INKtober 2015!

It's that time of year again, folks - INKtober! Make an ink drawing every day for the month of October - last year I attempted to complete the whole challenge and wimped out at finishing everything, though I did get to do some fun sketches.

This year I'll be taking up the pen once more and making another attempt at completing the challenge. I will be updating this post weekly with new drawings, so stay tuned!

UPDATE: Phew, fell wayyy behind again. Trying to play catch up in these last few days of October! I think instead of trying to do a ton of small drawings to catch up for each day, I'll do some longer ones than I would have otherwise done.

HERE WE GO - newest drawings at the top!

Grumpy Yeti-type guy. He just needs a friend. 

In which I try to get my derpy cat to sit still long enough to draw her

Hat Woman

Old Man

Day 10 makeup - Something. With horns. Tortoise-monster?

Day 9 makeup - Demon skull thinger

Day 8 makeup - firey fairy lady. I guess I felt like drawing some swirly hair today

Day 7 makeup - some sort of swirly fairy lady

Day 6 - How I feel trying to come up with ideas. 

Day 5 - Attempt at making spiders cute. Success? Ehhh., but I do like the ones with little hats.  

Day 4 - Random cat doodles. Tried to use some different shapes. 

Day 3 - Messing with brush today for fun - bard playing a lute by a tree

Day 2 - Goblin Dude. I like his hair.

Day 1 - my friend's dog Bean, and Cthulhu. Naturally.

Get your draw on for INKtober!

Character Modeling Project WIP - ArenaNet Art Test

I've decided to have a crack at the character art test for ArenaNet. It's fun, and I figure if I don't get the job I'll learn a lot from doing it anyway.

So! This week I started out working on getting a base mesh going with nice clean topology for the body and face, and blocking out proxy versions of the armor pieces to situate everything, and also to use as starters for the low poly pieces. Next up will be working on hi poly versions of everything!

I'm hoping to get most of the hi poly modeling done on the hard surface pieces in Max before going to zBrush for details, which always seems to give me cleaner hard surface stuff than if I blocked it out and then sculpted all in zBrush. Now that zBrush 4R7 has poly modeling tools, though, it might be worth taking them for a test run for this project.

Here are some progress shots of the lovely lady so far:

The provided concept art in the background

It's a balance between keeping close enough to the concept, and also tweaking things so they look good to my eyes in 3D.

Trying to keep everything simple at this point. From my  in-game *ahem* research,  lot of GW2 armors make use of double sided planes and alpha, in any case.

I may interpret the back of the armor my own way. I know this armor does exist in Guild Wars 2 the way the ArenaNet artists interpreted it, but since the provided concept doesn't show the back, I might offer up my own take on it.

Still well within the polycount requirement at this point, but I like to have some buffer if I can. I am sure I will need to spend a few polys I didn't account for after I get everything in a high poly sculpt.

Long way to go, but it's a start! Trying to get as much feedback as I can at each stage so that I'm at least cramming new information into my head. 

Working on this has also made me want to play some more Guild Wars. For science. 

Will (hopefully remember to) post updates as I go!

MONSTER MONTH & Inktober challenge page!

Happy October! I'm going to maintain this post for a couple of awesome October art challenges I'll be participating in, so I can have everything in one place. Inktober! And an awesome Monster Month! Perfect for the Halloween season. I will probably combine several of my entries for both.

10/17/2014: Lantern Ghost

Little ghosty dude today. I gouached! 

10/16/2014: Ballpoint Banshee

Love working with ballpoint pens too. This challenge has been great for really just allowing myself to draw for fun and without pressure. 

10/15/2014: Spider Zombie

Definitely Skulltulla inspired. Actually tried to combine some of the elements I found most creepy about Skulltullas and ReDeads.

10/14/2014: BatBird

I...I don't even know. Whatever it is, it's a baby!

10/13/2014: Skele-creeper

Skeleton-devil creature

10/11/2014: Creeper

Some kinda creepy...thing. 

10/8/2014: It's the GREAT PUMPKIN!

Yeah yeah so I already did a pumpkin. Inspired to do this one after seeing a rotten pumpkin in the neighborhood - they start to look all wrinkly and cool

10/7/2014: CAT

Rediscovered a giant box of copic & micron pens in my house and decided to start trying them out again

10/6/2014: BAT CREATURE

Playing around again with ink and water

10/2/2014: SPIDER PUMPKIN!

Messing around with inks n' stuffs on terrible paper

10/1/2014: WRAITH

Scribbly wraith sketch experiment with wetting an ink drawing

Seeds of Destruction - thesis character renders finally up!

This will be a short post, but a good one! I finally present to you the Four, of my thesis project Seeds of Destruction:

Additional rendered angles of the characters as well as the original concept illustrations can be seen over on my portfolio website!

Phew. This post has been a long time coming. My original concepts for these guys were very much in a 2D illustrated style, which I wanted to carry through into the 3D models. I ended up experimenting with many techniques to accomplish this. One particular strategy I ended up using to get a more hand painted look in the textures was to, well, hand paint the textures. I actually printed out the UV shells for each character once I had sculpted them in ZBrush and baked some ambient occlusion (so I would have some shading for reference when I started to paint). I printed on a decent card stock, which was the only thing I tried that would both go thru my printer without jamming it, and would also hold up semi-well to watercolors and ink.

Inked lines pass for Famine

Watercolor texture pass for Famine

I did two passes for each character - one to get the brush painted texture and occlusion with watercolors, and another with an ink pen to do some linework to emphasize some features, especially on the faces. I also later combined this hand done linework with Maya's toon line functionality to achieve the final lined quality seen in the rendered images. I found that using the handpainted textures with ramp shaders in Maya best achieved the result I was looking for in 3D, and overall I am quite happy with the result!

Tools used were Maya for modelling and rendering, ZBrush for sculpting, and Photoshop for texturing and editing. Thanks for reading!