Davy

Well I had started another space soldier character in zBrush about a week and a half ago. It's not done yet, but I was working at school on it Friday and zBrush or the computer wouldn't let me get very far without crashing every few minutes for whatever reason. So to blow off my frustration I decided to sketch him out instead. I needed to fine tune the final look of his boots, gauntlets, and gloves anyways. Funny how none of that came to fruition when I got as far as I did with this. I'd like to work more on it, and I might in the future. It seems decent enough to stick in the back of my portfolio or website somewhere when I get those ready. Not really sure about the pose, it was just how the original sketch ended up, and I wasn't really thinking about it when I started. Also his name is Davy, one of my friends decided that was what he should be called, and from that point on it was so.

I even managed to work on this in a way that kind of looks like a tutorial, so I figured it couldn't hurt to upload that. So here's the process behind Davy:

1 - Rough Sketch

2 - Block-In Lights and Shadows

Did this in a new layer under the sketch.

3 - Refining

The longest part. Just defining each part better, adding finer details

4 - Atmosphere

Rendered out some easy clouds with Photoshop and stuck 'em over Davy. Erased the area over his arm to make atmospheric perspective more apparent. Easy to remember as well, darker = closer and further away = lighter (actually by lighter I mean closer to the background color ex. the sky)

5 - Fancy Lights

This is just me trying to get more bang out of this, I already had highlights but I felt like he needed some more. Just went around with the soft brush and painted in the lights. Then went back with the brush at around 10% opacity and built up the glowing aura around each light. It was the same process for the highlights I intensified on his visor and shoulder.

Here's a little GIF of the whole process above, enjoy. 

Hope this helps somebody out there.

First Contact

Well since our group finally put up a website for our short, I felt obliged to post a few of the worthwhile things I did for it here. The soldier pictured here though was the final version I wanted for the short, which addressed some issues with animation of her arms. Time however was not on our side so it got left by the wayside. Below that is her gun, and if you notice there's a R+H on the side view. We decided to stick that there after the events that befell Rhythm and Hues. Finally there's the creature of the short, whom we affectionately called Coco. Fun fact, from hi-poly to low-poly (Ha, not really) to textures and rigging, Coco was completed in basically a day. Our previous creature had become a horrible nightmare that was unusable, so I jumped at the chance to save the creature. In the end it worked out for the better, Coco was much much more menacing than what we had before.

Be sure to check out the short's website here: http://artoffirstcontact.weebly.com/

HUDs Up

Work in progress render for the HUD/face of Marie for First Contact. The changes from the original (albeit rushed) first version are pretty dramatic. Having actual hair for one was a pretty big deal haha. Only thing left for me to do is play with the spec map to behave more like I want, and I'm calling this done. Gonna be a nice improvement over our placeholder.

Something Cartoony

Just wanted to get something out there that wasn't 3d. Plus, I couldn't sleep. So I drew Marie without her helmet. I wanted to do it all fancy-like but I couldn't spend too long on this. As I type right now my eyes want to close so bad haha. Off to bed as soon as I post this.

Forgot the Spec

Totally did not notice, her spec maps had somewhere along the pipeline got disconnected. How I did not notice till now amazes me. It also means our short was rendered without her spec maps as well... crap... Ah well, live and learn right?

Last One I Promise...

Just had to try a couple more...

Rendering Experiments

After my last post I felt like taking another stab at lighting, which I'm not too great at. This time around I lit Marie with three lights, one blue (side), one orange (back), and a slightly red main light source (front). Somewhat happy with how it looked I tried it again messing with the focal length of the camera and depth of field. Which resulted in a neat upshot I thought so I put it up here as well. Now I know that presentation wise it's best to put the model on a 50% grey background, but I'm a big fan of Chiaroscuro and having the black background is just kind of an aesthetic I've grown to like. Although the lights are far too bright here to achieve the proper effect haha.

In other news, I'm sporting a pretty powerful new computer, it's been kicking some serious a** in all my 3d applications. (It did cost me a pretty penny though...) Got these renders with extremely high settings all checked-on done in like a minute each. It's been night and day compared to my old computer. My old one served me well, but if I'm going to make this art thing a career I needed a better workstation.

Also big shout out to our Rigger Mike Swann, for rigging all our characters for First Contact. Went to hell and back getting our characters to work, my hat goes off to him. All that fancy rigging code and script is all black magic to me haha.

Red Light

Found a render I did of Marie while cleaning out some folders on my portable hard drive. Figured I might as well load it up. I think I was playing with rim lighting in Maya when I did this. Not much else to say haha.

Espacio Pistolero

I think this was a quick sketch during one of the many burnouts I suffered while working on our Production Studio short First Contact. Again it was Marie but no face mask this time around. I think I was trying to figure out how her face would actually fit inside of the helmet. Much to my dismay when I tried it in 3d, they didn't line up haha.

Doing these little sketches every now and then between all the hard work all most of my team was doing was probably the only reason most of us didn't lose it. Probably that and lots of angry car rides home...

I'll be sure to post a link to the short when we fine tune it some more, which should be soon hopefully.

Jedi Somethingorother

Had no sleep for the last two days of our massive two-quarter project for our Production Studio class. After school had kicked us out when it closed we went to a friend's house and brought some computers to continue working. I was mostly in a supervisory role as I couldn't do much at the time, so I drew in a friend's sketchbook when I wasn't needed. Originally it was going to be Marie, which is what we named my space marine character in the short, but I took a different route and it ended up as some Jedi-esque character.

Workin' like crazy

I've been slaving away like mad over the last few months on a group project at school. It'll be an animated short, that we only get around 22 weeks to do stuff in, and the space marine here is one of the things I've been working on for it. So in about 9 more weeks my Team should hopefully have a finished product that we're proud of. Got a lot of my friends working on the team as well and we're hauling ass trying to be the best short ever made for all time in that class. Plus, I get to see my character move which is cool. I'll try to post more frequently again as well, been so busy I don't usually have anything to post here.

Space Marines!

All finished sculpting! Now all my problems focus on getting this into a working version for Maya to get all rigged.