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Demonstration of how the weight at the bottom of the crane automatically shifts position according to the pitch of the main arm and how the height of the payload can be adjusted. All controlled by one bone's position and scale [blue].

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In keeping with the dark souls inspiration from my female knight, I tried a similar method to dress the male model which I made before. In contrast to the female knight, now that I had developed my skills, I went with a more streamlined design for the helmet and chestplate, focusing on a shape which would lead to blows glancing off the metal and more in keeping with how armour was traditionally designed with a leather tunic section with separate plating for easy mobility around the pelivs. To avoid a wierd floaty look, and to diffuse the leather textures across the body I made two leather belts to attatch the pauldron and another 2 for a section around the midriff for a scabbard to connect to.

However, realsim and cool-factor are an important balance so I decided to compromise with the sword arm being fully armoured at the bicep and shoulder and with a full gauntlet leaving the left with just the bracier. I thought this would look more menacing and show off the musculature which I spent a lot of time sculpting. To complete the look I designed some simple barbed wire to coil around the left arm which shows that the knight is not afraid of pain and ties in to dark souls/elden ring concepts where blood letting has ritualistic significance and can be used for spells etc.

Because I intended to have this asset be implemented into a game, I created a set of animations for different attacks and walk cycles which are on the top left. I wanted to use the idea of a composite sword because I always thought that they were a cool concept and so I designed one whith a complete crossguard and double bladed design, reminiscent of a knight's greatsword. This design choice was meant to be a challenge and I had fun figuring out how to animate the flowing nature of the weapon and the satisfying reconnecting to form a stable, traditional sword blade. This also allowed me to play around with interesting attack concepts which use the weapon to it's fullest and show how mobile the user can be. My favourite animations are probably the "sword swing" and spinning "jump slice" attack which features a slow motion section inspired by anime attacks with the camera impossibly close to the blade.

Just above this section I included a work in progress animation which is more cinematic showing a knight try to hold on to life after a fatal stab wound to the chest. This also draws inspiration from dark souls motifs which often show how formidable of an opponent a knight can be and have themes of undeath throughout, sometimes showing that we can survive off willpower alone.

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Just the untextured vegitation undermesh

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Shell with additional sculpted under-mesh (vegitation)

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Spiral pattern revealed after the shell base model (ring) offset was changed

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Low-poly version of the shell (pre-sculpt, pre-subdivision surface mod.)

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After watching a popular Australian Youtuber play with hermit crabs, I was inspired to challenge myself to try to recreate one of these complex crustaceans in Blender.

To achieve this, I started using reference images found online until I could find a flat view of the animal. From this I was able to make a hermit crab in a flattened position to use as the rest pose for rigging [views shown in red on the right]. To make the carapace, legs and claws look appropriately three dimensional, I needed to also put my sculpting skills to work to produce the serrated textures and tapering shape of each exoskeleton section.

To make the shell I started with a rough cylinder shape and used a recursive strategy with Blender's array modifier (set to object offset) which allowed me to change not only the rotation but also size of the rings to create a spiralling snail-shell look [shown below].

Playing off similar ideas seen in mythology of the world being on a turtle's shell and the fact that hermit crabs also carry their homes (shells) on their back, I had an idea of an ancient civilisation which used the hermit crab's shell as their whole world/city area and who lived under the protection of the wandering great beast and I made a small, ring shaped castle to sit at the top side of the shell.

To give an idea of the scale I added some decorative clouds and set the camera focal length to be very high (since you have to be very far away to capture such size. Furthermore I gave all the textures extremely high roughness and used a large scale noise texture to give varying shades of green
Since I didn't plan for this model to be in a game I was only focused on producing a single image for a poster or digital wallpaper. So to give the ancient effect I used high-poly, sculpted under-meshes which poked through the original mesh to give the shape of mossy growth (but on a much larger scale)

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Goliath Hermit crab with castle and river/waterfall

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NEW / ONGOING PROJECTS:

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A couple of years ago, during school, we were given the task of producing a heart poster for biology class.

Instead of just labelling images from online or drawing a 2D version myself I decided to go further and extrapolate a 3D model from a textbook image of the chambers of the heart and major blood vessels. I primarily used sculpting and curve shapes along with several reference images.

I thought that this representation would help my peers and me understand the position of the major blood vessels in and how they wrap around each other. It also helps with seeing how the atria and ventricles connect and their respective volumes.

Whilst it may seem out of place this serves to show variation in the projects which I'm willing to tackle even if it's outside of what I usually do

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Tower cranes are one thing - which often go unnoticed - which tie a city together. They often serve as background elements in games but sometimes they can be the centre of attention such as in construction games or overhead "drone" shots of cities. Therefore I set myself the challenge of modelling a crane which would hold up at both near and far views by being simple enough to have several in the background without sacrificing too much detail.

