keep ya head up

Learned something cool while doing these silhouettes.

Taking simple shapes, squiggles, circles, ect, and using angle by direction in Photoshop's brush tools allows for nice creature creation assets for silhouettes. I learned about this while working on Tad for a brief time as well, but never got to put it into less-graphical use.

See, like shapes even like this:

Varying the spacing, maximum size and angle also creates more iterations. I've seen this sort of thing used numerous times in concept art stuff (like Jennie's and others) but I never understood how they got so rigorously repeating shapes with such control. Of course drawing more on the resulting thing helps out as well. Gunna try to remember that for next time...

Portrait from my mind...what a strong black man!!!

CAbloof!

Love Block - Experimenting with using a lot of flat color with hard brushes, smudging, and a lot of light applied using a stroke + gaussian blur. More work to come hopefully. Gradients can be made many ways, but they should be utilized from the start to increase color palette and the feeling of light.

Game intro animatic! Put on your headphones kiddies, this has got sound!

Remembering somethings I learned with color and painting...specifically to use saturation as a device for changing coolness/warmness. Pretty cool concept I'd like to work with more.

Working on a painting process...

obese city

Some of the emotes are scary, but I see that more as a technical failure (well, time failure) than an issue. These were fun, especially the drawings.

The process for this included just getting some simple textures in (after doing AO) and drawing over the progress. This really helps me mold what I currently have to what I need. The draw over is pretty ugly, but the result was fun and the conceptualizing of this result did not take a lot of work.

More platforms:

There's a great program out there called CrazyBump that let's you generate, preview, and adjust normal, AO, Displacement, and Specular maps in real time. Even lets you throwin the actual model instead of just a preview sphere/cube/ect. Try that shit out. Holy moles.












Sorry if some these boards are unclear, I had a lot of fun doing them regardless. I learned that maybe I should use a little more reference pictures if I want to be more accurate (this piece I just didn't--I guess I learned this after doing them). Might help out.

Mind drawing. Found that I draw weight better when starting from the ground up. Some super quick ones.

nooo

rm

al

Finally getting the normal map/Mudbox/retopologizing workflow down. Thanks to Kirk, Drew, and this dude: ( http://www.cgsharpe.com/?p=55 )

Alternative WorkFlow For Modeling

1. Start with low poly base mesh, all quads; edge loops and topology does not matter at this point

2. Bring into mudbox, make high poly

3. Bring into TopoGun ( http://www.topogun.com/ ) , make edge loops for animation

4. Bring low poly "traced" model into to Maya, unwrap

5. Bring into xNormal ( http://www.xnormal.net/Faq.aspx ) , bake Normal/AO map from high to low

6. Use AO and normal map for texturing

7. Enjoy

Hopefully I should be able to use this for making enviroment assets for DarkStar. Looks like a plan.

Another lesson in reading the mutha effin helpfile...

Old Stuffs

This picture is somewhat scary (on all levels), but I learned a good process with it. Using smudge tool + the option of having "fingerpainting" on is a really cool thing to use when blending (the picture looks better bigger). So, start with a few moving streaks of fingerpaint to make a line of lighter color. Then, move in with the smudge tool to blend these streak in as a flattened form, or plane. Good for making blended forms. Also, liquefy is the equivalent of the sculpt geometry tools in maya for fixing large areas of the painting. Might be good even just for pencil drawings. Try it out!