2009 was a year in which I used far more conventional media than the digital ones.

Lots of paper, paint and stained fingers, back to the roots, and working digitally only when it was absolutely needed.

I enjoyed the results, sketchbooks got fatter, but it all happened at a cost. My 3D skills rusted big time, after a whole year away from nodes and vectors.

Back to the 3D scenario, 2010 will be mostly digital, and the images posted here will be made in Photoshop, Painter, Modo, ZBrush and Maya.

I’ll post these works here and in Sketcheria’s Flickr, some of them step-by-step, as I did in the canvases I painted in november and december.

The modeling below will be a part of my demo-reel as a concept design piece, an Obama caricature, that will be seen along with Lewis Hamilton and Tiger Woods. It’s a personal project, using a pre-production pipeline I’m used to doing to TV and video producers, adding to what I’ve been studying in 3D in these last few years.

Concept, model sheet, modeling, texturing, animation and render will be lined up and explored, and I’ll make the whole process alone, not as it usually happens in video producers.

All this work, however, won’t last more than 1.5 seconds in the demo reel, as another piece I’m modeling, an helicopter, that started as an animation study in Maya, and will follow a pipeline like this one, from scratch to final edition and compositing in After Effects.

But that’s what animation is all about, lots of studying, lots of working hours, to show a few seconds in a final presentation.

When I twitted about these images in the ZBrush Central forum, the designer Fábio Sasso, A.K.A. Abduzeedo - that runs an excelent design blog that goes by the same name - asked me to do a post about Obama’s modeling, as a making of.

All the steps, from thumbnails to concepts, to model sheets to multi-pass renderings in ZBrush and Photoshop can be followed (in English) clicking the image below.

There are 4 other projects on the way, all the characters are planned, there’s a final script and I have a couple of musicians in my plans to make the soundtrack, and one day they will be on the screens, I mean, monitors.

Actually I want them to be on the big screen, in Anima Mundi and other animation festivals around the world.

There’s no point in dreaming of small things.