya one and vectored it , gonna post + comp it and see how it all looks together

flash yeo

2009-04-16T18:29:00.000+01:00

working away with PS + flash for an animation for the Designers against Aids campaign in NYC, busy busy busy :-)

Eternally waiting for renders.... grrrr

2009-04-10T23:13:00.000+01:00

another doodle while waiting for a batch render

started life drawing night classes again wooo, will get some nice studies up soon!

S

Update yeo

2009-03-06T00:46:00.000Z

havent updated in ages cause been snowed under with studio work, but got some nice drawings done earlier when i was waiting for renders :-)

Hopefully next week when im a bit a head of the game i can get some zbrush sketching going, well ancy for 3d goodness! oh and im starting night classes in life drawing again!

ye wah?

2009-02-12T09:11:00.000Z

been working at colour keying and green screening techniques, using stock footage from Creative Cow I produced this little tester, the final compositing is pretty poor, but I want to have a go at rotoscoping and pulling matts

I had a go at displacement mapping in zbrush too, i knew displacement maps are more effective albeit more render heavy but i wanted to compare [normal mapping] versus [displacement + bump]

the displacement mapping does most of the fine details but i hate messing around with shader networks * must find out how to make zbrush displacement maps more maya friendly so i can just add it in the attribute editor*

Retopologising and teaaaaaaa

2009-02-09T17:03:00.000Z

the initial horrible mesh

using the retopo tool is like dot to dot :)

I also made normal maps using zbrush as opposed to baking them in maya, it's soooooo much easier and faster, but ive always found maya easier to map uv's in so theres still some to and froing

The retopologised model in maya with nice lighting & normal maps!

Zbrushnessness

2009-02-09T12:02:00.000Z

I was doodling away & decided to try out the retopology toolset

Shaun

In other News

2009-01-26T15:58:00.000Z

just getting everything ready for the move down to London town wooooo! spent wednesday at the Hunterian Anatomy museum, its my third time, I love drawing there but having giggling girls over your shoulder watching you draw for 15 mins is a bit of a headfry! gah! omg! you're irish! Feckin tourists!

Carraig Maquette [revisit]

2009-01-22T12:08:00.000Z

its been sitting in the corner of my room for a while & i wasnt happy with his arms so out with the anatomy books :)

Money Shots

2008-12-30T00:06:00.001Z

Nearly finished with the site, just working on some nice presentation renders of the jacob stuff!

Suckin Diesel Boss!

2008-12-08T03:47:00.001Z

YAY! after nearly a week trying to get my head around actionscript 2 in flash im getting somewhere!

this took A LOT out of me
-------------------------------------------------------------
coolMenu.dragButton.onPress = function() {
startDrag(this._parent);
};
coolMenu.dragButton.onRelease = function() {
stopDrag();
}
coolMenu._visible = false;
twodMenu._visible = visible = false;
threedMenu._visible = false;
showreelMenu._visible = false;
shaunMenu._visible = false;

clickBTN.onRelease=function(){
_root.gotoAndStop("1");
coolMenu._visible = true;
--------------------------------------------------------
woooooo i now have draggable/closeable windowettes!
to anyone flash proficent this is probally a pityfull achievement, but you have no idea how happy i am right now. [loser]

}
;
// mmmmmmmm victory late nite celabratory munchies

[Carraig Maquette]

2008-11-17T16:55:00.000Z

WIP shots:

the finished article

Finally wireless again!!!!!

2008-11-17T15:04:00.001Z

My internet's been down for over a week! aghhhhhh! Ive been working on my site, so it should be operational in a matter of days!

Jacob is go!

2008-10-25T20:37:00.000+01:00

Finally got round to uploading the final cut of Jacob online

Jacob
Uploaded by shaunwho

Props to Keith and everyone at Screeneast!

Carraig Redeign

2008-10-25T19:33:00.000+01:00

Sooooooo heres my initial doodle:

and the refined design

i scrapped the original hook jaws in favour of something more conventional, he needs lips if he's goin to lip sync! I gave him disproportionaly big hands as i had seen the hulk 2 recently and love his exagerated anatomy
[woof]

Stand easy son! CARRAIG R&D 002

2008-10-25T18:15:00.001+01:00

Right, i've been working away for the past few months flat out on Jacob and now I finally have time to start on my own work! Im currently helping out in animation workshops at Norwich Puppet theatre but I've also been in negotation with screeneast about funding my own digital short. This is a lot of hot air when I still have ceratin technical areas to catch up in before I should even consider my own production!

ssooooooo! Im starting another technical research project to tackle some key areas!

To pick up the pieces in my pipeline I will redesign an older character of mine, think beefcake minotaur [below]

and take it through a variety of stages:

+ Design
+ Full Maquette [less for reference more because I wanna have a go at latex moulds/casting
+ Modelling Completely in Zbrush & then retopologising - instead of maya then zbrushing
+ Uv map
+ Advanced Texturing Skin shaders
+ Set Driven key mucles in addition to conventional blendshaping
+ Skin & Rig
+ Lip Syncing & dope sheeting
+ Animate a Short sequence
+ Compositing!

[word]