3D Digital Art Sculpting and Character Concept Show Reels

   Well a few days ago I started to work on my digital 3d character concepts show reel ... or well demo reel for work I do.  My intent is to show my skills in many different digital media applications and programs. I will finish my demo reel in Maya via and animation of my works that I modeled, sculpted textured  and painted in Zbrush, Maya, Blender 2.64 and Adobe Photoshop. If I decide to use more programs on this project I will mention them here as I go along and also put them in the credits of the demo reel. To start I did some rough sketches and sculpts of my ideas for the scenes I wish to create ... I have decided that I will do 3 scenes, and these are to all show off what I have learned in these programs as well to set moods and environments that change through the 3 different scenes as well to show character emotion through the animation  of the models that I created.  I will add some background sounds and music though the work should stand for itself with or without the sound. I am doing this as well as having a still art portfolio because the reality is that most people want the people modeling the assets and characters in 3d to also be able to and have a knowledge of the rigging and set up.  I do agree that a strong knowledge of a rigging character deformation in animation and topology are the difference between a character that has problems and one that works and is believable when it is animated.  But before I go to that extent I needed to decide how I would do all this, what the scenes would look like, environments, characters, landscape and assets ... etc  ...  So for my rough set up first off I went and found many reference photos of landscapes similar to the 3d landscape I will be modeling. Many that contain fish that will help me with my modeling and sculpting as well as corral, plants and anything else that will aid in my research and work.  After this we come to the point I am at now and that is setting up rough 3d sketches of these scenes. With rough models and landscaping for the scenes, I as well have been creating other brushes and materials for this project and planning any vfx for the animations. I also have been recording my work flow via digital images so I can show the documentation of what work I did along the way.  For example here are some rough sketches of my first scene digitally sculpted in Zbrush using dynamesh. For these sketches I used and outline and a sketch material from zbrush. 

Again these are just some rough 3d concept sketches in zbrush.  These will all be modeled detailed colored and textured in zbrush then the models will be imported to maya for rigging ,animation, shading and lighting.  Some parts may be worked on in blender as well.

Here are the 3d rough models that will next be detailed in sbrush.

   As you can see these are just rough models ... but this will give me a place to start from. After I do the texturing, the sculpting and the topology again if needed then I will make normal maps as well for export with the uvs textures and any other map that is needed .

I will post the next scene i n a day or so and let you see the rough draft of that as well some individual renders of some of my models working on in zbrush.