Digital Sketchbook: Chris Allison

[Chunkey]

Hellos :) thought I'd set a thread up instead of spamming elsewhere :) Also I'd very much like to have some crits as I'm now going out of my safety zone and doing current gen art after half a decade of doing hand held and previous gen console games.

I've started work on the Splash Damage art test - This is the big one as I'm looking for work so I need to get my act together and make this work. Bearing in mind that I have never done a full normal mapped scene before but I'm relishing the challenge :) Hopefully it'll end up with me getting work, starting to feel the pinch a bit heh

Anyways, enough blabbing, here's the pics so far

1: laying out the basics as seen in the concept on the Splash Damage website.

http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/1st_update.jpg

2: thought I'd knock up some textures to see how the scene may look, wasn't too happy and was advised by Vahl to leave them off till all the geo was sorted

http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/2nd_update.jpg

3: I'd started doodling for the first time in ages, was fun but frustrating at the same time, must practise more! And laid out all my tiles to fit the expanded concept. Pretty happy with it so far.


http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/3rd_update.jpg

http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/drawings.jpg

http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/tileset.jpg
and the tileset so far up to this point (more have been added since)

3: I'm aiming to make this a distribution point for a floating market like you see over in places like Bangkok- There's an old ship graveyard not far away and peices of the deserted ships have been taken away and used for parts, or in this case, a whole building. Now I've modelled in the basics, I'll do another concept using a render as a template and I'll start adding the smaller details such as signage, design of the floating market itself.

http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/4th_update.jpg

http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/update5.jpg

This is how far I've got, taking a bit longer than planned but a lot of it is down to learning as I go along, been working on lower specs and trying to keep in my head that I can spend a few more polies to describe forms :poly142:

Oh and all this needs to be done by Sunday night! :p At worst, what you see so far will be textured/normal mapped and signage, etc a few days later.

Next up: using refs, I'll start detailing the walls, rotating each wall section slightly on Y axis so there's less of the flat slab of wall that's there at the moment. Start creating trims (welding blobs, drooping wires with lights on them, etc) and begin texturing.

Cheers

Chris

[Chunkey]

Ok change of plan hehe- was up till 3:30 this morning, starting to get an idea of whats needed of me for this.

I started doodling over a render to work out a few things, and thought about doing massive weld lines, showed it to my bro who trained up as a smithy when he was younger, told me it was a bit shite, so I got some more refs to get it right. I made a small mistake in making the panel lines within the wall meshes themselves, but now working on getting them set up as normal mapped trims. hopefully this will be the first trim to be made.

I did start texturing it up again, just to get an idea of colours,etc but again, I did this too soon. I'm making mistakes but quickly learning from them, which I think is a good thing :)

Last night, I started doing the high poly versions of the door, dock ground/wall and walkway, which has changed a fair bit since that last shot, made a few cock ups as I've rarely ventured in to hard surface modeling, but I think that after a couple of attempts, it's starting to look ok :)

Anyways, here's some eye candy, hopefully I'll get some more up soon :)

http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/fri/walkway.jpg
http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/fri/gound_and_door.jpg

Aims for today: get anything that needs high def loving sorted out, low poly matching up and UV'd ready for the NMs and bake those

Get back to the main scene, start using xrefs for the generic tiles (not used this since the beginning of GTA LCS, should be fun... :p) so at least I'm not having to replace all my duplicates as soon as a new texture gets applied or the modifier stack gets collapsed :p

Tomorrow:
start looking at what trims I need i.e. pipes, panel seams and hanging wires and get them modeled. Start looking at textures and how best to implement them.

Sunday: finish off materials, get the lighting sorted out and finally get the whole scene polished ready to send to job agency on Monday :)

[Sectaurs]

looking good!

[Chunkey]

just had one of those moments of clarity...... I've been making the high poly versions of things like the jetty, doing all sides.... only to come to the realisation that I could have just done 2 sides at most (due to it being rectangular) and shared the uv space for the normal maps.....

NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER!! :poly142: :poly124:

Been trying to get the tileset as small as possible, got rid of the broken section of walkway, made the single small porthole peice a double also rebuilt the little bridge- still needs detailing up and work out what to do for the high detail version.... apart from that it's all go go go!! :D

http://chunkey.global-illusions.com/old/art_test/fri/update6_pimpage.jpg

Got about an hour left tonight, up at 10am and try to work through till 1, looking after 4 kids and taking them down to the fair and back here for the final push!

This is taking a lot longer than I thought it would, but I'm picking new skills and refining older ones so it doesn't matter too much :)

anyways, last update until I start getting the normal maps sorted out- a bit behind schedule now but I'm still staying confident about keeping on target.

Things learnt:

Use bigger tiles- it's made things more fiddly then it needed to be.

Be more smarter about usage of high detail meshes- only do a section, not the whole lot.

Stop using inset so much when doing hard surface high poly work!!! slice slice slice!!!

[Chunkey]

Well, the deadline has come and gone.... couldn't make it in time to send off the art test to the job recruitment agency :(

Normal maps came out a noisy mess, the lack of forethought when creating the higher detail meshes and just general lack of experience with the current gen workflow has come back to bite me on the arse.

Gonna keep going though, will post something up once I get some more work done and figured out wtf is going on with my xreffed objects not displaying textures.

I've learnt loads but I suppose I need to get some more hours under my belt.

[Chunkey]

haha seems ages since I posted in here... actually it has DOH!

Went through a stage of not doing any art, just not feeling the love and feeling sorry for myself. But somehow the bug's come back, and now starting to get some work together.

Over the next month I will be forcing myself to do at least one hour's art a day, the aim being to have at least 3 portfolio pieces in my portfolio- Current Gen diorama (character/s and environment), previous gen and handheld dioramas.

I've posted these images in waywn? thread but these will get updated tomorrow when I start adding variations i.e. clothes, hair, etc.

Thanks for looking :)

http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/6053/latestde0.jpg (http://img177.imageshack.us/my.php?image=latestde0.jpg)
http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/latestde0.jpg/1/w386.png (http://g.imageshack.us/img177/latestde0.jpg/1/)

[Chunkey]

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/4938/221208yl4.jpg (http://img88.imageshack.us/my.php?image=221208yl4.jpg)
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/221208yl4.jpg/1/w330.png (http://g.imageshack.us/img88/221208yl4.jpg/1/)

progress :)

[Ged]

good work on this dude so far, I think youve not got enough volume to some of the forms for example his pecs look like they are drawn on top of flesh rather than actually being a bit of muscle on bone