Speedpaint | 1 Hour Rocker Sketch

Rock n' roll to fill my soul! Another speedpaint, this one definitely took me longer than an hour, but I had the base construction done in an hour. I'm actually happy with out it turned out, for how long I spent on it. I'm slowly getting better. This was super fun to paint though, so rock on!

Speedpaint | 1 Hour Deerotaur sketch

Well, there's this. This time our challenge was to paint a fantasy hunter, either being hunted or hunting. I decided to go with a deerotaur. The story is supposed to be a knight brings the fight to the beast's den, where previous attempts have not gone quite according to plan. I like the skull detail on the antlers. I tried to focus mostly on composition and hopefully conveying a narrative. Yeah, the deerotaur doesn't really have hands. Oops. Also, this was longer than an hour. You don't want to see what I had at the hour mark. So I spent more time on it to make it a little better. Okay, a lot more time. Still, was fun to paint. Trying to get away from sketch lines.

Modeling Monday #3 | 7.27.14 | Sten Gun Mk. II

A quick depth-of-field render to see what a possible in-game iron sights scenario would look like.

Yeah, I'm aware it's not Monday. And depending on how you look at it, I'm six days late, or one day early! I think I attempted something a little too complex for a single day's worth of work, at least, I'm not fast enough yet. Also, I had family emergencies to deal with this week, and family comes first, as much as I did want hammer away at this model. 

All that aside, this is my first weapon model. I think I pushed the tris too high, the 'lowpoly' version is around 17k tris (the two springs pushed this number up by 4k alone lol). I could soften the normals on it and that would help smooth it out. This is the smoothed version. So yeah, this took me a week to do, I'm not ashamed, I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot of new techniques, like how to make curves with triangles and how to make springs. I did make a major mistake though, in that I didn't model the middle fat piece of the barrel as a separate object. Which led to some inaccuracies where the shells get ejected and basically rendered it a nonworking model. However, the bolt slides back like it should, the magazine slides in and out, and the tigger rotates like it should! All in all, it was a ton of good practice for building an object out of a lot of smaller components, and I think the finished result looks decent. I might try to throw this into Unreal Engine and mess around with it in there. I don't know if I'll UV it and texture it yet, that would probably take about the same amount of time as modeling it. We'll see. I still plan on modeling something tomorrow, for Modeling Monday #4. It might be a little less ambitious haha.

Here are some quick work-in-progress renders where you can see how I started to build up the model:

And the final result.

I also updated my blog look. I got tired of the shadows and borders around the images, and you can only get rid of that in 'simple' mode. So I switched to a more traditional blog look. The color scheme fits me pretty well. Hope you enjoy the new look!

Speedpaint | 1 Hour Fight Club Sketch

My friend challenged me to a 1 hour speedpaint with our theme being based around our favorite movie. This is what I came up with. The first rule of fightclub is, you don't talk about fight club. The second rule of fightclub, you don't talk about fightclub. Getting slightly faster, forgot how much fun digital was. No Modeling Monday today, I had a family emergency and that took precedent over vertex pushing. Something might appear tomorrow though!

Sketchbook Saturday #2 | 7.19.12

Here are some sketches I did this week. I missed midweek sketch sheet due to being quite busy on Wednesday, sorry about that. I'm high on dieselpunk right now, what can I say?

Turntable | Vintage Gas Can

I rendered out a quick turntable of my Vintage Gas Can model so you can see it from every juicy angle. 

Modeling Monday #2 | 7.15.14 | Vintage Gas Can

Here's to the second Modeling Monday! Yeah I'm like 15 minutes late, technically, thanks to a lot of time playing with lighting to render sometime decent looking out. Seeing as I'm on my dieselpunk high, I decided to model a vintage gas can. This is the smooth version of the model, which probably has way to many polys than it should. I still have the low poly version, but it's quite a bit more chunky. Anyways, I spent a day working on this and I think it turned out okay for what it is. Good practice to say the least. There's supposed to be an X on the side, but I have to figure out the best way to do that. I'll probably post an updated version at some point, as well as a turntable.

High Voltage

"SHUT IT OFF, SHUT IT OFF!" A scientist gets more than he bargained when he turns on his super strength robo-hands for the first time. I got inspired after seeing a 1950's picture of a robotic exo-hand. I absolutely love dieselpunk, maybe even more than cyberpunk. My two loves. I will definitely be drawing more dieselpunk in the near future, this was too much fun!

Sketchbook Saturday #1 | 7.12.14

I'm going to be posting midweek Sketchbook updates and end of week Sketchbook updates. So here is the first Sketchbook Saturday! I drew this picture yesterday. I spent a decent amount of time on it, but I enjoyed it all. I referenced an image I found online, so credit due to the original owner of this design. But copying stuff is helpful to learning structure and details.

Birch Tree Test Render 2

I highly encourage you to enlarge the picture and watch the video in 720p to see everything crystal clearly.
I played around some more with my tree trunk material and grass materials and managed to get something a little more natural looking I think. I rendered out a short clip to test my new 'render farm', where I render individual frames on multiple computers. On my main pc renders for this took around 16 minutes a frame and on my secondary pc renders took about 28 minutes a frame. Anyways, I didn't touch the actual texture or bumpmap at all, and I think the results are still halfway decent. Time to move on to other things ha.

Midweek Sketchsheet #1 | 7.9.14

Midweek Sketchsheet is another weekly upload I want to start doing to help me stay consistent with my sketching. This week I mostly wanted to draw robots, but I did draw a dude dying. I really suck at drawing mechanical objects, so I'm gonna start practicing, since that's what I want to draw. I haven't drawn in forever so I'm pretty rusty...

Modeling Monday #1 | 7.7.14 | Subject 8 Base Mesh Progress

I'm trying to start a new habit this week: Modeling Mondays! Every Monday I will model something, probably a prop most of the time, and then upload it to my blog. This week, I decided to upload the progress I'm making on my character, Subject 8. Right now it's just a base mesh, I'm going to get into sculpting soon, but I'm trying to nail at least the general overall feel of the character before I start cleaning up anatomy and painting on details. I'm going for a slightly angular, chunkier feel with the art style. We'll see how it ends up, but this is his progress so far. I'm really excited about the idea of Modeling Mondays! Can't wait to see what else I'll come up with. 

3D Tree Test

A quick test render of more tree texture stuff. I added fast grass for fun. This render took longer than it really should have. I softened the normals of the tree geometry and made a quick bump map out of the original texture, which helped break up the flat geometry. Rendered this with V-Ray, I still need to sculpt normal maps for a game engine. Things are looking promising though, and I'm learning plenty. Fun stuff!