2024 Rookies - Monsters and Machines

Another year, another entry, welcome back, I’m glad to have you here!

This year's entry comprises my two favorite and most challenging projects that I used to develop my skills in rigging and modeling. Each one is geared to a different challenge.

The Jet Engine

This project was my main hard-surface modeling exercise this year. The goal was to re-create an existing complex engine as accurately and with as much detail as possible. The choice for this exercise fell on the Jumo 004 turbojet engine, which was used on the first jet fighter plane, the German ME 262.

The first massive challenge was getting a good understanding of the engine itself, as well as making a full list of all the important parts and finding good reference material for each of these parts. In the end, I decided to separate the engine into different stages, researching and sorting the individual parts by engine stages, which helped a lot in the overall understanding of the engine and the recreation of the parts.

Modeling and UV unwrapping of the entire project has been done in Blender and was a great exercise on how to deal with more complex hard surface objects.

The final rig and animation were done in Maya. The goal was to completely disassemble the engine, showing all the internal parts in the process. To accomplish this, I divided the engine into the previously mentioned segments, rigging the disassembly of each segment individually and coding scripts for repetitive tasks. This made handling the sheer amount of parts more manageable.

Credit to colleague and great animator, Marcel VANDERWEYEN, who did the final animation!

The Creature

This project, featuring a mystical medieval monster, inspired by the concept art of Andrew Baker, was the first quadruped creature I worked on, from the base sculpt to the final rigged creature.

I was intrigued by the initial design and wanted to have my own take on it. The goal was to create my own 3D version based on the creature concepts, which our animators could later pick up and work with.

The base sculpt for this Project was done on Zbrush.

To prepare for rigging, I exported the sculpt to Blender for retopology and added additional details, such as stuck weapons and arrows to the creature.

The final rig was done in Maya, following the quadruped rigging course from ESMA with a bunch of personal experimentation included

And with that, we come to the end. Thank you a lot for your attention and hopefully see you next year!