Finally we made a presentation of our small project called "the journey". You may already sean a red bearded guy somewhere here in my sketchbook, that happens to be the main hero of the game.
Those are from last week , but I didn't have time to post the earlier. Amazing exercise, whenever I do something like this I realize how important is to
practice the foundation stuff. Should do more of these and more often !
I did a couple of dosen more, but decided not to post them here and bore you to death Some of them took me 7 to 10 min, other were done for 4-5 minutes. I couldn't set the bar lower than 4 minutes , but I definitely pushed. <br /><br />
One thing in particular that helped me was to sit down and study horse anatomy. After that it was a bit more easy to draw horses, my eye started to actually see and interpret as opposed to just copying lines. What I really want to share with you is what I actually realized while studying the horse at my own (I mean without dvd guidance or tutorial of some sort). The stuff that I was able to observe by myself, the formulas that I invented to simplify the understanding of the proportions and the muscles, were immidietely stored in my memory. This made me think of the way we should learn, passive versus active learning (in this case passive will be watching a dvd and sleeping throughout it, and active would be learning and hunting for knowledge by yourself) and how effective it can be. Several days later I even stumbled upon an interesting article about modern day education which confirmed my theory that we gain most benefit when studying at our own. You can check the article <a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/" title="khan's academy " target="_blank">here</a> if you are interested in this kind of stuff. Think about it for a second, the great masters lived in an era where they actually invented all the techniques and elaborate methods of depicting nature, they didn't study anatomy from books , they conducted autopsies and observed the real thing !
Enough talking, I'm going to invent, observe, and finally consume a quick sandwich, because all that effort of trying to write and think in English , made me hungry. <br /><br />
" if you are interested in this kind of stuff. Think about it for a second, the great masters lived in an era where they actually invented all the techniques and elaborate methods of depicting nature, they didn't study anatomy from books , they conducted autopsies and observed the real thing !"
So when do we get to see the results of the autopsies you're going for?
Also excellent piece of advice. I think with something as vast as video game art, that covers many different styles, creatures, places etc along with many different ways of achieving the game ready asset, new comers can easily get lost giving how much information there is to learn so feel the only way to catch up is tutorials.
However there are some amazing tutorials out there, Alienthink.com's structure of man in an incredible series at breaking down the human body and learning to draw it from your mind in bitesize chunks as an example. I find when watching most tutorials I just watch how they use the tools and the effects they get to see if it can help streamline what I achieved and to also see what is possible with a new toolset.
... new comers can easily get lost giving how much information there is to learn so feel the only way to catch up is tutorials.
You are so right, man, this is something I wanted to express, but forgot to.
They are definitely good tutorials out there, and there are many that are a must watch ones, but I think it is good for someone to conduct his own investigations every now and than along with the absorbing of good learning materials (books, dvds).
Hey guys, long time since my last post. I have to complain a bit, my hard drives caused me trouble and I haven't been able to use my PC for a while, now that everything is OK here is a character that I recently created.
This is Kriss.
Can't say much about it because I made him for an unpublished project that is still in development. I've just got the permission to show it, so here it is in his full glory.
I plan to do a separate, more detailed post for him to show you how I used the new hair features in zbrush to get the feathers look the way there are now.
In brief, I created them in zbrush , export them to 3dsmax and used render to texture to bake them
for the final texture (actually I used RTTassist, but it is the same thing anyway). From then on it was regular old school painting in PS. I'll show you some process images soon, I promise ! And if I don't do it soon enough, you are free to spam my mail or blog until I do.
Here is the model without textures:
P.S. If you haven't backup your important data on a separate hard drive or other medium,do it right now ! I was so close to loosing my data, it is not a good feeling . Backup.
Exercising again, this time trying to fit a dragon in an environment in a pleasing way. I'll need to practice this kind of things more, cause I felt they are far away from my comfort zone.
This guy started out as a single dragon flying in a cave with no reason , but after a friend's suggestion, I expanded the canvas and added a little area of interest - two dragon younglings crying for their mother.
This below is just horrible, so you only get the small size image and no matter how much you insist I won't share the high-res
And a moon loving fellow
Crits are welcome guys, more than welcome actually
Thanks, dude ! Glad you like them and to see that you still check this thread. I have something else to share.
