Digital Paintings

A couple more done!  Tried to emulate Mike Mignola's style in the wild west, and that proved deceptively complex! Kudos to the man! The other is a mis-mash of history.

Revamps and new directions

When something's not coming together, you need to look at the core of what you found interesting and work on it. The throne room wasn't coming together- I didn't know whose it was or what he/she wanted.  Without that, all other things won't fall into place. 

I went back, and thought of some storytelling ideas. Something most people could relate to. Here's what I came up with.

Our character,

in jail,

wanting something more. 

New project: sci-fi environment

Low poly crane/probe part. Maya so far. Will put it in the whiteboxed world soon.

Machines at Work pt 2.

More WIP done.  Refining shapes, moving some things around to get rid of dead spaces.

Machines at work.

Hello!  Time for another digital work! Not finished but here we go,

First, basic black and white value thumbnails.

From there I pick a little from two pieces and switch up the vertical.

Some elements still arent' working, so I ditch the hanging cages and one of the pillars.  Light comes from above and behind, both cool and warm. I also thought about various compositional elements such as the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Mean.

The blue light is too strong so I'm knocking it back and adding some textures. Rendering starts now as I start to refine planes/fingers/features, etc. 

More soon!

Videos!

Here's some turn around videos for the current batch of projects!  We have a turn around for the mortar, the final animation that I've been working on and a zbrush turn around sculpt.

Low Polygon maya asset turn around

Maya animated short!

Final Maya sculpt

Final model with lighting and other photoshop edits.

Final Render of environment

Well, it all comes together in the end. Marmoset render of all Maya created assets.

All compositional elements point toward the center.  Dark object on left, light object on right with the most colorful in the center.  Everything else leans or slopes toward the mortar. 

Grunge metal texture

Many layers, but it finally paid off.

WIP2- Environment block in

Some figure fixes and environmental block in.

Figure- Reposing

After resculpting several parts, making edits and proportion changes, I reposed the figure using a zbrush rig and gave him a dynamic pose.  The pose should tell a story, and that will help be expressed with the environment that will be added in later.  Until then you'll have to trust me.  Next I created a few simple primitives in Maya and imported them in as .objs.  I could make them in zbrush but that work flow was faster. Here's progress so far.

Sculpting the body

Muscles and skin.

Sculpting

20min sculpt and noise experiment. Must remember to turn on back face masking.

Portrait- revisions

The last 10% is the hardest 10%.  Getting there.

The next piece of equipment of the scene: a scanner! I wanted a second model to create two points of visual interest. It also allows me to reuse some of the shaders on the mortar.

Just a reminder: Mortar and scanner were originally sculpted by Forgeworld. The make might-i-fine models.

Pictures in order, low poly, high poly, and the scenes.

Portrait- polypainting

More work in progress.

Street Environment- first draft

Getting some basic textures in, and time of day light color.  Lighting... ahhh that's it's own special challenge. Mixture of orange and blue lights to get the feeling, with more orange on the side. Only one casts blueish (cold) shadows. No specular, ambient occlusion or bump maps yet.

Heavy Mortar: high poly model and first shaders

Hello!

After a lot of experimenting, tutorials and other fiddling, I've laid out my first shader networks in maya. The blue grey is a mia_material_x with a base and reflected color. I used the satined metal and preset and mixed in about 60% matt finish. From there I messed with the glossiness and the direction of the anisotropy reflection angle, and tweeked the BRDF around a bit. After that, I added in a fractal + noise for the bump maping and knocked it wayyyyy down.

The copper was a blinn, with the diffuse dropped a bit, eccentricity lowered and specular roll off rised up. Warm yellow specular color. The main color was a cloud of oranges and reds, with a modified fractal for the bump map.

And finally, the hard surface modeled mortar!

zBrush Sculpt WIP 2

Progress.

zBrush sculpt

WIP.

zBrush fun

30 min of zbrush shenanigans.  Learning the new things.

Heavy Mortar: Low Poly Model

Here's a couple of shots of the low poly version.

Setting

Here's the basic layout for the setting and then a little photoshop fun. Now that I review this at arms length, I think I need to do something to get rid of the boxy feeling the walls give.  Time to think about that.... Heavy Mortar is from Forgeworld (Games Workshop).

Modeling schematics

Hello!  I've started working on my next environment and came up with a few model sheets. Added some photoshop tom foolery to give them some appeal, and saved the basic line drawing on it's own. This is a Forgeworld (Games Workshop) Heavy Mortar figurine that I'll be placing in an WW1 type setting and modeling in Maya.