10,000 Page views

So finally got to that mark, to be honest it has more to do with my AC art posts and the Machinarium concept pieces. But never the less still a big milestone, so a special little post for you guys...not 3D stuff...waaaaaaat I hear you say. Yes I am shocked too.

 I entered the scribblenaut competition in which you had to draw DC heroes or villians in the scibblenaut style. It was a fun little painting to do and I enjoy doing cute stuff like who doesn't? I chose to do the circus of strange which are not very well known Batman villains but i found them interesting ans so based a small scene around them.

Also for all you Korra lovers I got bored one day and drew this, i never finished it but i kinda like it not finished. Esme and Desna...i think are their names (i could look it up but that would mean opening a new tab...pfff). 

Im thinking i should prob get into more realistic painting....ahhhh just kidding yeah I like to draw with vibrancy and more colours than your eyes can preceive. I hope to draw more as I do miss it, i might upload some of my sketch book sketches too but i hardly find the time to do that either. But heres to 10 thousand views and hopefully a lot more.

Sammy's words of wonder: Dreams are only a figment of imagination but all goals are achievable. So don't believe a dream will come true instead set a goal in which to make it a reality.

I'm not dead XD

Yes people I'm not dead just yet so why haven't I been updating my blog then? Well a number of things, firstly being my family are trying to make up for the 3 years I spent at university by dragging me about the country. I don't mind it but it makes for less work. Other reasons are I'm just too lazy to upload and demotivation. So lets see what I can cram into a blog.

First thing i was working on was a thing for a small games company. I never got it finished due to the routine i had but still not allowed to show you guys what I did cause that would be wrong of me. So just take that as I did some low poly character texture practice but a bear ate my hard drive and now all that's left is this conspicuous blurry image that has nothing to do with the previous paragraph.

Recently been working on the guy character I started ages ago. I kinda left it for a while then came back to after some more tutorials and research to try help improve my ability to texture as I know that's where I suffer. But another main thing is detailing in zbrush. i have to focus on skin texture and details like pores. It is something i don't do right now because im still trying to find out whats the best way to do these. Below is progress on the hands, they need a lot of work but i find myself getting bored when it comes to adding details and so i need to find a way to make it fun really.
 

So to try and counteract what i said with adding details i tried to do this on the shoe and go into more detail than i normally would. This was a great test and it showed me how much masking is important and how knowing your zbrush is important. Now I'm not saying it's perfect, i have to again go around in another clean up pass and detail pass but I'm making progress.

I took an evening to work on a new head for my character, I watched a lot of tutorials and tried to absorb as much information as i could and implement that into a new head sculpt. I much prefer this head to my previous. Again lacking those skin details but the shape and form is there. i think right now where i am less comfortable with Zbrush detailing I will prob do height map pores and overplay with the sculpt normal as I understand that a little more.

So here is some progress below, i have found that separating up my mesh into bitable chunks it has made it easier for me to do everything. I try focus on a sculpt then export that subtool into max and retopo then back to the sculpt again. Its an odd way to work but it keeps the sculpting progress from getting stangant and stops u from having tunnel vision.

I finally started to texture, there is something awesome about texturing that i do enjoy. Now i never thought i would say that but its were your model comes together. I will be using both hand painting and references to create this character again hopefully watching dem tutorials has helped me understand the texturing of a character. These are just rough textures for the mean time and i will build up the detail in layers.

P.s. I haven't sculpted the hair properly and so that's why he's temporary bald but i will be using alphas for this model to get me used to that method once again.

Right also as another test I took a cube from the Zbrush tools and sculpted lips on it. I learnt a lot about lips from one tutorial i found on youtube. These type of tests are awesome as nothing has to be perfect im just experimenting with other peoples techniques to find what works best for me.

Another project I have been working on is my alien type fawn character...thing. yeah otherwords just a random Zbrush sculpt but below you can see some of the choices i made and how i changed them as the sculpt progessed.

It's pretty interesting cause u aren't fixed to any decision and this is quite liberating and you just kinda go with it. It means i was more apt to change things if it just wasn't working for me. Also here you see the skin in more bumpy than what I usually do. this is from watching a tutorial from a character artist in which they like to add and substract the skin in order to give detail. He doesn't use the smooth feature instead using this push and pull to achieve a more organic look. It's quite cool but very time consuming and i really should have used the alpha i did because it made my life harder. I also tried to give this thing a body but i just wasn't feeling it, i tired a few alterations but ended up dumping them because it didn't look right. All in the name of progress :D

I also am trying to get with grips with polypaint but i haven't researched that much into it and i need to learn how to use lightbox in zbrush for its polypainting use.

I also did a quick sculpt today, trying to get into the whole daily sculpt type thing so this one is based of Angellina Jolie. I am getting better at faces, hopefully with a bit more practice I can get better resemblances.

