Royal Necromancer

Here is the painting I was talking about yesterday. I think that it really helped me achieve a new level of polish for costume design. My knight was more hard surfaces, but this guy has a good mixture of cloth and metal. I also got to do some magic effects, which is usually fun.
I decided against doing a background for this guy because I really wanted to emphasize the character.

I think that getting some more genre variety is probably the next order of business for this blog..

Sci-fi, post apocalyptic, modern, I need to do more of those.

Recent Digital Work

Well, I was gonna post earlier because I thought I could finish the piece that I am currently working on for today. I still have some finishing touches to do though. It isn't worth it for me to rush personal works when so much of the polishing really boosts my skills.

Anyway, here is some of my recent stuff.
I am concentrating heavily on starting strong characters through honing my wacom sketching skills, then when I have something that catches my eye, I am working hard to improve my rendering and polishing skills.

I've really fallen in love with overlay layers. They are so useful to both start a painting by quicly blocking in colors, or finish a grayscale painting by adding colors and adjusting light and dark. They are super useful for light effects like glowing and for other effects such as texturing. I still need to be careful using these though, because it is easy to overuse them. So I still do most of my painting on normal layers.

That is pretty much it for today. I will post the painting I am currently working on soon, and I also have some sketches to scan and post.

So, until next time!

Ooh, long time no blog....

Where to start?

Well I have been working hard on honing my pencil skills.

I have been practicing a lot from life and photographs. From there I have been working hard on transferring things learned from that to my non-reffed pieces.

From there I have been also working on expanding my knowledge of different media. I am going further into watercolor, and I also have found a real love for ink!

Heh, sorry for the image heavy post. It was much easier to show what I have been doing than to need to explain it! I think that I will do another post tomorrow about the digital work that I have been doing.

3D Anime Character 2

Here is an update on the anime guy.

He is all uv mapped, I started the hair, and I put some unfinished placeholder textures on him. I am gonna need to make a more detailed version later.

I also made a toon shader network to get a feeling of what he will look like completed!

He isn't done yet, but he is going pretty well. and is getting closer to what I want him to be. I need a lot more work on the hair, and the hair texture. I need a smoother transition between opaque and transparent, and I need some detail on it. But the whole thing needs more detail.

So the next step is definitely more detail on the textures... Until then!

3D Anime Character

I have been wondering for a while how cartooney games like Eternal Sonata and Kingdom Hearts make their simple styles work so well.

I decided to experiment with that and try to make a model that looks comparable. This is what I have so far.

I started by painting this simple model sheet. I wanted to keep details to a minimum, but still give the character some... well character...

I then went on to modelling.

Next I'm working on UV mapping, texturing and hair..

I figure that the texturing will need to be smooth gradients and flat colors with some texture. I highly doubt that  normal maps will be necessary. Specular maps might be interesting. I should experiment with different shading networks to get a cartoon look, I think that will be important.

Till next time!  

I'm working on this sword model and thought I would throw it up here for people to see!

Here is the game-res version.

I took the game-res and then detailed it out in zbrush.

I want to texture it next and bring it into unreal or something. I am going to make some normal maps from the zbrush model..

Orc Warrior Model

Hey, it has been a little while since my last post. But I thought it might be a good time to do some updating here!

I have this model of an orc creature that I did in Zbrush, and I have been trying to figure out what to do with it. I decided that I would have a little fun with it, and play around with a few different options, and experiment a little.

I decided that the first thing I would try is a paintover! I took the untextured render and I have redesigned him by painting new features, a new color scheme, and an overall different look.

I'm gonna try out some other stuff, and post it later maybe.. I think I like the paintover versions design better. Maybe if I bring this to game res I will retexture it like this..