I just couldnt resist to share with you a little clue about a personal project that Im working on. I cant tell you much detail because I want it to be a surprise, I will only tell you that it involves creatures and it is in collaboration with some crazy talented artist, whos work Im sure you all are familiar with
Here is a quick creature thumbnails just to tease you a bit:
I cant keep secrets, I already said too much. More information and artwork will be revealed soon ,so stay tuned
This creature was made for Anthony Jones' amazing course. If you follow my blog you've probably remember the weird dragon sketches that I've posted some time ago, some animal drawings and studies too. All those were assignments for the course. I had really great time following his lectures and doing the homework, learn tons of things and I feel more confident in drawing and painting than before. Did I mention the course was uber-fantastic x 2 ? Anthony is true master of his craft and during those 9 weeks of education with him , he shared tons of insights on design, drawing, painting, anatomy and more. It was very motivating and inspiring journey for me, I can't wait to take another schoolism class ! )
Here is the angry fellow I've submitted for final assignment
Now, I know you are curious person and that you like to inspect images for imperfection so here is a link to even more bigger version of this image (2500px) - click here
Attention : Critiques are more than welcome, I'm always searching for improvement, so speak your mind if you think something could be done in a better way.
Studies , studies, studies. The ones below I did for one of the assignments for Anthony Jones' creature course. Photo studies intended to train my eye to recognise colors (the picking tool was not allowed as an option ) and a material sphere made of feathers and then applying what I've learned from the material sphere to the demon parrot.
Photo studies:<br /><br />
Demon parrot:<br /><br />
And a tip I want to share although I'm sure anyone familiar with photoshop already knows this - using the smudge tool for edge control:<br /><br />
I probably shouldn't even comment on your sketchbook anymore since you already know what I have to say about your work It's great! Can't wait to see more of your studies!
Viktor, thanks a lot dude ! You are always welcome to comment here I was actually thinking to reduce the studies for a while and do few bigger projects, but we'll se what will I came up with.
I do not see any pictures in this thread... sorry. Been so hiped by the good comments and cant see anything =[
Really ? well that is really strange, I'm hosting all of my images on my site, I didn't have any problems till now, hmmm. Will haved to resolve this...
Hey folks ! Haven't post anything in a while, this time I want to share with you my entry for a recent competition - the double happy creature challenge. I've opened a new thread for this here, make sure to check it out, there are several images explaining my process behind this creature. Hope you like it
I'm happy to let you know that a long anticipated project between me and few friends (crazy talented artist) is finally online.
Fan of creatures? Than make sure to stop by regularly at the creature atelier
The first monthly project will be announced within few days.
Spread the word guys and happy monster making!
Haven't been posting in a while, I was really busy the last few months.
Anyway,Here is an old work I did for the talented guys at Rmory Studios.
They were really kind to provide a solid blueprint for this combat suit which really helped me
to jump right into modeling and finish the piece faster.
Also I need to mention that the gun was also provided by them.I was commissioned to do only the combat suit.
Something that may be of interest is the workflow I used - I made the basemesh in 3dsmax using a more streamlined
SubD modeling technique. I've took advantage of two not so known features - the edge creasing and vertex
weights. Once the basemesh was done I detailed and posed it in zbrush.
In a nutshell:
Create a low-polygon model and set all the edges that you need to be sharp and crisp to be at 1.0 crease value.
To be in greater control of the surface you can also assign weights to the vertices.
After you are done add a turbo smooth modifier. It will preserve the creased edges and the weights and in the same
time smooth the rest of the surfaces. When you have a decent amount of mesh density trow in one more turbo
smooth in the stack to omit the cg looking perfect edges and round them too.
I'll promise to post a super mini tutorial on this next week or sooner, so stay tuned !
Uh, dafuq, never looked into here as far as I can remember! Nice work! Creature Atelier stuff is kickass!
I did and didnt see pictures. Took some time! Cool stuff!
@PacoCasares - Thank you, studies are really great. You are learning and progressign and in the same time you have a sense of satisfaction because they are relatively easy to complete and don't take so much time.
@acapulco - thank you for liking these. Also thanks for helping me troubleshoot my web hosting problem
Last week I've mentioned about this special SubD modeling technique and promised to write a brief tutorial, so here it is.
In a nutshell:
Create a low-polygon model and set all the edges that you need to be sharp and crisp to be at 1.0 crease value.
To be in greater control of the surface you can also assign weights to the vertices.
