Haven't posted here in a while, but Matt was on me to do something more finished, and this is what came out of it today. I'm not incredibly happy with it, but for reasons that are hard for me to express. Mainly because as soon as I start tying down a sketch into a more finished drawing, in my eyes, it just dies. So if anyone has any thoughts on this, or how to work around/through it, I'd really appreciate hearing them.
Been doing a lot of drawing lately, and here's a character I've been working on for a game project. Also, I've been trying to get some new stuff done for my portfolio (Game Developer Conference coming up later this week), so this is all going on the model sheet that I'm working on. Starting to get a real feel for cleaning stuff up quickly in Photoshop with my tablet, but it probably has helped a lot that I've become really familiar with drawing the character.
I...live....again. Here's something I did the other day while I decided I was sick of just doing the usual warm up sketches that I've been kind of stuck in a rut doing lately. There's a couple things I don't like about it, might try doing a couple tweaks to the overall gesture to try to loosen him up. Also there's this thing I have about drawing tightly confined spaces, that I never know how far "into" the drawing to set the camera. This is probably more to do with me not planning out any sort of composition, and just coming up with this drawing that has no real action or story to it.
Ah, things have been pretty silent on the old blog front for awhile, and that's my fault. No excuse for it! Anyhow, here's some characters that I've done recently for a webcomic that I was hired to draw. It's for an upcoming webportal for college and high school students, and they wanted a webcomic to go along in a sort of Student Life section. I've done about 4 of the comics so far, and I think I've got a workflow down that works pretty well. Once the site is launched and the comics themselves are live, I'll give it a link here.
Always loved the idea of a group of kids getting together and building something awesome (Explorers from the 1980s was one of my favorite movies growing up, it's a shame they don't make movies for kids like they used to), and what kid never wanted to build a robot? Just kinda working/laying things out for now, there's still one more character I want to get in there. Should have a much tighter version in a couple days.
Here's the final textured model. Final count is 500 triangles for the body, and 124 for the drill and tank. Kinda playing around with rigging him so I might pose it up or do a couple animations. Overall I'm really happy with how it came out, this challenge was a lot of fun and got a lot of ideas flowing.
Over at the forums at Polycount.com, they have a low poly challenge running through Saturday to recreate a next (current) -gen game character using a max of 500 polys/tris. So I decided to try my hand at the Big Daddy from Bioshock. I've knocked it out pretty quickly, and should move on to texturing to hopefully get it done by the day the challenge wraps. Right now I'm at 497, and the tank and drill are counted under the additional 150 they're allowing for weapons and equipment to put me at 603 for the moment.
Knocked this out this afternoon and I thought I'd share it. Just working out the rough composition for a illustration I wanted to do, to get more into the practice of storytelling in a drawing. There are a couple things I'd like to change, mainly grouping the people up at the top manning the ropes. Will probably blow this up a good 2-3 times when I work on the final piece, as I should get into the practice of drawing BIGGER.
For those of you familiar with Gundam or Halo at all, here's an idea that I've been kicking around for a bit, and finally got around to executing a bit. A Char Custom Spartan Armor, a combination of the Armor from Halo and Char's Custom Zaku from Mobile Suit Gundam. This was a bit of a challenge in a couple ways, trying to mash the two together so that they are still recognizable to people familiar with either or both, and then just trying to come up with a style/pose that I liked. I have a couple almost completed sketches in other poses before I decided to stick with this one and ink it. Then, since I originally wanted to get this done for a friend's birthday I got as far on it as I could before midnight so I didn't send it to him too late. My inking ability still leaves a lot to be desired, so time that I could have spent on improving the coloring got eaten up a bit by me trying to clean up inks I wasn't happy with. Probably could use a floor/bg of some sort, now that I think about it.