Since crane plans are often either low detail or hard to find online I had one main option. Since a lot of crane's structures are skeletal and constrained to 90d angles it made sense to use the same technique as the MAZ-7310 and use fspy. This allowed me to easily "trace" my reference image in 3D [above] of a Terex CTL 340-24 luffing jib tower crane which has a cool/complex counterweight system which caught my eye.

This method is not perfect, for example my image only showed the left side so I needed to find separate references for the cockpit. Additionally it is a lot easier to "freehand" model the braces and other connecting pieces in order for the distances to match up correctly.

Rigging such a rigid object like a crane was easy as you can imagine. I managed to create a system where I could control the pitch of the arm, the yaw of the main body and the hight of the payload all from a single bone's position and scale

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Each part of the collection is an individual object like this (untextured to show shape)

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Dark grass collection

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Light grass collection

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shows visible bones + untextured and shaded flat to show the mid-poly skeletal mesh

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Using similar methods to my human meshes I wanted to persue the pathway for making a more game ready and realistic creature like the type you might fight in a dark fantasy RPG.

The model is fully rigged including IK on to make finger placement easier and to add extra detail I used custom procedural textures using blender's node maps to generate a bumpy skin material.

Custom hair particle sim for the beard and body hair. weight painting used to control length in different areas

Demonstrated below is a simple animation which could be used for an attack

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Two female models I made a couple of months apart to show my progress.

The side by side emphasises the finer details of the muscles of the back and shoulders of [right - newer] compared to [left - older]

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Rigging and modelling bird wings as a challenge since they always seemed very difficult to make.
I didn't want to spend too much time doing this since I wanted to find a method that gave the best results in the shortest amount of time with the simplest shapes in order to retain smooth animations and potentially hold up in the event of exporting into a game engine like UE5 for an animated skeletal mesh. just for fun I used image textures from bird wings online and combined them with my female model from earlier

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These human models then serve as assets which I use for other projects such as these dark souls inspired atmospheric renders which helped me practise rigging and modelling armour.

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Personal milestones in modelling Human body for characters.

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Personal milestones in modelling Human body for characters.

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Primary method is sculpting followed by manual retopology for ease of rigging.

Using simple shapes I like to block out the muscles using anatomical references from images online such scientific illustrations and images of people.

After remeshing I retain the complex detail via the common method of baking into a normal map texture.

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depicted: piles of bloody, misshapen, white corpses - central knight delivers the final stroke after a tough slaughter

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Flat image of my dark grass particle system rendered with an HDRI

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Flat image of my dark grass particle system rendered with an HDRI

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Can you tell that it's a render?

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Starting from several flat images of grass strands from my own lawn I put the image textures on planes and used the knife tool to cut out an N-gon (to reduce no. verticies as much as possible) in the shape of the grass.

Next I formed bunches of the grass strands to form individual plants and set them aside in a collection.

Using Blender's hair particle system advanced mode you can add random rotation and scale to each instance in order to give a natural look.

The end result was much too bright so I individually darkened each grass texture (which used the image textures from before as diffuse colour) by combining the image texture with a darker green colour.

depicted: UV-sphere primary with my particle system on its surface - the HDRI is a default from blender's "world" lightmaps folder

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depicted: central knight surrounded by piles of armour pieces covered in blood - slain knight is on their greatsword, held over the shoulder

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Realistic model of a tank heavily inspired by a leopard I.

I used the plans of this tank which I found online to carefully model each part focusing first on the main body using large, simple shapes and later moving on to using smaller and smaller meshes for the armoured plating, rails and other details.

The treads demonstrate the use of blender's curve and array modifiers as I only had to model one segment of the tank track and then it was copied over and over in a closed curve shape designed to match the profile of the tread path

To show wear I used a custom painted texture and used that to controll how much of the green colour came through from a green plate metal material I found online

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Scene with crane models complete with building frame [red] along with mock buildings (made quickly) to give and idea of the different positions the crane models can be in

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Cinematic/poster shot of a MAZ-7310

This soviet military "tractor" caught my eye during a documentary as a powerful missle transporter so I decided to make one in blender and use this opportunity to practise my hard surface modelling.

I couldn't find any plans for this vehicle so I instead opted to use a program I saw on a youtube tutorial called fspy which allows the perspective of an image to be translated to a blender virtual camera for ease of modelling exact structures from images.

to keep my methods constructive I used the boolean modifier and didn't apply it so I could move around the "cutters" for the windows and in-set door handles and other features until my positioning was perfect and the rest of the mesh had come together

I used a smoke sim and a low poly collider to give the dust plumes to add a bit of extra realism as well as using the cycles motion blur rendering to make the wheels look like they were moving fast

For the blueprint style I made a grid texture and rendered an outline of the model I had made from different orthographic views using blender's "freestyle" feature.