Sculpting a Feng concept and going crazy due to kids holidays

As a freelance guy working from home most times and a parent, the kids school summer holidays are always a combination of walking barefoot through hell and a trip to Disneyland wrapped up in a wrapping paper of overwork and too many long hours. (Although being busy trips anywhere are out of the question unfortunately.) While I love my kids to bits, the idea of my 6 year old son Kane being off school for nearly 7 fucking weeks still terrified the life out of me, as I also have to get work done as well as be 'daddy' 24 7. Now when I was a kid it was 6 weeks, so I can only assume that teachers are taking the piss with the extra week lol. Thankfully though the school holidays are almost over.

It's been a busy one this year as I've been pulling very long hours and doing more stuff than may be immediately apparent. At the core of this is the FXPHD advanced environment modelling course I've been teaching. As all kids around where I live are off school as well (obviously) this means recording anything during daylight hours is a no go unless people want a soundtrack accompanying it that sounds like a kiddie riot. So lots of being awake till 4am and then up at 7am with the kids. This is not the best way to live trust me. It takes its toll and I can be a bad tempered old bastard at the best of times lol.

I also found time to do some stuff just for me. In fact I did something I very rarely do which is sculpt from another artists concept art. It was from some art by Feng Zhu (if you don't know who Feng is....you should). Some of the characters on the sheet of concepts he'd posted 'jumped out at me'. Without asking, or even thinking I felt compelled to sculpt at least one of them.....so I did. Now this is very naughty as your supposed to ask people before you do a 3d version of their 2d work... but when I've driven...I'm driven. I explained this to Feng and showed him the results and he liked it and was cool with me sharing it.

I do intend on texturing this when time allows and taking it to a final render stage, but I've got much on my plate at the moment that I'll have to wait for a gap. Apart from changing the tentacles it's all Feng's design and I can take no credit for it whatsoever. All I did was bring it into 3 dimensions. I've been a lover of his work from long before I did 3d professionally and it was nice to work with some a good bit of concept art by undoubtedly one of the great master concept artists of our time.

Well I've just spent all day uploading week 6's videos for the FXPHD course and am giving myself until Monday before starting on the next one. (Which is damaging the entire cathedral stone work in a sympathetic way ...in other words not making it look like it's been through the battle of the Somme, the battle of Leningrad combined like we usually do as digital sculptors for portfolio pieces to make them 'look cool' lol).

I may also get some time to finish off / continue with a few things I'm working on, on the programming side with any luck. Fingers Crossed.

Of Gods and Men....or not.....

raw poly model for the army of men...I have load of these now lol

Ok so the trailer for Of Gods and men has went live (which I had to bang out in 30 mins after 750 miles of train rides to and from Leamington Spa and back, after a last minute request for a trailer for EUE). After working on this and the many things that have went wrong around my short like a cloud of badness, it's got to the stage where I can almost no longer look at it. After writing brand new aps such as exodus to basically do what massive does..only my way and thus meaning I don't have to fork out a fortune for massive..... and many other things such as an auto skinning plug in for max and Maya (that came too late for the 1st part of my short), I have came to the stage where due to the compromises I've had to make due to every render engine I own dying on me (sticking 3.3 billion polys work of animated skeleton army will do that for any render engine it seems lol) I have been reduced to diffuse only passes from 3delight.

look no motion blur lol

That alone kills me as I know what it'd look like with the right passes to play with in comp instead of having to find a way to hack it together to make it look 'passable'. That was never the aim. The original dragon rig (which is what you see in the trailer) is seriously fucked up...you cannot parent it to a spline path in any way due to the rig being broke (I didn't rig it lol), there was 2 other rigs done by some mates but alas they arrived too late to render that stuff out as it was taking 20 mins a frame without motion blur. Even Breitbilds render farm can't be handed over for free for the length of time it would have taken.

I had every single bug ever recorded pop up in every single app I've used in some cases causing the whole thing to grind to a halt for days and in one occasion a week and a half..... I've had people who swore blind they would help pull out for various reasons which meant it went from 'Wayne makes a nice short with help from a few mates in 4 months' to 'Wayne tries to save his short with zero help in 2 months with broken software.

After months of pulling till 3am and 4am each night 7 days a week I'm as near burnt out on this project as I want to get. To put it very bluntly I'm sick to fucking death ot it and am very close to saying 'fuckit' and doing something else for end user event.

close up of one of the skeleton scenes in Exodus (notice low res sheild to try and save to enormous polycount)

Why? as I know that every problem or issue with that short whether my fault or not, stops with me... I'm not the sort of bloke to go naming names and trying to spread the shit around. So here are a few images that are from the dev of 'of gods and men', some that were lost back when I lost a month's worth of work on it after a drive went bang. They may be more representative of what's went on behind it than the actual trailer or the short itself.

An image (oneof only 2 that survive) from the lost months worth of work

Times ran out, there is no way to make this better at this stage. I have a choice to either suck it up and chalk it down to a bad deal or throw my toys out of the pram and can it completely. The jury's still out as to how adult I'll be over it after months of my life spent on it. Simply put as it stands it doesn't match the vision I've had in my head for 23 years. Maybe I've just been overworking...I dont know.

Exodus alpha version 1 results.....no animtion and no use or more than one model back then...its much differnt now.