That's a good point, I suppose. 3d techniques also vary wildly and if you don't know what you're doing you can get some remarkably ugly results. My favorite is people who don't know how to use a particle system for hair and end up making characters who look like they have a koosh ball or steel pot scrubber stuck on their head...

Oh, and alpha eyelashes. That drives me bonkers. Any time I would look at Ashley in Mass Effect I would start twitching...

3D! I've really really wanted to try out 3d work, though it's been a bit hard getting my hands on the industry, recommended software. The university I went to doesn't teach anything along the lines of 3d art, so inspiration, alternative programs, research, and determination it is! Really looking forward to the final product , love the progress so far.

You don't need Z-brush or Maya to create professional quality models. You can do that with Blender and Sculptris, which are what I use. In fact, you can create a 3-d film start to finish inside Blender. Both programs are free, and Blender has a huge community supporting it. It's probably one of the single greatest wonders of opensource co-op software in existence. If you want to get started, there are lot of tutorials on Youtube and a great site called Blender Cookie that offers vids on many different subjects.

That is good advice Vashos. Blender and sculptris are great free tools to learn with, but if you want to find work in the industry you will have to look at what the studios are using and the vast majority use Maya, 3DS Max, C4D, Zbrush and Mudbox.

Anyway here are a couple really small updates. Master Yi has been posed and will be rendering out tonight so I moved on to making the Shiv and the wooden dummys Yi will be cutting up. Bonus points to anyone who can name this champion. =P

Hey everyone posting our final! One of the great pleasures of working in CG is that something always goes wrong. We had a couple of last minute hiccups and literally missed the deadline by seconds. That's alright though, we had fun working on this piece and we still have the animation to finish up. The animation should be done by end-of-day Sunday or very early Monday morning at the latest, so keep an eye out for it. Also including a greyscale version of the scene before textures/matte painting/post compositing. The greyscale (shadow pass) is what we had "finished" at 10pm. Shortly after is when everything else finished up and we put it all together. Enjoy!

Excellent sculpts. Sorry you missed the deadline. Great detail too!

One thing I'd like to see is a more focused render showing Yi in some sort of action slot mid slicing something, or after having just sliced something. The only problem I have with the render is that it looks too "posey" and it looks like you tried to squeeze everything that you sculpted into the scene. I understand the thought process here. But sometimes less is more. If there were fewer objects in the scene we could be much closer to them and see some of that beautiful detail that you sculpted. As it stands now, it's too bad that a ton of the detail that you sculpted is simply going unnoticed because its al crammed in and kind if hard to see. At a glance, I didn't even realize that the statues were other characters. It was only when viewing the shadow pass that I realized they were character busts.

Impressive work nonetheless! I hope that you take what's said into consideration and make some awesome renders of Yi cutting up each statue one at a time. Don't be afraid to pose him mid combat, air, etc.

The fantastic thing about 3D art is you can always reposition and re render. In 2D art you can't. You'd have to manually redraw the whole thing. <3 3D. Gotta start practicing more now that I have free time.

Hey Delk, thanks for the comment. Ideally we would have liked to have gone with something a little more dynamic as well. Unfortunately since time was a constraint we just chose a frame that was already in our animation (and therefore already had some renders). In the animation it'll be a part of the whole and will add more to the piece.

NOo! you missed the deadline? def a winner here

That's true, but the skills you learn in Blender and Sculptris will translate across most 3-d suites. Simply learning how 3-d works, topics like topology/maps/particles/animation, and the production pipeline are the most important parts and the basis for 3d art no matter what software you use.

wow hey, nice, these ppl need to go suck a lemon, this is great, good job.