Aside from getting back into the whole album covers to CG project I also just started making A model of the Witch King Of Angmar from The Lord Of The Rings. I’ve been a long time fan of the films, the literature, and the video games. Though certainly entertaining, the start of this project is not entirely whimsical. A friend of mine who works at EA suggested that I improve my CG character portfolio. I once saw an Adam Savage video where he suggested that whenever you are making a piece to impress a potential employer that you should make something known. The reasoning being, that while originality is certainly valued, an original design can be hard to judge you with, because the only person that knows exactly what it’s supposed to look like is you. But if it’s a known character there’s a benchmark to judge you against. So ideally when I’m done a potential employer looks at it and goes “Wow, it looks just as good as it does in the film!”
If I learned anything in college it’s that you should be sure to not waste your time with a project. So even if no employer is ever impressed with my work on this I still come away having learned a few things. I intend to do layers of simulated cloth, which I haven’t tried prior as I’ve seen the nightmares people have had wrangling it. In the past I’ve always used layered rigs and deformers for cloth to avoid the pitfalls of cloth simulation. I’ve also never made a full suit of armor. So hopefully I learn a couple of things along the way in these two areas of interest, and make something rad while I’m at it.
Ironically I have made a lot of pieces of armor but never for myself. I had a student that I tutored that had a particular interest in it, and I’ve had some Drexel students incorporate it into their finals. This has left me with a pile of projects that are half finished, that I feel like I can’t do anything with. The reason I feel like I can’t do anything with them is that they are student designs, and it would feel like I’m stealing from and upstaging my students all at once, which is not the type of person I aspire to be.
I have long lamented that I don’t seem to make enough for my own satisfaction. I feel as though I have the skills to create literally anything in CG. A status that I feel I reached while teaching four academic years at Drexel University. My students came to me with such a wide variety of problems to solve, shapes to make, and textures to recreate I gained so much knowledge in service of them. However, my portfolio does not necessarily reflect my skillset because I was only making these things for them and felt that I could not incorporate them into my own portfolio for the reasons I’ve already outlined.
Reading those last two paragraphs back this post became more whiny and pathetic than I intended. Especially because I have no one to blame but myself for my perceived shortcomings. I certainly don’t blame my students, whom I’m thrilled to have helped on their journey. I love working in animation and visual effects and just need to commit to spending time working on what I enjoy making. That’s why I hope to jumpstart my website here and follow through on what I’m doing. I’m hoping that recording it will give me some sort of added accountability.
In any case here is the rough start to making the Witch King. I have just the rough base model of his helmet/crown. And also below is a slideshow of my reference material. If anyone wants to make their own model I’ve already done the legwork of finding the best reference I could. I was trying to only use images from the film, behind the scenes, or official merchandise. I didn’t want to be taking from the fandom in order to make my model.
Matthew Cyreal Rotella 