Update: It's now part of the banner/top image up at www.destroytokyo.com
Just felt like posting a couple little sketches I did tonight to break in a couple new pens I got. First we have the long-time favorite of mine, the Pilot Hi-Tec C. A very fine tip pen that I believe is only available through importers, like Kinokuniya Bookstores. I love doing little sketches with these. Secondly I was looking for a brush pen, but with a bit more control, and I ended up picking up something a bit different. It's a dual tipped (one on either end) Pilot pen, similar to a felt-tip, with one end black and the other a gray. I like it quite a bit so far, and I think it'll be great to use to put in splashes of gray for the little sketches I do with the Hi-Tec. I'm going to be traveling to Hawaii on Friday for some good friends' wedding, and I'm looking forward to all sorts of stuff to draw while I'm there!
Here's something I've been working on for an independently published video gaming magazine called The Gamer's Quarter. It's put out by some people I met back when InsertCredit.com had a forum that I used to visit. It was a great place for discussion on videogaming and the medium. TGQ grew out of that and I offered to submit a couple art pieces for their latest issue. This is based on one of the articles, and pokes a little bit of fun at the game Gears of War. The theme for it is "Even with all my macho posturing, you still don’t take me seriously."
Hey all, know I've been gone a while. I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I needed it. That contract ended, so I'm looking again. In the meantime, I am sorely need to get back to posting up some work, so, to start things off...
Kind of a tie-down of a design I've been kicking around trying to get right for awhile. I'm pretty happy where it is at the moment, and should really get on finishing it up, as well as some of the other characters that go along with her. So those should be coming up in a future post!
Just tying down the design a bit. Going for a real cartoony type of the character you typically see in Epic's games, such as Unreal Tournament or Gears of War. Cable is also a very big influence, so Tal gets 10 points for picking up on that. Even though Cable would totally get his ass handed to him by Moon Knight.
Here's the bookcase to go along with the sketches below. I modeled it out pretty quickly, and at the moment it's pretty much all unwrapped, including the books. For the books, I only made about 3-4 templates, and just made instance copies to populate the bookcase to make it look jam packed with stuff. At the moment it's around 820 triangles, which I would like to get smaller. I think what I'll try is dumping all the faces on the backside of the books that face the back of the shelf where you can't see. As long as it's under 1000 I'll be happy, but I might go back in and add some planes to add more cobwebs hanging from the books. Right now the black polys you see are where existing cobwebs will go, they just haven't been textured yet, and doing a screenshot from Maya on my machine won't alpha-blend those sections out.
Update: I'm about to say the modeling is final, and UVs are done. Here it is, with the Unreal Tournament Default/No-Texture Texture:
I...live....again. Here's something I did the other day while I decided I was sick of just doing the usual warm up sketches that I've been kind of stuck in a rut doing lately. There's a couple things I don't like about it, might try doing a couple tweaks to the overall gesture to try to loosen him up. Also there's this thing I have about drawing tightly confined spaces, that I never know how far "into" the drawing to set the camera. This is probably more to do with me not planning out any sort of composition, and just coming up with this drawing that has no real action or story to it.
For those of you familiar with Gundam or Halo at all, here's an idea that I've been kicking around for a bit, and finally got around to executing a bit. A Char Custom Spartan Armor, a combination of the Armor from Halo and Char's Custom Zaku from Mobile Suit Gundam. This was a bit of a challenge in a couple ways, trying to mash the two together so that they are still recognizable to people familiar with either or both, and then just trying to come up with a style/pose that I liked. I have a couple almost completed sketches in other poses before I decided to stick with this one and ink it. Then, since I originally wanted to get this done for a friend's birthday I got as far on it as I could before midnight so I didn't send it to him too late. My inking ability still leaves a lot to be desired, so time that I could have spent on improving the coloring got eaten up a bit by me trying to clean up inks I wasn't happy with. Probably could use a floor/bg of some sort, now that I think about it.
Just tying down the design a bit. Going for a real cartoony type of the character you typically see in Epic's games, such as Unreal Tournament or Gears of War. Cable is also a very big influence, so Tal gets 10 points for picking up on that. Even though Cable would totally get his ass handed to him by Moon Knight.