After you are done add a turbo smooth modifier. It will preserve the creased edges and the weights and in the same
time smooth the rest of the surfaces. When you have a decent amount of mesh density trow in one more turbo
smooth in the stack to omit the cg looking perfect edges and round them too.
Here is a simple example of this (click the image to see high-res ):
The cube in the middle has several edges set to use crease value of 1.0. You can see that after adding a turbo
smooth modifier on top , the creasing keeps the edges super sharp and the turbo smooth takes care the rest of the
surface. The third cube has not only edge creases but has also weights applied to some of the vertices - this gives
you additional level of control.
For the zbrush users out there, the concept of edge creasing in 3dsmax is the same as the creasing that you can
find in the tool>geometry>crease rollout.
Pros:
The pros of this technique is that you don't have to add additional loops (extra chamfering the corners) to control
the surface. It is super fast ! You can block in a model within minutes and continue the polishing work in zbrush for
instance.
In a mather of fact you can be lazy and keep all kinds of n-sided polyies with this technique. Here on the image below you can
see what I mean. If you add creasing to the loops they will hold up the surface and the n-gon will not show artefacts.
The vertex weighting is a great way for varying the edges, making them transition from soft to hard.
One more thing - the cage model can quickly be turned into a low-poly model ! On the other hand if you did the
regular sub d modeling technique where you put a lot of extra loops and chamfers to control the surface, to create
a low-poly you need to do some clean up work. With this technique you do not need to do the cleaning step.
Here is another a bit more complex example. This model on the image is part of this character
Bonus tips:
Instead of the second turbo smooth modifier that is used to round up the sharp edges, you can add the old school
mesh smooth modifier which does the same thing ,but gives you even more control. You can use it to add a second level
of vertex weights !
You can mix the techniques ! You can start with the crease/vertex technique and whenever you want continue with
the regular practices of sub-D modeling, adding chamfers and support loops here and there.
This technique is especially good for building proxy models for retopology use. I've written a more comprehensive
tutorial about a modeling technique that uses the retopology tools in max. You can check it out here
Here is a speed painting I did for fun recently.
It all started by trying out a custom brush which resulted in the small sci-fi submarine
which then led to the obvious conclusion that a sci-fi submarine could not look thrilling
if not chased by a giant cute plesiosaurus.
Hey everybody, see what I got in the mail today quite heavy,surprisingly well printed and absolutely
amazing box full with well with amazing artworks! ( sorry if I disappointed someone who expect amazing
boxes to be full with something else, I like mine to be packed with art ).
Congrats to all the artist whose artworks fills its pages and kudos to 3d total for publishing this large
body of works with wonderful variety five books featuring pieces in different categories from characters
to sci-fi and scenery. Must have I would say!
One sci-fi character I did a while ago made it to the final selection.Yeah, very happy!
Hey guys, the character in the slide below was used as an example in a short lecture I did a while ago.
I'm blogging about it here: http://bit.ly/11zEc0t (there is video , but unfortunately the lecture is presented in Bulgarian).
This character is in prototype stage, I'll post the finished one hopefully soon. It will be one of the main character classes in a game I'm working on.
Did this helmet design as a practice before a week. I was testing a new technique combining rough zbrush sculpt with bunch of overlaid photos on top and overpainting the whole thing.
I've posted a simple gif animation explaining the process on my blog, here.
Doing some practicing.
Hope Ill have more free time to finish this guy, gave him proper texture and render.If you have any ideas about how to treat the coloring and patterns, I would love hear them !
Replies
P.S I'm sketching some neo-vampires/bat creatures right now, hope to show them soon
keep them coming
Finally we made a presentation of our small project called "the journey". You may already sean a red bearded guy somewhere here in my sketchbook, that happens to be the main hero of the game.
See the full presentation --> link
To see the video walktrough --> vimeo link
Here are few art pieces from the presentation, make sure to see the rest :
practice the foundation stuff. Should do more of these and more often !
I did a couple of dosen more, but decided not to post them here and bore you to death
One thing in particular that helped me was to sit down and study horse anatomy. After that it was a bit more easy to draw horses, my eye started to actually see and interpret as opposed to just copying lines. What I really want to share with you is what I actually realized while studying the horse at my own (I mean without dvd guidance or tutorial of some sort). The stuff that I was able to observe by myself, the formulas that I invented to simplify the understanding of the proportions and the muscles, were immidietely stored in my memory. This made me think of the way we should learn, passive versus active learning (in this case passive will be watching a dvd and sleeping throughout it, and active would be learning and hunting for knowledge by yourself) and how effective it can be. Several days later I even stumbled upon an interesting article about modern day education which confirmed my theory that we gain most benefit when studying at our own. You can check the article <a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/" title="khan's academy " target="_blank">here</a> if you are interested in this kind of stuff. Think about it for a second, the great masters lived in an era where they actually invented all the techniques and elaborate methods of depicting nature, they didn't study anatomy from books , they conducted autopsies and observed the real thing !
