Leila – Facial Motion Capture

My fellow student Thomas Heller and I are currently working on a term project called Low-Budget Facial Motion Capture, and Leila is the head model I have created for that purpose. Our goal is to achieve acceptable animation performance with very cheap cameras and a quite simple capturing setup.
I will explain the procedure in detail, when the project is finished. Until then I can show you the finished head model, where I had to ensure good deformation through a nice edge flow and clean topology. Thomas also made a test rig using 2D capture data, which worked pretty well and can be watched below.

If the video cannot be displayed you can download it here: leila_mocap_test_web.mp4

If the video cannot be displayed you can download it here: leila_turntable_web.mp4

The Cat and the Ball

These are ten seconds of traditional hand-drawn animation. The story is not very original, but I hope it is true to many of Disney’s classic animation principles. It was drawn entirely in Photoshop and took me about 10 hours to complete, although I did not draw all in-betweens and reused some frames.

Zombie Chicken

This zombie chicken will be an enemy in a first-person shooter, which some of my fellow students are creating. Although I am not part of this project I made this character as a sculpting exercise. They won’t be done until January, so I do have some time left to rig and animate it.
The base model was done in Modo, because it allows fast modeling, and was then exported to and sculpted in ZBrush. I did some basic painting in ZBrush, but all the details, like the blood splatters, were painted in Modo. It weighs about 2600 triangles and has three 2048×2048 Textures for color, specular and normals.

Adventure Character for Short Film Project

This is a WIP from a character for a short film project, which was unfortunately cancelled. We wanted to make an Indiana Jones parody with cartoonish characters, so they were heavily inspired by those films. The head is how far I came during Pre-Production, maybe I will reuse the mesh another time. But it was a great modeling exercise.

Steampunk Game Character

This character took me about two months to complete and went through several design changes. Our instructor wanted us to make a character with a mechanical add-on, so I decided to make wooden steampunk wings.
The model weighs 8018 triangles with the wings and accessoires. There is one 1024×1024 pixel texture map for the body and another one for the wings, everything was painted with a mouse, as I still had not bought a tablet. The character is also rigged for posing.

Tutanchamun

This is a low-poly model for real-time purposes. It was used for an interactive learning software, in which the user has the ability to explore Tutanchamun’s grave in the Valley of the Kings. The main difficulty were the shrines and sarcophagus that are wrapped around the mummy like onion skin (Click for further Information).

These two animations have been developed during animation class at my university. The creature model and rig were made by Billy Butler and Kurt & Oyvind, the second character is the famous LowMan by Miguel González Viñé.

I did the animation and rendering, as well as modeling, texturing and rigging of the bunny character and compositing and color correction in After Effects. At first I tried to create a working and flexible ragdoll rig for the bunny, but it always ended up in infinite chaos and so I created a simple, traditional rig.

If the video cannot be displayed you can download it here: bunny_and_creature_web.mov

If the video cannot be displayed you can download it here: DoubleBounce_Web.mov

Greek Vase

The assignment was to model a NURBS-model of an ancient greek vase and design a texture for it. I than had to set lights and render it in three variations – on a white background, a black background and one free version. A detailed documentation (Vase_Tutorial.pdf, 950 KB) of the process was also mandatory.

Ducati 848 Vector Graphic

This is a vector graphic of a Ducati 848 motorcycle, done as a university project in spring 2008. Took me about two weeks and approximately 30 hours to complete. The assignment stated to only use Illustrator paths to draw an object. Most areas are paths with single colors, only the front and back tire have gradients and parts of the cooling unit in the front are gradient meshes.

Smoking Kills – Research for Short Film Project

We just did the pre-production for this project. It was planned as an anti-smoking-clip, featuring a society of microscopic terrestrial and incredibly cute creatures, which would have been made extinct by the tip of one single cigarette at the end of the clip. I learned a lot of technical tricks in Maya during the process.
The cigarette model consists only of procedural textures, the tear strand rig was planned for usage as slime of the dead creatures and the burning paper, a complex hypershade animation, would have been used in the ending credits.

If the video cannot be displayed you can download it here: manuelwieser_tear_strand.mov

If the video cannot be displayed you can download it here: manuelwieser_burning_paper.mov

Female Head Model

I did this model of a human head as a private exercise in Maya with lots of references. It was the first time (back in 2007) that I tried creating a head mesh and I wanted to achieve good edge loops and a clean topology.

Augustus – Real-Time Strategy Game

These low-poly models were created during the work on our thesis at the Höhere Technische Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen in Innsbruck, Austria from summer 2005 to spring 2007. It was a real-time strategy game done from scratch with C++, OpenGL, Maya, Photoshop and in a team of four people.

The original thesis is available for download, it features descriptions of all the technical aspects and research as well as a complete list and details of the models: Augustus_Diplomarbeit_Small.pdf (10.7 MB, 234 pages)