Bravest Warriors - Danny Vasquez

I took a little break to day to do something fun. I was watching Puppycat for the eleventh hundred time and I started to watch some Bravest Warriors. This cartoon is done by the same guys as Adventure Time and even Fairy Odd Parents back in the day. I wanted to model one of them so I picked one, Danny looked cool and so I spent today modelling him. This is not game ready, not unwraped just coloured using basic max skills and rendered though the consistent colour viewport. But it came out well I think, he's a little sideways chubby so I'm going to fix that but it was a cool little test and it didn't take me all day either. I went visiting a relative, watched hours of youtube, watched the tipping point and failed at answering even the most basic of questions...etc.  I might do some more of the Bravest Warriors universe because I enjoyed this one so much.

Colour...me....never!

Did this the other day just cause i was bored tbh.....yep that's all :D Plus I wanted to post the shortest blog I've ever done.

Success

Modern Character

So been trying to work on a modern character that would be a main or side character in a game. This is to challenge myself into doing higher poly stuff and it will add a nice piece for my portfolio. I have shit tonnes to do and trying to stay focused is always a problem but I'm being fairly productive over the last couple of days so hoping to keep this up. No doubt I enjoy doing characters a lot more than environments, the hard thing is characters don't just take a day or two to do and so it makes it a challenge when you're quiet fickle on projects as I am. Anywho I sketched out the idea and it isn't a concrete must stick to sketch, there is things I will change. For example I did want high boots but then weirdly enough i wanted to try and do hairy legs and see what problems that would give me. I would presume it would just be part of the diffuse but you could alpha them. Always choosing the hardest option eh, I also love low crotch jeans, you see here I drew shorts, as for now this is staying but I might end up just making it shorts in the end because it will be 10 times easier to rig. I gathered some ref of the clothes I was kind of thinking off;

So here's my progression on the sculpt. I want to have multiple layers on this character to make it more realistic. I also want to add tattoos to break the character's body up a bit. Although i do have a problem in which my base sculpt was one centimeter off due to an accidental rotation. This means when I'm sculpting it isn't symmetrical  This wouldn't provide that much of a problem only the hands really fucked up on me, on is sculpted like a hand and the other has con-caved fingers.

I haven't started on the clothes yet, trying to get the body form right first and I add details. DETAILS DETAILS, this is important because I often try and leave the details out because its the most time consuming and hardest but not this time spammy. I have to increase the hand size because they are looking rather small, might largen the feet a little as well. I don't have an ethnicity yet but i think I'm going to go for Asian in the end. I also don't have a hairstyle in mind but I am going alpha this so I'm going to leave that to 3ds Max.

So yerg yet another project in my folder of ongoing. Have faith guys I'll finish this shit :D

Dat Swag

Okay so been a bit busy the last few weeks unfortunately. It was my sisters wedding and there was still a shit tonne to do and that took a lot of my time up. Now thats over we have the 12th over here a celebration of the culture which will be bonfires and bands for a few days then the 18th will be graduation and you can see what i'm getting at. So while doing all that and plannign stuff I'm looking for jobs, trying to do personal work and get some gaming on as well. Anywho small update on the work, i dunno if this video will work but we'll soon see :D

P.s. CBA removing sound so enjoy american dad in teh background :)

Mute the Cute Newt

So what you at Mr Henry? Why thank you for asking blogger :) Well I just wanna model shit and so I have been. I wanted to try some character work since FMP, in a number of ways. First I just started with a sphere and tried to make it into something human, using a celeb as reference. Of course there is plenty wrong with it but what would i need practice for if I was already perfect.

Also I need to do cute stuff and here's a hamster....yip. Gotta unwrap and texture it still :D

Also tried my hand at a different bust, this is kimarhi from FFX but my version I guess. This tests many things and again lots wrong but LEARNING. 

And the best of the whole thing is I've been inspired by Aymen's stuff and I've had this little thing in my mind for a while. This is Mute, Mute is a newt, he cannot talk but he's great at rolling and jumping. I hope to getting him all rigged and slithering along a cute environment.

  

LOVE ME

I've also started work on this fella cause hes fucking cool, I only have a base mesh at the minute so nothing exciting to show. But the main thing here to note is I'm trying to burst out all this energy, but i need to start and focus on one project at a time. That is a problem with me, I like to flit back and forth so for now I'm going to pick one and then finish it. I have something to show then instead of a hundred WIP's, anywho that is all bros :)

CanJam2013

Last weekend I went to a 24 hour game jam event in Lincoln University. I worked with three programmers to attempt to produce a game in that period of time. We were given the tile of Uranium Madness and so based a game on elements and a capture the node based system. I, of course was in charge of the art and below is the stuff I worked on over the period of time.

 Normal Unit

                 

 Heavy Unit

                

Fast Unit

               

 You can see my work ranged from Hud to in-game sprites. I made everything in 3DsMax and unwrapped, textured then rendered out the images. This is a longer way to do things rather than just drawing them but I wanted the hand painted practice. It was an awesome day to get out and understand how programmers work but it was very hard, trying to work for 24 hours is not an easy task. Unfortunately we weren't able to get a game together due to the code crashing but I still had fun and I learned a lot from the experience.