No Shave This! | First XGen Hair Render

In Effects Class we are learning XGen, which is a plugin for Maya that you can use to build hair, grass, fur and other large amounts of detailed objects. For our first assignment with XGen, we had to build a hairstyle for the Malcolm rig and then make it dynamic. Of course, in the spirite of the impending No Shave November, I built a beard (neard, really!) instead of a hairstyle. This is a render I did in Vray 3 using a default gray hair shader and skin shader.

Sol | Concept Sketches

This is some concept art I sketched out today for SOL. Actually starting to really get into this digital painting thing, I'm always scared to work with color, but I think these things are starting to look okay. Really diggin' the floating rocks powered by energetic ore veins/chunks. Gonna be pretty awesome. Excite!

Sol | Crash Scene Animatic v001

This is an animatic I'm working on for our junior class co-lab game project, Sol. Our hero, Spero, flies into Musa's atmosphere only to get zapped by an alien weapon. When his engine fails he crash lands, narrowly avoids missing a bewildered and slightly terrified alien squid. Haven't done storyboarding since last year but I think these are a step up from what I've done previously. This is only one segment of a more complete sequence but it's coming along. Still plenty of room for improvement but communicating a story visually is a challenge and super fun for me. Hope you enjoy it!

giraffe.sketch

My friend wanted to me to draw a giraffe. I've never drawn a giraffe before, but I ended up with this guy. The sketch went through a ton of iterations before it got to this, even then some of it is pretty awful, haha. But I think it turned out okay and my friend was amused, so that was pretty fun.

Drawjam 10.16.14

So I haven't drawn anything in a really, really long time, at least nothing that I've put on my blog. The first image I referenced another image from one of my favorite artists, I don't take credit for the design but I was trying to match his line style, which is full of life and weight. The second guy is one I drew from a photo reference, all original there. I really suck at drawing mouths and this one actually turned out okay.

Rigid Body Simulation | Instanced Particles

I pumped out a quick render of my window shatter scene. Since the last version I posted, I also built a particle system to add in more pieces of glass with smaller bits and more detail. It really helps fill in the scene. I need to build more particles systems and learn more about them. I also rendered with some motion blur and depth of field to help push the perspective. 

Perspective Marker Sketch

Just a quick sketch I did with some of my new Micron markers. I've never used markers before, and it's a challenge since there's no erasing, but I definitely am in love with fluidity of the lines and the expressive weight one can get from them. Another thing I suck at is perspective, so I tried throwing down a grid and building up something from that. Fenceposts receding always seem to work for some reason.