Using Symmetry for Concept Art Silhouettes

ctrl+Paint has some awesome tutorials, and the symmetry tutorials reminded me of an awesome Technique I use!

You simply make your silhouette into a smart object, duplicate your silhouette half and flip it, and voila, you have a mirrored object that updates every time you save the smart object!

Neat!

ipad sketchles

The iPad tends to make things look good so I had to add about -25 brightness for this to look right on a regular monitor. 

This was pretty fun to do, because let's face it--any sort of symmetry tool across any program fucking rocks. If there was a single word for "fucking magical" it'd be "fuckgical" or maybe "magucking" and that rightly describes getting to use an active symmetry tool.

I used sketchbook pro for this, which has an amazing brush that sort of looks like this:

And it frickin' rocks! You get a lot of great gradients from this guy, and sharp vs. soft forms are really easy to create. 

Anyway, working more on getting better at the iPad drawing stuff...and just got a real stylus today so hopefully that helps with future stuff!

first shipped title!

Whoo!

Unfortunately it's also the project I got to spend the smallest amount of time on so far, but hey! A wins a win!

I love console games, so hopefully if I keep this up there will be more soon!

I don't really believe in "heroes", but

... every time I discover JK Rowling putting a new way to describe something with a fart on her website I think I love her just a little bit more. That among other things, like her creative writing!

I recently spent some time re-reading all seven Harry Potter books, and man, it's a lot different after you've experienced the story twice. It's really nice.

I feel like when I one day have kids they'll definitely enjoy these books (unless they're assholes--I'll have to make sure they're not). Not the pansy e-books though! (Unless it still has the Mary GrandPre drawings in them. They're a real treat to look forward to every chapter in addition to everything else.)

But there's nothing like curling up to a book that's bigger than you and reading without glasses on!

I spent most of my life writing more than anything else, and now that I've spent a few years doing art, I think I realize I do miss writing quite a lot. So trying to figure out a way to combine them in a video game that I actually like would be fun.

 Anyway, here's a little guy I spent a little bit of time on the other day, trying to mimic this character:

Should probably add color to the model just for practice. 

poopers

Learning awesome animation stuff...

So I always wondered why folks locked attributes for animated objects. The rule of "you don't want to fuck something up by accident" seemed justified enough, but I couldn't find a way to make it so that attributes that I did not want animated to be excluded when I set a key. When hitting set key, all attributes would get a curve and key when I did not necessarily want that.

And thus, learning to struggle through curves, super long clean up of unused curves made it all made sense. Locking and unlocking attributes on the fly prevented new curves from being created, and therefore allowed you the flexibility to change an attribute's lock state while you animated.

I like learning the practical way, but it also taught me I shouldn't be afraid to question my teachers and fellow colleagues. I learned, by making this mistake, that having too many curves also causes performance issues in game, but also clogs up your file quite a bit.

So lesson learned: Lock and unlock your attribute as needed! 

fruity pooty

Learned about shadow box recently and did this unfinished 3 to 5-minute little designs on a Zbrush-created shadowbox mesh. Radial symmetry is crazy!