John Berkey Paintover

Original by John Berkey

Paintover of my model without perspective lines

Recreation by me, with paintover lines where i could identify relevant perspective

3D Sekhem Cannon Model

This week's assignment was to create the proxy for a cannon we will be taking the next couple weeks to model and modify in Zbrush and Substance Painter.  I went for something pretty ambitious this time and decided to recreate a pretty elaborate dragon cannon.  

The lighted wireframe render in Maya is shown above.  The process was a bit complicated, where I created some proxies for the assets in Maya, then brought them over to Zbrush.  After that I decimated them 3 times and brought them back into Maya for the snapshot, and finally exported them to Unreal.  

Here is the reference image I'm working from, I hope to have the model sculpted by next week, using alpha brushes in Zbrush to fill out the scales of the dragon.

Drew Struzman - Composition Study

This week we tackled recreating one of the iconic movie posters by the immensely talented Drew Struzman.  The Thing being one of my favorite movie posters of all time, I chose that one. 

I would credit the success of Struzman's composition to the Diamond and radial elements that focus the viewer on the unknowable but subtly identifiable nature of the titular Thing.  The light radiating from the Thing's face focuses the composition on the mystery of its identity.  The spiked halo surrounding the head adds mystery to the picture before you understand the location of the movie, revealing the hood to be a furred hood attached to an insulated winter coat, combined with the splotchy nature of the marks at the bottom of the poster, a keen viewer can guess the movie takes place in a cold environment.  The diamond is created by the Thing's stance combined with the whipping snow serves to frame the figure, the only representational element, as the primary and only focus of the scene. 

9/17 Lego Part 2

Orc Army created using the Foliage feature in Unreal, we created a unified model in Maya.  To do this we brought the combined mesh into Unreal, applied materials to each of the mesh components, made 4 copies with the 4 different orc skins, and used them as foliage to apply them easily and cheaply.  

A single orc of many used as foliage

After the Orcs, we created an actor blueprint for the Rahirim.  This included their figures, helmets, and horses along with the materials to make it all happen visually.

Gandalf was the figure I was in charge of modeling and texturing, a sword and staff material was applied after we brought him into unreal.

I also created a low LOD set of models to make him cheaper as you got further away

9-14-18 Digital Live Drawing

Frank Franzetta Value Assignment

This week's assignment was to apply value to a linework by the great artist Frank Franzetta.  I'm a little unsure about the result, I feel like I'd need to make another pass to be satisfied, maybe with a harder edge brush and try to blur the result instead of using a soft edged brush.

Lego Modeling Part 1

 My first object was Gandalf's staff since it seemed the simplest to construct, starting with a simple cylinder sized appropriately against our lego figure, I beveled the edges and moved to the top of the staff.

After some beveling, edge-looping, and extruding, we've got the top of our staff looking nice and lego

Don't forget to to make your low LOD

Next was Gandalf's sword, starting with a cylinder appropriately sized for his hand

The sword's pommel came next, with some extruding, edge-looping and beveling so that it came to a nice rounded edge as it met the cross-guard and blade

Next, obviously was the cross-guard and blade, this part was actually a good bit of fun, I enjoyed the edge work, but I may return to refine the edge of the blade to bevel it a bit but that may require re-topologizing so I'll do that if everything else is looking good and I have some extra time to throw at this.

And don't forget that second low LOD!

Sillhouette Studies - Brian Froud

Week 3's 2D assignment was to create sillhouettes branching from one of the designs of Brian Froud.  I followed the vulture anatomy of Skeksis (this big ugly vulture magician guy) and developed a cast of bird people (and a bat for good measure) to explore the shapes and attitudes of various avians turned humanoid.

I really enjoyed the more robust shapes of the bone vulture and the peacock, but the kiwi might just be my favorite of the bunch.

Collaborative Lego Project

Character team: Zack N, Zack M, Jackson, Heather, Cat

Minecraft-ish Environment

Applying textures is one of the most essential skills in developing a complex, aesthetically coherent 3d model, and the cube is about as simple an object to UV as you get.  6 squares, when cut and arranged correctly, make for an easy introduction to the basics of laying out UVs and understanding how seams and UV shells work.

Start with a 10x10x10 cube

Give it a .05 Bevel to smooth it out

Then set the segments to an even number to allow for a clean UV cut later

Open up the UV editor and select the middle-most edges of the front of our cube

Cut out the front face of the cube, and subsequently cute the others and arrange them on along the 1x1 UV map

Cut and arrange the faces to minimize unused space

Create your material with the image file you wish to assign to the cube, apply this material to your cube and export it to Unreal

Open up unreal and import the material over from your pervious project to save a bit of time, then set up a texture sample, setting the Filter type to Nearest to prevent the texture from becoming blurry

Now that your block is set up, you can create your own textures and set up a custom environment

While I can say I like how the rock face and ground looks, the blocky shape of the temple really leaves a lot to be desired.  Rounding and the ability to work with smaller blocks at least would really help to sell any sort of detail beyond the most abstracted shapes of the temple.