Modeling Monday #4 | 8.11.14 | Subject 5 Viking Wastelander

So this was what I eventually ended up modeling today. Took me awhile to figure out the main helmet shape, for some reason I was really struggling with that. In a big change from my previous Modeling Mondays, I want to do something with pushed proportions and more stylized than my previous realistic models. I was also trying for a simpler, low-poly look that was more shaped based. I quickly modeled up a neck to fit into the mask, I know it's still pretty chunky. I kinda like the faceted look though. There's a major seam I have to smooth in the middle. I might try to actually handpaint a texture for this guy sometime in the near the future. It wasn't intentional, but I think I'm adding him to my 'Wastelandia' set of characters as Subject 5. Think crazy, neurotic wasteland TF2 Scout. I might keep working on this though, it has potential.

Sketchbook Saturday #3 | 8.9.14 | WW2 Machines

Here are some sketches I did this week. I've been mostly drawing WWII era machines and characters, because I'm so caught up in dieselpunk and that's what I want to draw. So I need to expand my shape language and learn how these things are built. A couple of traditional sketches as well as a digital one. More will be sketches for next week. I've had a crazy two weeks, so I should be back on track now that I'm at school.

Speedsketch | 1 Hour "Jaegerfist" bandit

Here's a speedsketch I did during a challenge with one of my classmates. The theme was "Jaegerfist" or "Hunterfist". So we had to draw whatever that kind of fist would be. Of course, I steered toward a dieselpunk inspired arm cannon. From the start I knew the cannon was going to have a shark decal, since sharks were commonly painted on airplanes during WWII. Sharks are natural hunters. It made sense. I love his gangly body. He's a bandit out to get some loot. His hand is a bit broken but that's what happens when you have a time limit. I actually redid almost the entire sketch to clean it up and change his outfit. I made it much better and I'm glad I spent the time to do it.

SOL | Preliminary Sketches

Here are some sketches I did for our junior project game project "Sol". I'm not a concept artist by any stretch of the imagination, but someone had to start drawing some thumbnails so I took that mantle upon myself. Here are a few sketches I drew up for the overall feel of the game. They are only the beginning.

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!