Hubert Ham is a character I developed after inspiration from game I was playing with my family. The game was to create things in any medium based on cards with words on them randomly pulled from a deck.

The character works as model, this being his first photo shoot. In the future I would like to develop the project further to create 12 shots for a possible calendar. The shot above would be used to make the July page. The theme being summer and.. pig roast.

I created a base mesh and fluid topology in Maya, and then sculpted more detail both in Maya and Mudbox. Most of the materials used are based on mia material X. Rendering was done using final gathering, two point lights using quadratic decay and a spotlight for highlight. I rendered a separate shadow pass casting shadows from all lights to add more depth.

Various maps used are below. The skin diffuse is meant to be a bit sunburned, and was applied with the skin shader in mental ray. The UV I laid out using Maya bonus tools. The normal maps and textures I created in mudbox. The last two maps are for his onion "hairdo".

The above video is an example of the rigging I created for his eyes. The eyeball had to be a sphere in order to rotate correctly in his head, and is using an active lattice deformer to distort the sphere into the cartoon shape of his eye. To rig Hubert beyond his eyes, instead of building from scratch I experimented with the Maya autorigging system. This was very convenient in order to create a quick rig that could be refined with a few additions and weight painting, though I do prefer creating my own rig for better results in terms of deformation and range of movement.

Below are my initial design sketches to develop the style I wanted to use.

The following photo is of the original polymer clay sculpture I created while playing the card game, developed a bit further than the 30 seconds the game allowed for.

This final shot is a WIP render I created for instagram.