First Manga, soon to be a Maya animated character

Now that my account is working again, I can post under my own handle!

Here's the design for Niko, a bit further along (still kind of scrubby, in my opinion). How does she look in the bomber jacket? I have other costume ideas, but so far I'm kind of partial to this one. As you can see, I still need to learn some hand rendering techniques. I'm good at the fast sketch, but not so good at the finish work, and I still don't understand folds in clothing.

Here are the front and side view sketches of Niko. Now I'm ready to start modeling her. I'm going to do her as two separate projects, one in Max, and one in Maya. The Max version I'm going to convert into a Quake III character. The Maya version will be used in a new animation, and I'll have her singing a pop love song (probably "You Are", by Atomic Kitten).

.. and the side view ..

The construction of the two models will be very different. The Max version will be all polygons, including the hair, as it is supposed to be a game character. The Maya version will be done in sub-D's, with procedural rather than modeled hair, again because its intended use will require that. The goal here is to learn both Max and Maya at the same time, to boost my employability. Fortunately I have access to both these packages through nearby production houses that have open workstations I have arranged to use.

Note that she's not wearing her flight jacket either - I plan to model that seperately and apply it as clothing rather than build it into the model. This will give me some extra flexibility when it comes to wardrobe later on in the production process.

Coool. Ahh, character modelling... god luck to you sir.

You know, it's funny - you see a lot of character stuff on CGTALK.COM and other places like that, so you'd think that character work would be the most common type of CG. But I've been talking to potential employers and business partners, and apparently character work is done by fewer than 10% of all CG artists, and fewer than that can actually animate them once they're built.

The funny part is that I had no idea this was the case when I started out. I thought that I HAD to learn to do character stuff if I wanted to work in the industry, that it was the bare minimum potential employers would expect of you.