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.

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.