owlBear.Model Sheets

this is a character i made for my BFA project at art school. it was made for a 6.5 min short film, called Hun Kin.

the project was an animated rendition of the myth of the Hero Twins in Maya mythology, of how the sun and moon came to exist. the plot was that the hero twins defeated the lords of the underworld through a series of challenges, and by doing so, they become the sun and the moon. thus giving rise to the first day, which is the meaning of the title.

since the story is an epic that i had to cram into a shorter timeframe, the original story had to be change a great deal. i spent weeks just tweaking details in the story...which drove me nuts, b/c i could decide on little details, making it more complex than it needed to be [etc]

this character is the lord of the underworld, which i called owl bear, as its mask is that of an owl's face and it's body is like a gorilla/bear. the owl is a creature of death in mesoamerican mythology. the large body is meant to be scary and menacing, along with the dark color. the red adds to its menacing quality. the trees on his back were changed to spikes as the story changed.

i kept it low-poly so as to keep it manageable for my computer and the comps we had in school. i didn't want to have extremely heavy high-poly models that would make animation a pain in the ass.

i'm still working on this project, mostly b/c i want to have it look good, and i don't know most of the operations i still need to do, like better lighting, VFX, good compositing, etc.

responsible for modeling, UV texturing, rigging, weighting, and animation of this character. [as well as concept art, story development/ storyboarding, art direction, compositing, lighting.] i did all of the work, with help of others on certain aspects [mostly paint weighting and story development]. which was stupid, b/c it'd been so much better if i had collaborated. oh well, next time.

created in Maya 2009 [how ironic] and photoshop cs4.

you can view a highly unfinished version of it here: [link]

hit that there download button for bigger view