Congratulations to Darrin Hofmeyr from South Africa, who has won the July XSI Base Image Contest. Darrin receives as a prize the Mesmer Press book XSI Illuminated: Character signed by the author, Anthony Rossano.
About XSI Base Community (www.xsibase.com)
and the Image Contest
Every month XSI Base holds a contest about a creative topic. People can show their
technical as well as their artistic skills. The artists who reach first,
second or third place receive a prize. The new topic is always announced at
the beginning of each month. Here's a link to the current Image Contest
XSI Base.com is a Softimage community. Besides the forum, you can find
the latest news about Softimage XSI, industry news, interviews with
professionals from various industries, job openings, learning resources,
tools and scripts.
About Darrin:
I had often surfed the BASE without ever joining and simply read the forum and looked at the Art. Building robots or mystical environments was not my strong point and I never got interested, but then when the contest subject was "cute characters" I new I could do something and so signed up immediately. My girlfriend Sasha Perdigao is a master at anything cute, so I decided to get one of her characters to model. This was perfectly legal in the contest rules. We did not have to design it ourselves.
Before I tell you how I did it, let me first tell you a bit about myself.
Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1976 I was always a fan of animation and was drawing for as long as I can remember. I was extremely fortunate to be able to study in Scotland after finishing school. There is a lack of animation schools in South Africa and so this was an oppurtunity I would not scoff at. I graduated with a 2:1 with Honours and returned to South Africa to find work. I have now been working for four years with a brief stint of seven months in Toronto, Canada. I worked mostly in Maya over the last four years but am a huge fan of XSI and used the software in Canada and whenever possible now in South Africa.
I am working mostly on Commercials, doing character animation and a very little special effects. Unfortunately the local Ad agencies find that character animation in commercials is somewhat lost on our audience. So very few M&M type ads are done in this country.
So now for "Jennifer", my cute character. After Sasha had designed it, I simply started it the same way I do most others. Importing a front, side and 3/4 view reference plate on grids for the start of the modelling. It was a pretty simple character but seeing as the artist was making sure I did not make a mess of a good character I had to finesse all the curves and thats what took time. Starting off with simple box and subdividing where necessary I got the basic shape. The modelling took just over two weeks in my spare time. As for the texturing, I would have to say that this is my downfall. The character could have looked a lot better if I was more experienced and had spent longer on this critical part of the whole package. I am more into modelling and animation than I am at spending ages setting up good textures. Oh well - next time.
If you check out my website you can see a rough, quick walk cycle I did as a test.
Thanks to Mesmer for the book and thanks to XSIBase for the competition.
