Vince!

A few months back while I was still at the Academy I was assigned to design, model, texture, rig. and light my own character. At the time I was still working for Sharks Ice and regularly bumped into Vince, a mechanic/Zamboni driver/handyman who does a bunch of work for the facility(which goes mostly unnoticed and unrewarded).

He's always been a genuinely funny guy, with great features and characteristics and it dawned on me that Vince would be the perfect guy to base my model on.

It took roughly 3 months to have a finished model with so-so textures and a rig that was semi working. After the semester was over I was a little bummed out that Vince didn't live up to my quality expectations. His rig was mostly broken, which led to mediocre animation, and since lighting and shaders aren't taught to the degree that I'd prefer I was left to learn it all on my own.

I put a lot of work into it and really wanted to use Vince for my reel and unfortunately it wasn't up to standards. Well, it just so happens that I'm currently not working (although apparently still employed) and decided to spend everyday working on Vince up to the level that I'd like him to be.

I've now worked on Vince for roughly 3 or so weeks and have managed to tweak the mesh, completely redo the textures, add normals and occlusion maps and finally got a nice rim shader working for him. I deliberately went for a TF2 art style so that I could keep the model simple, clean and readable while still retaining a lot of character appeal.

Next step is to give him a proper rig and finally get him animated.