Met Jackson Sze, and here's a door

Before my usual blurb about whatever I posted have to say I met Jackson Sze at a workshop at our school over the weekend. He's a really good artist and a damn good painter and he's worked on some cool stuff. Ended the day with a signed copy of Battle Milk 2, it was a good day haha. I really want to paint after his workshop.

Now back on topic, and something out of my comfort zone but homework is homework. Had to make a door of any type (Sci-fi, Fantasy, etc.), and originally I had planned a pretty elaborate sci-fi door. However, two days before I had to turn in the assignment I realized I had no idea how I was going to texture the whole thing let alone unwrap it.

So after a bit of freaking out I redoubled my efforts on a fantasy door. What started as a dwarf head/door I came up with this instead. Some kind of door to an otherworldly dimension of demons or miscellaneous other bad things, or good things I suppose anything's possible.

Took a lot of shortcuts to get this done as fast as I did. About 30k tris, and an texture pass greatly helped by dDO. It's all on one 2048 as well with plenty of room left to cram some smaller extras in to. When you gotta get stuff done, you have to get it done though. There was supposed to be light beams coming out of the central crack in the door. My alpha cards only rendered straight-up green, despite my alphas. I'll just ask my professor when I get to class tonight. I will admit I totally stole the Darksiders' Horsemen logo though, I had the largest mental block figuring out something to put on the door.

Also looking at it again, it should be noted the door opens inward, and thanks to my friend Chris (Same name I know.) for letting me use his lighting rig. Makes things instantly prettier haha.

Programs used: zBrush, Maya, 3Ds Max, 3dCoat, dDO, Photoshop

Tree House

Now for some more recent work. Here's a shot of one of my homework assignments for a class this quarter. Based on the concept by this guy http://deevad.deviantart.com Ignore the leaves they're kinda lame cause I'm not really up to speed on zBrush's fiber mesh functions like I am other areas of the program. It was fun to do though, not really used to stuff besides characters, which made doing this pretty slow, but I got it done more or less.

Deep Blue Sky

Well I should of posted this like a month ago, but here's the end result of my friend and I's crazy shark idea. I designed most of the characters and converted them to flash, my friend handled the sharks and a fair bit of animation himself.  You can check out his dA page here: http://deadpoolrus.deviantart.com/ He's pretty good at makin' monsters and better at painting in Photoshop than me I think as well. Anyways, there were other group members naturally and there was probably as much pain as there was fun put in to making this.

Still at the end we wanted to fix more things, improve the look of backgrounds, shots, and different assets. Time was something we didn't have by then and only a few fixes made it in. All in all though our professor liked it and we passed. Hope you like it, more posts to come soon!

Of things to come...

Figured I should post one more thing. This isn't the whole image, but a preview of something I'm working on. It should be pretty epic by the time I finish. I think it covers all the basics when creating an epic looking poster. Can't wait till I finish it, I'd post all my progress right now but I have a habit of not finishing something when I do that haha.

Gilneas

Here are a couple of shots from my Environment project from Hard Surface and Organic Modeling. It's Gilneas from World of Warcraft. Just loved the design of the city, and had to remake it (As best as I could from memory haha) in Maya. It's not too bad, but after Finals I realized I wasn't making it for a game, and I could of gone more all out on detail since I technically didn't have to worry about poly count.

Still though one of the girls in the class did this amazingly awesome job on the nepal city level from Uncharted 2. It was freaking awesome, she even won I believe it was a scholarship from Sony. Makes me happy to rub that in people's faces when they say that my school doesn't teach the students anything.

The End of the Road

Well end of 'the' road technically for Dorothy and the gang. Only way from here on out is a starship to get Dorothy home. At least that was the idea behind it. The question is which portal will take her home? Dun dun dun..... and the plot thickens haha

DE$PERADO

Here's my Web Animation Class Final. Had a lot of fun working on this, I totally amazed myself just by finishing it haha. Big thanks to my buddy Touch Blevins who did all the voice over stuff.

 There's all the backgrounds I did for the animation as well.

More Color Studies

I'm partial to the top one, but sadly my professor says the cherry blossoms gotta go. Oh well, can't really argue with the guy he's better at this than me haha. I'll figure out something to pop in that area in the final painting. Maybe more temple structure or something, to give a better sense of scale of the complex maybe. Decisions, decisions....

Thumbnails

Thumbnails for my second project in my Background & Layout Design class. Took about 30 minutes at most for each of em. It was fun painting them. Not too much to say, they're all rough ideas on my take of The Wizard of Oz. Most are city shots, and my portal/gateway home.

Color Studies and the End Result

The color study/final painting for my background and layout design class. Pretty bummed about the final outcome, file was corrupted and I had to do in a day what I did off and on over the course of 3 days or so. Still, I kind of like it, probably cause I have a thing for waterfalls haha.

Wannabe Matte Painting

Well I spent about 4 hours before class, trying to figure out matte painting. It's not too bad from a distance, but it fails pretty bad when you're up close. Oh well, more practice I suppose haha.

Shadow of Mars

                                                          ^Characters^

                                                         ^Enviroments^

                                                             ^Scenes^


My final presentation for my Conceptual Storytelling class. A painful amount of work went into all this stuff here, wish I could find it all cause this 'final' work still doesn't show enough I think. Anyways, we had to redo a classic Universal Monster Movie. I picked Frankenstein, and set it in space. Could of had a lot more fun with the art and story but my Professor gave us a prison of limitations, and I followed them... for the most part. Hope it's as interesting as I thought my story would be.