Life drawing

Ice Battle

Debating on Dark vs Light when it comes to composition. Hmmm.

And ultimately went with light. However, I got ahead of myself and went to color too early. Value first, color later. Edit the shapes and positions, keeping to my original composition elements and the scene takes shape. Speaking of shapes, I turned the right soldier inwards to have him gazing back into the composition. This also forms a diamond with the creatures blade, our hero and the bright event in the sky.

NOW is the time for color, so I put down a couple of Hue/Saturation layers to get the overall look and feel. We're in an snowy area with golden light.

The main color and textures come in now. Our hero has a red uniform since red is a power color, and is as strong as the blood on the blade. If I didn't, then the eye would get stuck on the blade and have a hard time going anywhere else (although it makes a nice anchor in the middle of the piece). Textures and saturation layers were added to the creatures to give them an old metal or bruised flesh tone, and to kill off most of the black in the piece.

Lastly I add a photo adjustment layer to sculpt the blues back in and globally take down some of the yellow. Details are added on top of that and we have a finished piece!

Render

Video of the walker... walking.

http://youtu.be/jGB44uFJcOY
or
http://youtu.be/u42WRww8_VY

And a couple of pictures:

Keythong

Mostly done.

Photoshop painting WIP

Itchy bird... thing.

Fixes

As stated in a previous post, fixes needed to be made to the vehicle.

• A barcode graphic was added to the side of the vehicle and more scratches were added to spruce up the empty space.
• Tiling textures across the knees were edited to stop being repetitive. Smaller pits were added to vary up the surface to keep it from being boring. 
• Specular and normal maps were adjusted according for the above fixes. Specular maps were spruced up a bit to add more variety to the bare metal.
• After further study, the barrel on the back of the vehicle was off center and was adjusted to center.

Frozen combat: Process work

I'm starting another CG paining, and it all starts with process work- getting the foundations solid before pen work begins.

I start with a perspective grid that's pretty far off the final size of the page. If the grid is too close to each other then the angles will look weird.

Next we start with some compositional elements. I love the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Rectangle, so I put those in. This will help attract the eye to the right place in the piece without it seeming forced. Because I already have an idea of what I want to do, this is an informed choice. I put in some basic geometry to represent the ice flows this will take part on.

Now we add the combatants, both good and bad. Body flow works up as a triangle toward the top of the page, and the figures flow about the page, matching the compositional lines as shown above.

 Finally some atmospherics and the feeling of the piece starts to take shape.

More soon!

Lighting, posing, thinking

I'm in the middle of rigging up the machine I modeled, put some lights on it and voila!

Well see him walking in no time!

Learned a lot more as the project has progressed.

• Build smart the first go. Any revamps eat A LOT of time, and possibly make the next person's job harder.
• Watch for tiling. I see some of my scrapes and dings are too obvious on the legs. Those will have to be removed.
• Every surface needs to be interesting. Some of the larger areas will be spruced up.

Color comps

Some movie stills of "The Way Back"