Enough talking, I'm going to invent, observe, and finally consume a quick sandwich, because all that effort of trying to write and think in English , made me hungry. <br /><br />
So when do we get to see the results of the autopsies you're going for?
Also excellent piece of advice. I think with something as vast as video game art, that covers many different styles, creatures, places etc along with many different ways of achieving the game ready asset, new comers can easily get lost giving how much information there is to learn so feel the only way to catch up is tutorials.
However there are some amazing tutorials out there, Alienthink.com's structure of man in an incredible series at breaking down the human body and learning to draw it from your mind in bitesize chunks as an example. I find when watching most tutorials I just watch how they use the tools and the effects they get to see if it can help streamline what I achieved and to also see what is possible with a new toolset.
You are so right, man, this is something I wanted to express, but forgot to.
They are definitely good tutorials out there, and there are many that are a must watch ones, but I think it is good for someone to conduct his own investigations every now and than along with the absorbing of good learning materials (books, dvds).
This is Kriss.
Can't say much about it because I made him for an unpublished project that is still in development. I've just got the permission to show it, so here it is in his full glory.
I plan to do a separate, more detailed post for him to show you how I used the new hair features in zbrush to get the feathers look the way there are now.
In brief, I created them in zbrush , export them to 3dsmax and used render to texture to bake them
for the final texture (actually I used RTTassist, but it is the same thing anyway). From then on it was regular old school painting in PS. I'll show you some process images soon, I promise ! And if I don't do it soon enough, you are free to spam my mail or blog until I do.
Here is the model without textures:
P.S. If you haven't backup your important data on a separate hard drive or other medium,do it right now ! I was so close to loosing my data, it is not a good feeling . Backup.
This guy started out as a single dragon flying in a cave with no reason , but after a friend's suggestion, I expanded the canvas and added a little area of interest - two dragon younglings crying for their mother.
This below is just horrible, so you only get the small size image and no matter how much you insist I won't share the high-res
And a moon loving fellow
Crits are welcome guys, more than welcome actually
Nothing I can crit on, only hope to be as good some day
I just couldnt resist to share with you a little clue about a personal project that Im working on. I cant tell you much detail because I want it to be a surprise, I will only tell you that it involves creatures and it is in collaboration with some crazy talented artist, whos work Im sure you all are familiar with
Here is a quick creature thumbnails just to tease you a bit:
I cant keep secrets, I already said too much. More information and artwork will be revealed soon ,so stay tuned
Here is the angry fellow I've submitted for final assignment
Now, I know you are curious person and that you like to inspect images for imperfection so here is a link to even more bigger version of this image (2500px) - click here
Attention : Critiques are more than welcome, I'm always searching for improvement, so speak your mind if you think something could be done in a better way.
Some links:
Anthony's blog: click here
His schoolism course page: click here
Photo studies:<br /><br />
Demon parrot:<br /><br />
And a tip I want to share although I'm sure anyone familiar with photoshop already knows this - using the smudge tool for edge control:<br /><br />
Cheers!
Really ? well that is really strange, I'm hosting all of my images on my site, I didn't have any problems till now, hmmm. Will haved to resolve this...
I'm happy to let you know that a long anticipated project between me and few friends (crazy talented artist) is finally online.
Fan of creatures? Than make sure to stop by regularly at the creature atelier
The first monthly project will be announced within few days.
Spread the word guys and happy monster making!
Keep up the good work
Two tips:
Some poor anatomy sketches:
Anyway,Here is an old work I did for the talented guys at Rmory Studios.
They were really kind to provide a solid blueprint for this combat suit which really helped me
to jump right into modeling and finish the piece faster.
Also I need to mention that the gun was also provided by them.I was commissioned to do only the combat suit.
Something that may be of interest is the workflow I used - I made the basemesh in 3dsmax using a more streamlined
SubD modeling technique. I've took advantage of two not so known features - the edge creasing and vertex
weights. Once the basemesh was done I detailed and posed it in zbrush.
