Author: Simon

Security Guy

A little sketch I made in-between jobs at work. Took about a day and half in total. I tried to add in visual lines in the design so it reads better, a tip I picked up from the pixologic Sigraph 2013 video’s of Disney.

Tommy Gun

This is a tommy gun I modeled in Zbrush. I’m trying to improve my hard surface skills with Zbrush and since I needed a tommy gun for a character of mine I thought it was a good practice to do it totally in Zbrush. Not all the details of a real tommy gun are there because I’m gonna make a game res model of this.

Old Head Sketch

A head sketch of a stylized old man. The idea is to make this in a full illustration, but I’m first gonna finish my animation because I allready have too many personal projects going on. I’ll return to this once the animation is done.
Workflow is below.

Oil Lamps

Two of about ten oil lamps I have to design and make for background props of an illustration I’m working on. Made in Zbrush, quite fun to do some hard surface modeling.

Moth rig test

[evp_embed_video url=”http://simonglas.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Renders_TestAnim_1.mp4″]

I finally have time to make another blog post. The first five months of this year were filled with working on the ‘Thors Hammer’ project, a themepark ride for the tusenfryd park in Norway. Although I really loved working on the project, it was almost a constant crunch time which left no free time or weekends to do my own stuff, no problem really, just the reason why I haven’t posted in five months.

This is a little animation I’ve made to test the rig I’ve made for this moth. I’m working on a short animation where this moth will play a prominent role, but there will be more flying insects in there. The goal was to make a flexible rig which can be re-used for different flying insects.
The render of this moth has nothing to do with the final animation of course as there are no textures, shaders of fur used.

I normally animate in XSI, but it was a real pleasure to animate in Modo. It is amazing how far the animation toolset and workflow has come in just a few releases. Every time I thought ‘wouldn’t it be handy to have …’ it was already there, like the motion path option to be on permanently, even in the model view, brilliant!!

Modelled, rigged, animated and rendered in Modo.

Adjusted Orc

Last month I spend some time on updating and finishing my Orc. I made the sculpture somewhere around May but never bothered to texture it. When revisiting this sculpture I though I could do a bit better so I changed a few things. The biggest change was that I reduced the length of the maxilla, the orc is a stylized figure but I felt it bordered on the unbelievable.

Hands and legs got more definition and skin folds and I also made him a bit older and made his expression a bit more intense, the old one was looking a bit too bland. After that it was on to texturing and rendering. I also sculpted a few rocks and added some grass and a bit of ground/dirt to place him more in a setting.

Hope you like the end product. 🙂


Left is the old orc, right is the new one.

Zbrush Characters

Two characters for a new turntable I’m working on. It’s gonna be a little beach scene with the boy standing in the water and the woman under a Parasol. The characters are still a wip but the sculpting is nearly done. The hair of the boy is still polygons as I wasn’t sure yet if I wanted to sculpt the hair or use fibermesh. But after sculpting the hair for the woman, which was incredibly easy compared to most hair systems, I’m going to also use fibermesh for the boy.
Some props still have to be made, like a watch and earrings for the woman and a diving mask for the boy, new eyes for both, plus of course the rest of the scene with the beach, the water, the parasol etc.

Zbrush Game Character



Lately I’ve been making a game character. I must say, that was a lot more work than I had anticipated. In the end it took me about seven days from start to finish, including a simple rig and a simple environment.

Most of the high-res work was done in Zbrush with Modo for the modelling of the low-res parts and the final retopology. The budget they gave me was 5000 tris, not very high for todays standards, and I used 4972 of them. Modo was also used for painting of the textures, which is a little bit better than Zbrush I think because you can straight away set the resolution of the textures. In Zbrush you basically paint a vertex color map, so to get a decent resolution for your texture you need a fairly dense mesh. In Modo you really paint on the texture (which size you decide), even if you have a very low resolution mesh, which keeps the scene more responsive. An other advantage is that working with layers is easier, a drawback is that only 8 textures can be visible at the same time.

Post work on the textures as well as painting specular and glow maps were done in Photoshop. UV’s were made with UVLayout (best program I ever bought!!). Normal and Occlusion map were done with XNormal.

Here are some pictures of the character. The top picture is the high-res sculpt in Zbrush, the middle picture is the low-res model in the Unity game engine and the lower picture is a beauty render from Modo.
The supplied concept was by Red Stream.

VFX Reel is online.

I’ve added my VFX reel to my homepage. You can now choose between the modeling reel and the vfx reel, breakdowns can be downloaded from the same page.
For all iOS users, my apologies for the bad quality, the mp4 version looks fine but the WebM one has all contrast removed through its compression. I’ve used Miro for conversion as Adobe Media Encoder can only export to WebM inside a Quicktime wrapper and I’m not sure if non-flash non-mac devices can play that. I’m eagerly awaiting my Production Premium CS6 update to see if the Media Encoder now can natively encode to WebM. If it does, I’ll udate the WebM versions of the reel, but until then, this is the best I got.

New Reel is Online!

Wow, Finally! After months of rendering, compositing, After-Effecting, compressing and re-coding my new reel is live. This is only the first reel as I will also be adding a VFX reel in the coming months, though that will be significantly less work. The 2011 reel is removed but I might add it again at a later date, we’ll see.

A change to the site is that I took the gallery down as that only contained very old work and never saw any additions. Most of my recent personal work can be seen on this blog, and will eventually find its way onto the reel, so a gallery section was not needed anymore. Take a look at my new reel at the homepage and let me know what you think!

Cheers