New Stuff

I'm now at the beginning of my honours year at Abertay. It's going to be a lot work but i should be able to create something amazing by the end of the year. I want to pick up as many new skills as I can this year so I can create an impressive portfolio.

This is my first attempt at creating something using a graphics tablet in Photoshop. I am hoping to do a lot of my honours project concept art, textures and storyboards using my graphic tablet. At the moment I have to concentrate on research but I'm trying get some practice in now so my skills are up to scratch.

It's All In The Eyes

These renders show my character model's eyes in more detail. The pupils and iris have been modeled to achieve a sense of depth as you look into them. The glazed appearance has been produced by an almost transparent sphere around the eye that has a bump map applied to it.

For the animation I used blend shapes to allow the pupils to dilate and contract.

Model Sheet

This is the character I designed and built for the Advanced Animation module of my course. I paid particular attention to the eyes so I could use them to help convey emotions. I will be highlighting some of this charaters features in detail in futures posts

Bike Update

I have now finished modeling the new windshield and nose for the bike. I think this version is a big improvement on my original work. The shape looks much more aerodynamic and it uses half the number of tris.

I created the nose of the bike by extruding edges from the glass section. This stage really completed the look of the bike, the next step will be to add materials and textures to bring the model to life.
I plan on using the MentalRay car paint texture for the main body parts to get a glossy finish.

Room for Improvement

Working on this model has really shown me how much i have improved over the past 2 years. There is a lot of hidden or bad geometry that needs fixed and some parts like the handle bars will need to be replaced (they used more tris that the rest of the model put together).

These renders show the parts of the model I have worked on. Most of the work has been to get rid of any polygons that are not neccessary to add detail. After doing this I tweaked the vertices to smooth out the bikes edges and normal mapped each part of the motorbike.

The next stage is to remodel the windsheild and the bike's nose, These were the parts I was leased satisfied with when i first made the model and will take less time to do-over than fix.

Keneda's Bike

This bike model was made in 3ds Max 7 during my HND course at Dundee College.


Some of you may recognise this as the bike from the film Akira. That film influenced me greatly and is what inspired me to pursue my love of animation. I have recently converted the .max file to an .obj and loaded it into Maya 2008, I think it could prove interesting to see what i can do to this model now i have more knowledge and experience to draw upon.

Model Britain

This model was produced to display statistics and work as a game menu. The detail on the model is actual geometry which was created using a displacement map, this was to allow for a camera to move around the model and show it from various angles. It was shelved in favour of a more stylised cartoon map but I hope to use this model for some personal work soon.

Digital Monster

I have been trying to improve my skills in Photoshop so i can use it more to develop concept art for my models and animations. I have only used it for photo editing and making textures to this point but am planning on using it more creatively on future projects.

First Post

Welcome to DuncanRoss-Art!

I am now approaching the end of my 3rd year of computer arts at The University of Abertay and think that it is about time i developed some presence on the web.

I have created this page to showcase my work, show my works in progress and hopefully gain some valuable feedback to improve my skills.