I’ve finally reached a point with my new model where I will stop working on the head and move on to the body. I added hair, tweaked the cel-shading settings, adjusted the lighting, and created more permanent eyes.

Click on the image to see a rotating movie of the current model (a floating head).

Next I’ll try creating the body, something I’ve never tried before. I think I’ll end up going through several scratch versions before I get the poly flow down and end up with a workable version.

In my spare time, I’ve been working on creating a human model in Lightwave. My goal is to be able to cel-shade the model once I’m done to get an anime-type look in my rendered images. So far, I’ve done a lot of work in creating the head, although I still feel like it could use a bit more tweaking. I hope to only spend a little more time on reshaping the face before I move on to building the body for this model. Eventually I’ll add hair to her, too!

Here is a preview of the work-in-progress. Click on the image to view a larger version.

The site hasn’t changed much recently, but I have been busy. Unfortunately, I haven’t been busy working on the site. My day job has been taking up a lot of my time recently and my spare hours have been going into working on a new model in Lightwave. I’m working on creating my first good human model. So far, I have a decent amount done on the head, but I still need to do some shaping until I’m happy with it. Then I’ll move on to modeling the body.

The good news is that I should have more spare time in the near future. I still have a good amount of vacation days to use up before the end of the year, so I will have lots of long weekends in the months to come.

I hope to update more frequently once my schedule lightens up.

I finished modeling a basic set for my animation (space surrounded by distant stars) and I moved on to creating an animation test. This is a pretty basic test, but it has the ship flying, banking, and doing a turn. I also changed the camera’s angle and zoom during the animation, as if it was trying to follow and watch the ship fly by.

Low resolution (374×240, approx 3 MB)
High resolution (748×480, approx 9 MB)

I’ve been working on a short animation of a spaceship to force myself to get acquainted with all of the animation tools in LightWave, which is something that I have not dealt with yet. So far the vast majority of my renders have been still images.

I’m pretty close to finishing up this model, so I thought I’d share it before I move on to the animation stage of production. You can click on the thumbnail image to see a larger version of the model.