Got an official portfolio site!

Montagu3d.weebly.com

Go and check it out if you guys want, but there's nothing really new there. But I sure do feel more professional for having one.

Davy Be Done

Well I finished Davy, and so here he is. Wasn't happy with Maya renders, so I tried it through Marmoset Toolbag. Guess this is equivalent to a realtime game render? Anyways I also learned what the heck an emissive map was, which wasn't too hard to get to work. So yeah here's my stab at the SC2, Gears, Halo armors with a bit of my last sci-fi soldier all mixed together. I believe 5992 polys ends up being about 11k tris, if that's more your thing. Almost the same as the Berserker from Gears of War 1 I have sitting on my external hard drive. So, I think I did alright hopefully, my professor say it isn't low enough. So I'm gonna try harder with my next character for portfolio. First time I've managed to get a real character all on one UV page before as well, and at 2048. I'm really happy with how this turned out. Now to get crackin on the next one, only 6 weeks left for me... no pressure lol.

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/

Winter is Coming

After my last post I just had to make another one just so I could use the line from Game of Thrones. So, here we go with Winter.  I'm not too happy with the pose, I tried to get more of an extreme twist from her torso to her waist. I ended up scrapping that because I didn't want to end up spending hours noodling the pose till it was just right. I didn't want to copy the pose I did for Summer, but after putting them together in the second image, I don't think it would of been too bad. Colored Winter just like I did Summer, also colored lines are make things pretty nice lookin'.

Anyways I quickly stuck Summer and Winter together in one image. Kinda surprised that it worked so well, at least I think it kinda looks neat. I also didn't realize how much taller Winter would end up being. Wasn't my original plan to mash them together, but it works. Who knows I might just finish up this lady/swimwear/firearm/season theme I've started with these two. I mean I'm halfway there already haha, just Spring and Fall should be fun to do.

Summer's Bookend

Well I meant to post this at the "official" end of summer on September 21st, but I kind of forgot.  Anyways, I embraced being a male of my species for an hour or so and drew a pretty girl without much clothing... So, I wanted to try something different when I did this and just played with the gradient, lasso, and hue/saturation tools in Photoshop to color this. I thought it looked neat and graphic-y, and was simple way to color. Kinda has a military-girl vibe to it, in which case be careful she knows how to use that gun haha.

Red Wizardz

Here's another one of those 30 minute speed paints. Topic was Red Wizard. This was as far as I got in about 30 minutes. Probably would of been further if I hadn't kept changing my mind about it. Made me waste a lot of time, lesson learned.

I think I said this before in another post but I'll say it again. Going into a project headfirst is not always the best way, planning things out or at least figuring out your goal before starting really really helps.

Anyways I spent about another 30 minutes trying to do something with it, then I scrapped that and put in another 30 minutes and ended up with this.

I think it's better, but it has a non-existent pose and I should of just started from scratch all over and saved myself an hour messing around. Doing these paintings has really been forcing me to think about stuff a lot more than I'm used to.