New Year, and we're back on track

So, we stopped during the Christmas break, we tought we needed some time off after a hard worked year, lots of projects ahead and we really needed to clear our minds, recharge batteries if you will.
But we are back to work, so, here it goes.
We finished the props concept art, that being, armor, pads and clothing for the Nightcrawler. We made a couple sketches and we finally went for this.

 We wanted the armor not to look very heavy, we needed it to feel light and easy to bend or move, leaving freedom of movement to the character. also we wanted it to be asymmetrical.

 Also We wanted a little mischivious look on him, so we gave him a cloak, we loved it.

Finally we worked on the textures. Javier Lopez was the head of this, he went through lots of skin textures, hundreds of pictures looking for the feel we needed. he narrowed it to some nice skins, mostly from amphibians and cats.

We all loved the SSS (Sub Surface Scattering) on the cat's ears, also some frog's specular highlights. We all agreed on Javi's choice and we think they fit pretty cool.
In the meantime, we worked on a sketch for the armor, a 3D sketch, we felt we needed to see it on the 3D model, just to test its looks. here it is.

From this, we saw some changes needed to be made, the knee portion of the armor, some asymmetry was needed as well, so we pointed out those issues and we began working on the model. I will soon be posting images of the progress.

As we already had the texturing study, Heads, our lead texture artist began painting the skin and spandex textures for the model.The textures have been getting upgraded constantly, and we began working on the skin shader as well. For now I'll show you some progress on the skin textures.

Some of the red spots you see on the skin will be treated as specular highlights, not diffuse color, but we wanted to see how it looks. Also we might be adding some defined patterns to the skin color as well, we're currently working on Mari for this texturing process.
Last but not least, I wanted to show a pic Heads did, he just wanted to check out the color of the textures on the Nightcrawler, obviously, there's barely any shader or lighting work on this pic, but it was good enough just to check the overall look of the Nightcrawler.

 

It'll be a lot darker though.

Ok, so this is what we've been up to. Next week I'll be posting images of the on going rig process in which I'm working, as well as the models for all props and hopefully some shader tests.

3d Concept

Ok, we've been trying to pull the 3D concept quickly, but it's been hard since we're having lots of work again. The whole team had their saying on this, Niko and I worked closely to get it done, thumbs up for him and Javi, they designed the Nightcrawler and it's taking shape at last.
Here are some pics and a turntable on line, the tail looks weird because it wasn't attached to the mesh, it's a subtool. we're now working on the animatable model, I will be posting it hopefully next week.


Concept V1 from Daniel Saravia on Vimeo.

NightCrawler 3D Concept

The Clothing concept should be ready next week. hope you like this.

Concept Art V2 and Model sheets

Ok, long weekend behind, we had holiday on Monday so, little work was done.
Anyway, Niko and Javi still had some work done during the weekend.

 Niko finished the Model Sheet for the Nightcrawler so I could start working on the base mesh. Me and the Team are pretty happy with the model sheet and the way Nightcrawler's shaping out.

Meanwhile Javi kept working on the overall look for the Nightcrawler. Color and hair were being added to the existing and accepted art. Here are 3 of the tests he made that we liked the most.
I liked the dark blue one the most. we're still debating on which color fits best.

Concept Art

Ok, so we've been working on the main treats of our character, our Concept art team, led by 2 great artists, Javier Lopez and Nikolas Duque have been working really hard to get it done.
We've been in group meetings trying to get the most of all the ideas in our team, polishing how is it going to be, and I think it's turning out great.
It's the very first time I'm leading a project, and it's great to have such talented and skilled people to work with. Hope you like how the concept art it's turning out.

So this was the very first Concept art developed by Niko, even though we loosely based our character in X-Men's Nightcrawler, we wanted to make it different, since it's not gonna be a human sized character and since we wanted to make it look our own kind of Nightcrawler.
We wanted to make it look evil, but not to much, agility was a must and we wanted it to be more dynamic.

Meanwhile Javi was working on his own version, he sure made it look way more evil. He also was working on the silhouette, looking for ways to make it look as agile as we wanted it, he also proposed some sort of tentacle-like hair, he went as far as proposing an armor for it.

Here's the first concept for the face, developed by Javi, he tried a variety of faces, from devilish, to curious and innocent.

Thi is Niko's second concept, the whole team had their saying in this, we tried to fuse somehow what Javi had been working on and what Niko had in mind too. Here's what resulted.

We had a meeting and decided where should we go with the concept we already had. So there were nonnegotiable traits, he is agile, fast, evil looking and a night creature. Since it's going to be roughly 25-29 cm tall we have to be careful not to make it look like some kind of fairy. But we also wanted not to make it look like a small demon. so this is how far we are in concept art terms.
Javi and Niko are still working on the final concept for the Nightcrawler, as soon as we have it developed I'll be posting it.

So, let us know what you think, what do you think we should change/add.

Thanks.

Introducing our short

The Nightcrawler project is a short film I've been working on since late September with some friends from work. It's basically an exercise we decided to do to test ourselves and see how far and how good we are, also to get to work on things we all would like to work on but we don't get the chance to do very often.

So, the main plot is simple and short, we see something weird on a partner's desktop and film it, it steals a stylus and runs away. Just that.

Saying so, the idea of this blog is both for me and my team to show you our progress and mainly for you to give us advice and share your thoughts and criticism with us. As I said the idea of this short is to test ourselves, and we'd like to have as much feedback as I can.