Hai Phan - Freelance Character Artist

Hai Phan is an artist I came across when I was looking for tutorials that involved the entire pipeline. It was in CGCircuit that I found his videos and the fact that he wasn't going for a realistic approach but rather a really nice stylised that made it so appealing. 

His tutorials were helpful as he didn't approached a software specific but rather explaining the general concept and industry standards. 

Hella is the character he mainly worked with and it was amazing to see most of the process on the making. 

His portfolio is fascinating and quite extensive (have a look!); the amount of different characters and creatures that he creates varies a lot yet you can still sense a style within. 

Not only his videos were really accessible but it was really easy to get in contact with him and he was kind enough to answer some questions that will be useful as primary research for my dissertation. 

Tutorials, tutorials ... endless tutorials

Knowing that my dissertation is a blend of a tutorial and a case study, I had no option but to learn the pipeline as much as I could in a short period of time. At this point I got Photoshop or any other drawing softwares and techniques tamed for the purpose (maybe not to the standards I want, but they'll do the trick).
Maya as a 'put assets together' software I'm pretty sure I'll manage at my level. The problem was Zbrush; I've tried this software before and the interface scared me away. now that I tried to go back to it I decided to target it from 0. Started looking at tutorials on digital tutors and opted for taking the basic Introduction to Zbrush, a 6 hr tutorial to teach you the basics an also introduce you to some of the useful tools and functions that Zbrush has. After finishing those I started to look at some other such as Pipeline Integration with Maya and Zbrush and Creating Game Characters with Maya and Zbrush but the more I spend looking at this tutorials the less I felt I was practising. Looking at the 169 tutorials that Digital Tutors have ONLY for Zbrush was a bit overwhelming and thinking that I had CGCircuit tutorials to watch as well (recommend this one in particular) and other 13 GB of other random tutorials I found online. I felt for a second there was not enough time to watch them all even if I had double the amount of time to do it!
The amount of tutorials in Magazines and in some dissertations I was reading felt like it was just an endless and even found myself watching tutorials while having dinner :-/
For a while it was all I could think of until I broke down and decided to just crack on with work. I still ended up going back to some tutorials because I knew I could do things I just forgot how. I felt like I didn't target this process the best way; I should have been working along with the tutorials and pause them when needed, but at the time I thought they were going way to fast for me to catch up their speed (specially when they come with an amazing model and say 'I did this 3 months ago'...)
Hopefully this won't affect much of my practical work, but I am proud of managing to stand at least 26 hours of pure tutorials without perishing.

(yes...this is how horrifying it looks....and this are just from ONE website! )

DOTA2 - Character Art Guide

Beautiful Tumblr brought this up a while ago on my dashboard about a Game character guide from Valve's DOTA2 which at first I thought it was a PDF showing the characters sheets and as I haven't played the game I nearly skipped over.

After deciding to give it a go I notices that it was a general but very useful pipeline of the workflow when it comes to a character design and creation for a video game.
Some of the points they touch might seem quite basic, but some of them are certainly too basic that people usually forget them (and by people I mean me).
The topics go from silhouette, gradient and colour schemes to some geometry, UV mapping and item making tips.

Here's the link to the PDF which I'm planning to print for future reference. Once again, well done Valve.

Eye can see you

Most of the model I made it following a tutorial part of Digital Tutorials that a friend lend me. It was basically to build a female human body which then I modified  on mudbox to achieve an alien-ish look.
Part of this tutorial was the building of the eyes which obviously I just duplicated, scaled them and used them for the other extra 3 eyes on her forehead.

Old eyes with simple geometry

I was happy with them but one thing I really wanted to make was the pupils to dilate as that would add some creepy effect to the scene; also I've always thought that extreme closeups of the human eye look rather amazing!. Just as if I asked for it, a video came on my dashboard on tumblr of how to make really really cool eye with Maya and mudbox and it was only 12 min long, so I gave it a go despite the fact that I made the model fitting the previous eyes.

It was pretty easy and despite the fact that maya wouldn't take the texture I made in mudbox for some reason I ended up keeping this new eyes and work later on on their texture. Now, they don't look really special on the screen cap, but at least the pupil is animatable now.

Also, if anyone wants to give it a try to this tutorial, it's pretty easy and it has a good outcome: