Building Ava

Ok so for my Digipen Senior project, I'm working with 5 programmers and 4 other artist to produce a 3rd person shooter. It's going to be a mix between Metroid Prime, Silent Hill, and Mega Man. Sort of sci-fi exploration meets Mega-man power ups, with a bit of a creepy vibe. I'm the Character Artist for the project, so I'm in charge of the 3d character models and textures, which I hope to start documenting on this blog.


So I've been working on the main character Ava for about 4 weeks now. I started box modeling, using our concept artist's sketch as a template. My budget was 5000 polys and I landed a little under that. The detail was used to carefully shape the edgeflow around the armpits and shoulders, something I wanted to improve from the last model I did. I wasn't worried about suit detail at this stage because most of that would be covered in a normal map via sculpting in Mudbox (as seen below).


I decided to use Mudbox because the computers at school have them, and Zbrush is a little trickier when it comes to baking normal maps. Right now I've got a basic diffuse map to help visualize the key areas of the model, and I've began sculpting her suit on a new layer, that way I'm able to alter anatomy and suit detail independent of one another.

Wide Rider (it's finished!)

Wide Rider from Drew Gamble on Vimeo

This isn't the true director's cut with awesome music that I'm not allowed to use, but it's otherwise my finished product. It was done over the course of 8 months during the projects classes at Digipen.

Happy Cake Oven

This will probably go down as the last animation I did at Digipen. Fun times, not sure it's my thing though (and the audio seems a little off on the vimeo version).

Game Team

Ratatat/Animation Stuff

Can't believe it's been 3 days since I was in the thick of crowd getting down to some sick Ratatat riffs. Those guys put on an excellent show... truly original. Their new material's sounding pretty sweet and I have to say it was one of the best concerts I've ever been to (minus the copious amounts of Marijuana smoke and occasional douchebag).

Animation.

It's really not my thing but at Digipen we do a lot of it. The first two are from a character animation class that I'm currently taking. We started with a simple character to communicate with body language, then advanced towards a complicated rig for lip sync. The class itself is pretty sweet, she covers a lot of stuff outside the realms of just animation, but I wish it wasn't so time consuming. (The third vid is from last semester)