Sunday, June 5, 2011

Digital Painting

One thing on my very long list of things to get awesome at over the summer is painting, and concept art inside photoshop. I'm not too bad at drawing and being able to paint well in photoshop can turn a so so drawing into an awesome piece. This is my first attempt at any digital paiting since I did my drop trooper concept for my life drawing and visualisation assessment. The amount my work as improved since then as you can see is quite incredible. This has taken quite a lot of time today, but I pleased with the quality , its obviously not yet finished, but it means that the focus of my digital painting over the summer will be to practise until I can do a full piece to this quality in a short period of time, say 45 mins to an hour. I'm also keen to do as much drawing practise over the summer as I can to improve my ability to create small details in my concepts and 3D models. Obviously 3D modelling is something else I want to spend a lot of time on as well, and spending more time digital painting will improve my ability to texture my creations.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Inspiration

I've decided this fine June morning that I'm going to devote a post to worshipping some of my favourite digital artists, who I have come across over the last few months, and praise their awesome-ness. These are the guys that I really aspire to one day be as good as (fingers crossed) and when I see their work I am just in awe of how incredible it is, both in terms of CG but also as art itself. I would love to meet any of these guys and congratulate them on being awesome, but enough babbling like a little girl.

These first two images are by an artist called Mike Jensen, I saw this image the first time I ever went onto the zbrush central website, and quickly assertained that this is where the really talented people come to show off their work and I have been regularly visiting the website and using the work I see their as the quality bar I should be trying to achieve. What really stunned me when I saw this image was a) the level of detail (this is a common thing among the following images), but also how flawlessly this very hard edged model had been sculpted in zbrush. I'm a big fan of the way Mike Jensen creates really simple but effective detail motifs and re-uses them across the model. But never to much as to make the model noisey. He always strikes a really good balance between shape and surface detail.

This is again another Mike Jensen sculpt done completely in zbrush. His method of creating this sculpture changed quite a bit from the image above, as new tools in zbrush 3.5 and 4 allowed for different ways of working. In this sculpt he maticulously carved out edge plate from a concept mesh and the result is that this model looks completely believeable. I looks as if it could stand, support its own weight, and move around. None of the pieces look like they would intersect if you tried to move it out of the position that its in. And overall the sculpt is just beautiful and everything that is true about the first piece I showed is true about this one.

Next on the list of artists who blew my mind is Slipgate Central (first name Vadim second name I would have to look up so I spell it right). I came across his work on the polycount forum. This piece was his entry into Dominance war IV which he promptly won. As I mentioned I am a huge fan of detailed models (and apparantly I have a bit of a thing for cyborgs and robots). But what was really impressive about this model and I reckomend you go to vimeo and look up his videos on how he made this model. Is that the high resolution mesh contains so many different parts that all move and interact with each other. The visor is made of at least 5 or 6 parts that move to open it up. The mechanisms he created make the model so believeable and takes it to a level that isn't perhaps needed but makes all the different to the finished result. The other truely impressive thing is that from this truely incredible high res mesh, a real time game character was made to a budget of 10k tris. I don't think its possible to do much better than this on that kind of budget.


These last two images Are by an artist called Deigo Maia, I only discovered his work this morning. And when I saw this model I was completely blown away. I know that its made up of many different objects but they all fit together so well that even looking at the wireframe doesn't give you much insight into how the model was constructed. The only way to describe it is incredible. I'm still in shock really from discovering this, and it was what prompted this blog post. It's almost too soon to be able to sit down and analyse this work I'll have to spend a lot of time staring at it.



Well there you have it 3 3D artists that are inspiring me at the moment. The other purpose of the post is for anyone from uni that just skips over looking at thumbnails and has a heart attack because my works improved a lot, well made you look hehe.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Finished Low Res

Nearly there, I'm really pushing to get this portfolio piece finished and start moving on to the next one. Works been really hectic recently, so these side projects have been a bit slow. I am really pleased right now with how this is looking (guaranteed that feeling won't last long) but it marks a step up in my 3D modelling skills. The next piece will hopefully be even more impressive. I'm going to spend a little more time this evening tweaking the low res, then I will be firm with myself and say enough. After that I'll UV map and rig the low res. Then finish up any last minute texture and sculpting tweaks to the high res and viola he'll be finished.