New Mecha Work In Progress.

Already on with even more crap. I figure I can count on less than a handful of people ever reading this beast. So while I might tempted to pretend to be HBO and lure people in with gratuitous swearing and !VIOLENCE! I think it will be best to keep it tasteful.

Whenever I'm presented with a new subject to work on the first priority is always to try and guesstimate exactly how long it will take to produce that piece in 3D to a certain level of quality. In seven years of professional modeling the only thing I am sure of is that I really can't make good estimates : ). Just making passable work can be taxing, and sometimes making work great takes orders of magnitude more effort to get right. And just to throw some miserable aberration into it all sometimes things just click, the methods pan out and you are in and out and done much quicker than you realize. Sadly the first case is more common and you can't plan around the second, thus the life of a production artist is mostly one of groveling, working extra hours to keep yourself satisfied with outcome and trying not to look too foolish when it is time to show your progress. As such, being worshiped and praised should be low on your priorities if you want to work in games.

Anyways onto the MEAT of this post. Here is the start of my next BIG personal project. It's something near to my heart with roots in the 80's (specifically Macross) and my earliest days of learning Maya on my first 1Ghz Machine. I guess this makes it as good a place as any to start up again and prove the years haven't only made me a drunk with bad art sensibilities. Without further ado a model I will never texture:



Honestly looking back on this is kind of love/hate now. There are some things I like about the stance the disposition of forms and the interplay of shapes and structures. But for as many things as I like with the overall design, there are so many things I would change that were I to try and fix I might as well just start over.

So fast forward to now, it's almost 8 years later and here I am, for the third time I believe, making this model again. An earlier version may be lost to antiquity and this one will never be completed, it peaked early. That said, I still don't think I have done this up right. I am going to heavily refine and reproduce this beast, hopefully into a definitive edition. Here is the state of it after the first few hours of modeling it:



There it is capped out of Maya and not really looking like much at all, yet. Once this puppy get's humming along knocking into a better form should be a rather lively fun task. As I go forth on this I will be working it out in sections while trying to keep the buildup nice and modular. I want this to have a good plausible form, look logical, and have some nice plausible feeling articulation and actuaction. Mostly I want this to congeal into a hot looking shape that will texture easily, zBrush nicely, and look killer. But that will be a long ways out from now.

I am going to be detailing this from the ground up and work out the kinks as I go. I'll be modeling a bit on the front legs tonight. Here is a tease of the more fleshed out designs. It should be interesting to see the deviations later as the actuall finished form is worked out. ANYWAYS, the pics:




An Ortho Drawing of the leg to get the ball rolling...




And some detail of the front hoof/foot in more of dimensional and tonal rendering...

That's it for this post, hopefully I haven't derailed the Titanic yet...

-g'night

First Post of the New Year!

Shit, it's taken me too long to update this P.O.S. Well I guess I'll just have to start out with the first things first and the resolution to follow along with it.

Not that long ago (about three weeks ago I suppose) I was privy to viewing one of those abortionate art measures that becomes all too common in poorly managed projects. Basically the Art Director wanted to get out a piece that showed the broader locale of his virtual world. The problem is if you really do it up right that is a hell of a lot of work, and the Mullins and Dusso's of the world aren't even fast enough to pull off what he wanted. So naturally the first things to go when time is tight and people aren't thinking straight is quality and taste. Queue the bad use of Photoshop paint daubs filters.

First let me throw down a challenge. Has anyone ever made a piece better with paint daubs? Suffice to say in the 13 or more years (that I can recall) that it has been living in the Photoshop menu I can't single out a single use of it that even came off as clever, let alone good. But I am young yet and I have plenty of time to be proven wrong.

Naturally the worse angels of my demeanor got the best of me recently and while trying to spruce up this blog with a bit of art for the background (which was in hindsight, a wretched idea) I decided to see if I could be a little more sly than that particular A.D. So I went and hit flickr up for a base image and really worked the crap out of a picture in PS. I've probably already said too much for this picture to be enjoyed by any purist or connoisseurs, but oh well. Some times the image is the thing, here it is, mightily touched up and ready to view.



So there you have it, hopefully there is enough soul and effort that went into that at least it isn't an utterly futile waste of time. While I have learned a good bit from the process of this I am definitely not going to revist this method in the future. Despite the fact that it is going to take a tremendous effort to do work similar to this I am going to at least take the time to construct a scene like this on my own, from scratch. I'll probably use Maya as the basis of later works and see what short cuts I can find on the way without it turning into a defacto rotoscoping job.

Even though his work is tremendous I want the new work to be dialed back a bit from reality and not end up looking like a Dylan Cole piece. My aim is different and to anyone who will follow from this point of departure I hope that I can entertain, learn and make better, more personal, more original art.

Dusk Pt 2

The second part of this, and the first thing I painted yesterday...

Dusk Pt 1

Painted up a couple of images today, thought I would put up what I have here and put up the other later.
Been seeing lots of great almost lost old stuff over at the Golden Age of Comics blog. I personally try and be pretty forward looking myself, but this is blog's look back is so tremendously informative and worthwhile that it simply shouldn't be missed. It really is just one of the nicest growing repositories of old pulp illustration that I have found on the web. So very worthwhile.

Thor Re-Inked

Just tossed up some quick contributions to Ape Lad's re-inking Thor group on flickr. I am pretty happy with how my page turned out. I also got some good inspiration looking at some of the other artists work. Inking Kirby is a lot fun, plus it is great to spend so much time staring at his composition because you can just learn so much.

You can view my work and all of the other awesomeness here.

Wait, Photoshop?

I just remembered, this is an art blog. My art, or at least the bit that I actually do, on the Intertubes, er, Interwebs, whatever. Anywho I was over at Aaron Bushnell's studio last night, hanging out after Ev's (Cholesky's Blog) dinner for his 2.8 x 10^30 Birthday. Started sketching Gerg, then he morphed. Put the finishing touches on this this morning. I am pretty happy with how this sketch turned out. I actually was trying to be derivate, reading some Ashley Wood stuff. The ol' patterns just came ripping right back though, at least I don't hate the results too much. OUT!

Systematic Overhaul

I am typing this from a newly reformatted Dvorak keyboard, ever so slowly. Oh man the price in short term strain to alleviate long term pain.