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.

Double Feature

Two posts in one night, back to back! I'm on some kind of a roll. Anyways I kinda wandered into a daily paint group on FB. Thirty minutes, no photos, pure painting, random topics everyday. It's pretty fun considering how hectic I felt under the gun. I'm just more impressed with how far I got in that time. Nice to see that I can still kind of paint.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sketchy Suit

Been busy lately, starting a massive group project. Should be really badass when we finished. Anyways this is a cartoony version of the zBrush sculpt I'm working on for the short. Wanted to figure out some form of color scheme. I originally wanted her armor to be some sort of color, and her accent lights to be white. It never wanted to look right though, so I ended up with the reverse of what I wanted. Which I don't think looks too bad, I like it at least. Her 'eye' I should also explain is a holographic display thing, I guess kind of like the Cylon eyes. Except this one doesn't always move from side to side, I guess a cyclops would be a better example. We were thinking about maybe doing a kind of inside the helmet shot like you see in Iron Man to see her face as our short goes on.

Hopefully I get the actual model done soon as it is much more impressive than this lil' sketch I have here. Learning a bunch of cool zBrush stuff for hard surface modeling, and I think it looks pretty darn cool so far.

In other news, Happy New Year, and I've also gotten an internship doing some stuff for a local PBS station. Doing pre production work for a short they're planning. I'll be sure to upload that stuff too if I can.

Monk-y Redo

Hey all, long story short my trusty old tablet finally broke and just got a brand new Intuos5. Hadn't really had the chance to break it in until now. Finals have started for me this week and I just wanted to get that off my mind, so I decided to retry the female monk from Diablo 3 again without lines. I had taken a couple old demo files from one of my professors and tried to figure out how he painted them. Reverse engineering a painting is rather fun when you manage to achieve similar results. She did kinda get stretched since I wasn't really paying attention to anything but how to paint.

Anyways this came out better than I had hoped, considering how unwary I am of using so much color, like the blues/purples in the shadows. It really does make the end result feel... nicer, not really sure why yet.

IronCop

Here's my second project from my Editing Techniques class. A trailer mash-up, and I can honestly say these are a total blast to do. I used the audio from the Iron Man 3 trailer, and clips from Robocop to make this and I think they worked pretty well. Of course it does feel like I made it easier on myself by not really parodying two sources, but I love Robocop and I love Ironman. With both movies coming out I figured why not marry the two of them together and as a bonus get a grade as well haha.

Still Alive

Hey all, sorry about not posting for like a month. Just been busy with school and more importantly the first of my portfolio classes. Which also means I will eventually be thrust out into the world to find some form of employment, kind of a scary thought the more I dwell on it.

Anyways, here's some head studies I did yesterday. One of my friends posted one the other day and it got me all fired up to do something in photoshop. It really made me see how rusty I was at painting and that faces are still something I need to focus on more. Especially since I'm aiming my portfolio for character modeling.

So, both studies are of the same girl/ref which you can check out on the poorly updated, but always useful Characterdesigns.com Did the greyscale in like 40mins, I think the color took me considerably longer. Your art skills are like a good knife, you have to take care of it or it dulls.

I'll try to update a bit more, I know I have some drawings laying around somewhere. Just have to find them. There's also a super awesome new zBrush sculpt in the works so you anonymous viewers can look forward to that.

Flame on!

If you haven't been able to figure it out by now, our hero (Despite the title of this post) is based on Firefly from Batman. Our story filled with clichés and sort of typical hero stuff didn't really feel like it needed a special unique hero or villain.

Out of all our concepts though it was kind of funny how characters that were basically rip offs of other established characters were the ones our team gravitated towards. Goes to show that people like those things for a reason I suppose. I honestly had never heard of Firefly, when I saw the original sketch I was thinking about the Rocketeer. Which is also one of my favorite movies.

Anyways no real reason behind this piece either, just another thing to get people going in our group. I guess it was also a break from having to do proper character turnarounds. That stuff really wears you out. So much thinking about things you normally don't care about cause you're usually doing a one-off drawing. I suppose that's a good thing in the end though.

Fire & Ice

Here's a quick sketch I did, just to make something for fun and to 'hopefully' get the rest of my Production Studio class in the mood to work on this, since we begin animating next week.

You wouldn't think it but this is severely edited in photoshop haha, well unless your monitor's colors are different than mine, then you can probably tell. I reposed the characters forever trying to find the right angles and changed the colors to red and blue. Also it's so much cleaner than it actually is, Photoshop really is amazing isn't it?

The Mother & Daughter

Here is our unnamed mother and daughter for a story beat in the beginning of our project. Not much to say about 'em. Both designs were started by my friend Lee who you can check out at http://deadpoolrus.deviantart.com/. I ended up modifying the designs again, just because we wanted all designs to be similar. The little girl is barely changed and the mother's body shape was the only thing I kept from his. Originally the mother had a ponytail off to the side, like her daughter. However this made her look like an older sister or something. So I settled on a bobbed kind of hairstyle.

Also on a side note front views always make my characters look weird now that I'm looking at them again... not sure if that's normal or something I should be working on.

The Hero

Here's the Hero of my Production Studio project, the "T" stands for Trojan (As in Trojan Man, get it?) Anyways all immature silliness aside I think I like this the most out of all the characters. Knowing the plot also makes me feel kind of bad for our hero, but I won't give anything away till it's finished.

Again not all designs are mine here. The alter ego again is mine, but the hero costume design was originally done by my friend Lee, and then another guy in our group took it from there. I finalized and refined the design into what you see on the bottom image.

The Villainess

Well here's some turnarounds from my Production Studio class. Tis' the ice based villain of our story, complete with alter ego as well. The story has quite a twist, at least we think so and despite it being so dead serious I think it'll be fun.

Not all here is my work, the super villain costume was created by my friend Lee, who you can check out here http://deadpoolrus.deviantart.com/. I edited his turnarounds and I guess you can still see the eraser marks from his original line art. Her alter ego is all my idea, and I had originally drawn her head too big, thank god for photoshop haha.

Anyways hopefully the costume scan looks ok, I didn't scan it myself I don't have the original.