This image was created quickly, in an evening, and is based on a pencil sketch that I had sitting around. It is generally faster to work from a concept, as exploring ideas in 3D can easily take up a lot of time, even though it is fun. As I had no intention of animating the character, I created a very rough box-modeled base-mesh in Maya, meaning that it has an unorganized topology, that was exported to Zbrush for sculpting. The sculpt is then rendered in Maya/Mental Ray using a Subsurface Scattering Shader (SSS), which is rendered as a series of passes. The passes are then combined in Photoshop, which is used to create the final image with techniques identical to my look-development procedure..
Jester is based on a series of sketches I did back in 2001 when Gnomon was commissioned to design and produce the SIGGRAPH stage demo content for Alias|Wavefront Maya V3. The project was called 'Zufuhr' and took place in a fantasy incubation factory. Jester is meant to be a plaything for the children. I didn't get to develop this guy then, but a couple years ago I finally got around to it. The final image has no post-processing, except for the 2D smoke added behind him. I chose to develop him in 3D, after doing some 2D look-dev, for the purpose of creating a DVD on character modeling, texturing and shading. Therefore this guy just needs to be rigged and he's ready to animate, which hopefully I'll get around to one day! 
Wow... what a frickin amazing movie this turned out to be!!! Thank you Neville Page (lead creature designer who hired me) for giving me the opportunity to be involved in something so special. I took a seven month 'sabbatical' from Gnomon to work full-time in the art dept from '06-'07, knowing that the experience of working on an epic sci-fi Cameron was something I just couldn't miss. There were about 25 artists at Lightstorm where I worked (more at other locations), and being in the same place as Neville (with whom I shared an office), Ben Procter, James Clyne, Yuri Bartoli, Tully Summers, Tyruben Ellingson, Daphne Yap, Jordu Schell, etc... was truly a privilege. When I joined the creature crew, most of the work was being done in 2D/clay with a little bit of Zbrush, so my role was to bring in 3D so that I could further develop some of the creatures in ways that 3D is best suited. I worked a lot on the Banshee, as well as the Leonopteryx, Fan Lizard, Woodsprites, Direhorse, and some other secondary creatures.... resolving 3D models, doing texture/shader look development, integration tests with paintings by Dylan Cole, rigging and pose tests, animation, etc. Its crazy that this is almost two years ago... What Weta pulled off is just mind boggling. Really the most overwhelmingly intense non-stop visual feast I've ever seen. It has been quite a while since I wanted to see a movie again, immediately. I've only seen it twice, but I know another viewing is right around the corner. Hats off to the hundreds of artists who contributed to it and to James Cameron for being a genius (who btw wasn't a tyrant as people say, but was always quite friendly during his weekly visits with the creature crew). And thanks again Neville! $2B and counting. Crazy.
The good folks at 3Dtotal were kind enough to ask me to do an interview for their downloadable PDF magazine, 3D Creative, which was just released. The article has a bunch of my work and images of the Gnomon campus and they were kind enough to give me a bunch of space... 17 pages! Thanks to Tom, Lynette and Rich for your interest!
Pretty unexpected, but I got a call a couple weeks ago from the Carson Daly show wanting to spotlight me and Gnomon! They came to Gnomon last week to interview me and film the school. It aired a couple nights ago and it turned out pretty cool! Just ignore Carson's embellishments in the beginning. I am not one of the best creature designers in the world. heh.