The Rise of the Unnaturals

26/04/2021

What I've been working on as of late. Current state of Ashley Colburn. Rough concept of a new concept "Bulverizer"

22/11/2020

Current state of "Dawnbreaker". Testing. Took the current sculpt; quickly extracted some clothing and really quickly whipped up a really rough animation. I'll use these to analyze proportions and general feel before finalizing the sculpt.

22/11/2020

14/09/2020

The second aspect of this project is game development. The goal will be to develop a triple A caliber 1 v 1 fighter style game (similar to that of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, etc.). The first part being a playable demo between "Dawnbreaker" (a character designed by my brother Curtis Nordstrom and first seen in his film "The Invincible Man") and an entity known as "The Heart of the Dark". Both images are still w.i.p.

31/08/2020

Mimicking my brother's workflow, I've moved into a 2 week work cycle to produce 2 main aspects of the project. The first being a cinematic, which I am hoping will help introduce the "world" of the "Unnaturals" and the second being a game demo which I'm hoping will introduce the core mechanics of the game. The following images show the main set piece of the cinematic. Still lots of work to do...

17/03/2020

Not really Rise of the Unnatural material but updates as to what I've been up to. So my computer broke at the end of last year and my brother and his wife were kind enough to get me a brand new one! So as a thank you gift and a congratulations (he finished his first feature length film) I did up this piece for him. It's a take of his characters UltratotheMaxMan and a Masked Avenger done in my own style.

19/12/2019

Started my first set piece for The Rise of the Unnaturals. A gas bar/convenience store. Props are in various stages of completion. Created with Blender, rendered with eevee.

07/12/2019

07/12/2019

Before beginning the final draft of "Fauna", I wanted to quickly get this idea out of my head. A first draft of a character I'm calling "Mother Bear". I could have kept going but I do want to commit to finishing "Fauna" first. I would like to do more videos like this in the future. Perhaps with some commentary.

25/11/2019

Just a couple images of my recent update. One in Zbrush, one in Blender.

25/11/2019

Continuing forward with planning and concept. Moving onto the legs.

19/11/2019

Still in Zbrush I've been continuing on in the conceptualizing and planning phase. Still quite rough but happy with the direction so far.

11/11/2019

Starting to bring out the sci-fi/fantasy elements of the character by putting the "faun" into Fauna. Back in Zbrush, a second pass of the concept of her helmet. In this pass I try to find the lines and shapes. In the next pass I'll work at cleaning up the line work and panelling.

27/10/2019

A skin and hair test for Fauna. Still some work to do on the head, but really happy with the results and direction thus far. Shout out to Curtis Nordstrom at North Stream Universe for help with the rendering. You can check out the turntable here: https://youtu.be/Z4x_XUXze54

06/09/2019

This update features some texturing tests for Fauna's face. The textures are 4k so I wouldn't expect this high fidelity for a game model but rather for prerendered cut scenes and such. Rendered once again in EEVEE. Still some work needs to be done, particularly the corners of the mouth.

24/08/2019

This week I did a fair amount of work on the base mesh. It's looking a lot more organic now. On top of that did a bit of a clothing test. Beyond developing a game I'd like to do a fair amount of story telling with these characters through cut scenes and shorts. This would involve exploring the characters beyond their costumed counterparts. Fauna would be part of an elite task force. When not suited up she would spend a lot of time devoted to training as well as being an active ambassador for an organization she is affiliated with. The outfits are just blockouts and the rigging is still very simple so this all would be very much w.i.p.

15/08/2019

This last week was spent working on Fauna. I finished up the retopology of the base mesh. This allowed me to do some limited posing (anything extreme would cause bad deformation in the joints). This is useful because normally I need to sculpt my characters in an A-frame pose. This is a somewhat awkward and unnatural pose and doesn't always provide a great read of the character and being able to do something as simple as dropping the arms by the side can be quite advantageous. I then made small adjustments to the original sculpt based on my observations focusing on the bigger shapes and posture. Up next I want to focus on better defining the medium shapes and I'll probably end up adding toes as I want the characters for this project to be modular in design (think of dressing up dolls only this would be a digital doll). Also I've completely moved into Blender 2.80 :) which has a brand new real time render engine which I had a bit of fun with for these renders and am really looking forward to using in the future. Cheers till next time.

06/08/2019

In the past year I've spent a lot of time sculpting concepts and better fleshing out the style I'd like to go with for TROTU. In that time I've really grown as an artist. That being said I've also been working on M.O.U.S.E. 2.0. Just some subtle changes to style and anatomy. The images are a comparison and a little material/hair test (bald characters usually don't give a proper representation of the final character).

30/07/2019

Working on a character named Fauna. I am currently retopologizing the base mesh. I've been recording as much of the process as possible and am hoping to start a YouTube channel documenting the workflow.