In a nutshell:
Create a low-polygon model and set all the edges that you need to be sharp and crisp to be at 1.0 crease value.
To be in greater control of the surface you can also assign weights to the vertices.
After you are done add a turbo smooth modifier. It will preserve the creased edges and the weights and in the same
time smooth the rest of the surfaces. When you have a decent amount of mesh density trow in one more turbo
smooth in the stack to omit the cg looking perfect edges and round them too.
I'll promise to post a super mini tutorial on this next week or sooner, so stay tuned !
Martin
I did and didnt see pictures. Took some time! Cool stuff!
@PacoCasares - Thank you, studies are really great. You are learning and progressign and in the same time you have a sense of satisfaction because they are relatively easy to complete and don't take so much time.
@acapulco - thank you for liking these. Also thanks for helping me troubleshoot my web hosting problem
In a nutshell:
Create a low-polygon model and set all the edges that you need to be sharp and crisp to be at 1.0 crease value.
To be in greater control of the surface you can also assign weights to the vertices.
After you are done add a turbo smooth modifier. It will preserve the creased edges and the weights and in the same
time smooth the rest of the surfaces. When you have a decent amount of mesh density trow in one more turbo
smooth in the stack to omit the cg looking perfect edges and round them too.
Here is a simple example of this (click the image to see high-res ):
The cube in the middle has several edges set to use crease value of 1.0. You can see that after adding a turbo
smooth modifier on top , the creasing keeps the edges super sharp and the turbo smooth takes care the rest of the
surface. The third cube has not only edge creases but has also weights applied to some of the vertices - this gives
you additional level of control.
For the zbrush users out there, the concept of edge creasing in 3dsmax is the same as the creasing that you can
find in the tool>geometry>crease rollout.
Pros:
The pros of this technique is that you don't have to add additional loops (extra chamfering the corners) to control
the surface. It is super fast ! You can block in a model within minutes and continue the polishing work in zbrush for
instance.
In a mather of fact you can be lazy and keep all kinds of n-sided polyies with this technique. Here on the image below you can
see what I mean. If you add creasing to the loops they will hold up the surface and the n-gon will not show artefacts.
The vertex weighting is a great way for varying the edges, making them transition from soft to hard.
One more thing - the cage model can quickly be turned into a low-poly model ! On the other hand if you did the
regular sub d modeling technique where you put a lot of extra loops and chamfers to control the surface, to create
a low-poly you need to do some clean up work. With this technique you do not need to do the cleaning step.
Here is another a bit more complex example. This model on the image is part of this character
Bonus tips:
Instead of the second turbo smooth modifier that is used to round up the sharp edges, you can add the old school
mesh smooth modifier which does the same thing ,but gives you even more control. You can use it to add a second level
of vertex weights !
You can mix the techniques ! You can start with the crease/vertex technique and whenever you want continue with
the regular practices of sub-D modeling, adding chamfers and support loops here and there.
This technique is especially good for building proxy models for retopology use. I've written a more comprehensive
tutorial about a modeling technique that uses the retopology tools in max. You can check it out here
Here is a speed painting I did for fun recently.
It all started by trying out a custom brush which resulted in the small sci-fi submarine
which then led to the obvious conclusion that a sci-fi submarine could not look thrilling
if not chased by a giant cute plesiosaurus.
amazing box full with well with amazing artworks! ( sorry if I disappointed someone who expect amazing
boxes to be full with something else, I like mine to be packed with art
Congrats to all the artist whose artworks fills its pages and kudos to 3d total for publishing this large
body of works with wonderful variety five books featuring pieces in different categories from characters
to sci-fi and scenery. Must have I would say!
One sci-fi character I did a while ago made it to the final selection.Yeah, very happy!
Cheers!
Martin
I'm blogging about it here: http://bit.ly/11zEc0t (there is video , but unfortunately the lecture is presented in Bulgarian).
This character is in prototype stage, I'll post the finished one hopefully soon. It will be one of the main character classes in a game I'm working on.
Comments and critiques appreciated
Cheers !
Martin
I've posted a simple gif animation explaining the process on my blog, here.
Cheers!
Martin
Hope Ill have more free time to finish this guy, gave him proper texture and render.If you have any ideas about how to treat the coloring and patterns, I would love hear them !
Cheers!
Martin