I’m new to the community, but not new to CG work. However, I’m diving into the deep end of Blender for the first time.
This is a project I’ve made for myself to:
Get some real practice in full still production in Blender
Make a neat birthday present for my sister, who became a gamer with me, playing PC adventure games together back in the day
The subject will be a fan recreation/reinterpretation of throw-away parrot character from 1992’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. I’m giving myself about a month to complete it, from concept to final product. Hopefully posting here will not only keep me accountable, but encourage me to continue. I’m posting my reference and first in-progress rough sculpt below. While there are a few Blender projects out there already, depicting parrots, I’d like to steer clear of mimicking any of them. I want this to be my own, not a facsimile.
I’ve got the sculpt pretty much complete, and ready for Retopo, I think. I skewed a bit from my original ortho drawings, but I’m liking the character his facial features are getting.
Not as far along as I’d hope this week. But I did manage to complete the sculpt last week and begin retopology. I think the head is coming along nicely, especially since this is my first sculpted/retopo’ed character.
You’ll notice I removed the bulge on his forehead. Looking closer at the reference, I have no idea why the red portion of their crest read as a bulge to me. Oh, well. Smoothed it down to the point I think I can get better expressiveness out of the face, without focusing on the forehead.
This week, I completed retopology, finished out the mouth, and got the main, large feathers shaped and placed. I’m hoping to be through UVing by Monday, but we’ll see how this weekend goes.
Super busy these last couple of weeks at work. Fortunately, although we’re at the end of March, I still have two full weeks before my “true” deadline. This week, I finished out the initial blend shapes and unwrapped this guy. Here’s the initial base colors I quickly laid down in Substance Painter. He’s starting to come together!
Quick update. I still find I’m falling behind schedule, but I have hope that I’ll find the time to wrap this up by Saturday, if I put my mind to it. Primary surfacing is complete. I’m not exactly happy with the main body texture, but that’ll be covered by feathers anyway, so it might not be as bad as I see it. Currently working on primary feather UVs and texturing.
Tonight I got a first pass of the fur groom complete. I hope to wrap that up tomorrow along with the eye texturing and an initial rig pass. Final feather colors are still to come!
I’d keep going on tweaks and pruning of the fur and feathers, but I really need to knock out the rig and pose this guy before Friday. He’s feeling too diffuse, overall, to me, so if I have time I may pull down the roughness on his anisotropic shaders. Might get a sharper highlight on the beak, while I’m at it. Overall, though, I’m starting to be really pleased by his look.
As an update, I’m still deep into rigging him right now. I presented what I had to my sister this weekend, for her birthday, and can’t wait to hand her the final product!
Wings and feet are rigged, so I’m going to spend this week hopefully getting to final poses, environment, and lighting. Taking a bit longer than I wanted, but I feel this’ll be far better polished if I take my time, rather than rush through it.
