Luigi & Mario Normal Maps

Meet The Family...

Now that all the characters are modeled, I'll tweak them a bit to achieve a nice cohesive balance to their designs.  So far they all have strong silhouettes, which is nice:

If anything, Wario's shape could use a little more love.  His side view is the least appealing of the three characters.  Anyway,  I'm making progress.  I'm feeling that texturing might be the next step.

Wario

I thought I would take a moment this morning to post some progress on Wario.  I still have a few more hours of work to get all the details I want into the face, but you overall facial structure is here.  Below are some sketches I made of him before modeling.  Like Luigi, I didn't have a complete character rotation for Wario.  I'm winging the side view.  I deviated from my concepts a little bit with moustache and added the "lightening bolts". I wanted to carry that design over from the original Nintendo Wario.  

I'm imagining Wario to be a tall pugilistic type of character.  When I model his body I'll be looking at standing bears for inspiration.

Luigi, Completed Model

I finished modeling Luigi.  Here are some renders of the mesh.  I'm planning on going back and doing some texture work later but I'd like to move on to Wario before I do that.  I think the next step is to get all the brothers completed and adjust their textures together so they look a bit more cohesive.

Luigi's Body WIP

Quick update of Luigi's body blocked out.  The nice part here is that I've been able to use some of the geometry from Mario (reshaped of course).

Luigi's Head

Spent a little time on Luigi tonight and was able to finish the head mesh.  I purposely gave him sharper angles than Mario to give them some contrast when they stand next to one another.

Mass Update

I thought I would drop by and update the blog really quick...so hello everyone!  I'm just about wrapping on the big website/resume/blog/linkedin updating push.  It's been a real journey for me during the last week.  I actually can't believe how fast all the different pieces came together.

They say (whoever "They" is) that you should update your demo reel every 6 months.  While this sounds like a no brainer, in reality it's difficult to keep up with. Life always finds a way of intervening with your art.  Also when you work an insane amount of hours the last thing you want to do is come home and work on your demo reel.

But moving forward I definitely want to make more of an effort to do this.  The last time I made a demo reel was 2007 and for years my old reel sat around while my art progressed, mostly off the grid.  This new reel displays my talents much better.  It's format is almost much more friendlier to updates.  The template allows me to just swap in new characters in place of older ones.  Atleast until I do a major change to the format.

I'm also thinking that I would like to either do an environmental art reel or a generalist reel.  I have enough stuff that I think it would be kind of fun to put it on display.  Environments are really fun to render because you can move through them (the down side to rendering characters).

I also made a plan for new pieces that don't include any of the new Mad Mario stuff.  These are brand new and will be made to display very particular skills.  So look for news on that in the future.  For now, check out a shorter cut of the demo reel: http://www.dennisflath.com/projects/4452321#1