This will be a short one. Before I continue, I must say that it is hard to do artistic work for yourself when you are employed as a production manager for example. Because for the whole day you are in numbers and organization, you need to communicate with artists, provide them all material and feedback,  deal with all problems that can be happening in one VFX production. It is really hard to keep yourself organized after all that. After some of my working days, I am exhausted and have no power to deal with my art. In the future, I will write about the importance of good communication between artists and managing staff, and my perspective on that particular problem. 

To continue with Unicorn, 

I tried to make masks for the texturing process, so I followed awesome guides: 

Paul H. Paulino

Artruism Digital

Michael Wilde

Also, as you can see in some parts I reorganize UV because the first version was overkill for my computer RAM. After the whole process, I figured out that baking maps, exporting models for painting, and making masks are the processes that I don't like because you have to wait toooooo long.

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Hi everyone!

I wanted to make an intro for my future videos. My first idea was to make line art animation, something like this. However, I went to freepick.com to find some free graphics for my background. I have found some futuristic graphics that I liked so that changed my initial idea and I had to change the entire approach to the animation and effects. You can see in the montage that I designed the central logotype right there on the spot. As always I had many trials and errors, I was working after my working hours and my mind was scrambled, so experienced animators and After Effects users can notice that I have some rookie mistakes and fails during the whole process. For the sound design, I took a bunch of free samples from Sample Swap and mixed them directly in AE. I didn’t record that part by mistake, and I was already tired (read lazy) to do it again for the montage. You can see they magically appeared as the process went on. 

Enjoy, and if you can learn something from - even better!

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Hi everybody!

Finally, I had a little free time to finish my third blog post: Unicorn - The UV process. This was a challenge because I was constantly changing resolutions and the number of UV tiles, as you can see in the video. I wanted to unwrap the head first, scale it to fill one UV tile and then unwrap the rest of the model based on the head UV shell texel density. As I always do, I group UV tiles by materials or similar parts. It is a lot easier to create material masks when I work like this. I would make a note here: when I did tests for details transfer, I realized that I will have hardware problems so I definitely need to change the number of tiles and address some of the issues that I made here (not putting patches in the middle of tiles - to have symmetry in the texturing phase). So, in the next video: Unicorn - Transferring Details you will see how I did the UV reorganization. Also, the low poly model is sent to Azbe Rihtarsic so he can rig it.

I will do it the old school way - in Maya. As I was completing the retopology of the body, I realized that It would be good if I was going to do an idle animation instead of just posing. In that case, it would be useful to have smarter topology around joints. When I did the topology of the body I took care of edge loops and I tried to stay professional as much as I could, but it’s not excluded that I made some major mistakes. As you can see in the Retopology montage I had a lot of “trial and error” situations. I will see what my rigger will say about it. I tried to stick to guides from FlippedNormals as much as I could. 

Hey everybody!

A few months ago I asked my friend Ognjen Popovic to help me out with some organic models, so I can build up my texturing skills. He sent me a concept from zBrush, and I have to do the rest of the stuff - retopo, UVs, transfer details, sculpt some new details and after that, texturing, LDV and render. Yes, I know, it's more like building up a CG Generalist skills, but what you gonna do :D

I decided to make a blog about my journey through the complete process, so if you notice that I'm doing something wrong or there is a better way to do it, I'm open to suggestions. After all, it is a learning project, so feel free to give me advice.

You can check Ognjen’s work here: https://www.artstation.com/ognjen

The particular concept: