Canon Sculpting Continues

Nick I am dying

Story/Myth Restyling

I'm going to be recreating The Myth of Prometheus in a sci-fi setting

we're gonna tempt fate again and go for Moebius

Lighting and Recreating Robo

Junk Robo is a go-go!
This week's assignment was to create a 3 point lighting arrangement and recreate the subject.
For this I placed a favorite junk-assembled robot on top of various sketchbooks to stabilize it on the slanted light table.  The light table provided a strong rim lighting all around the figure, while the light form the room provided ambient light, and I used a friend's phone flashlight for the spotlight.
Overall I'm pretty satisfied with the result, blocking out the shapes and sampling the colors directly from the photo was easy enough as I worked them in the same document. The lighting is fuzzier in my recreation but I feel it's more dramatic and emphasizes the 'giant robot stomping through the city' look I had tried to recreate with the under lighting.

Cannon UV and High-Res

While the Dragon continues to make progress, I'm UVing and setting up the other elements of the cannon to be prepped and ready so that once we dive into Texture painting in earnest with Substance Painter everything will be ready.

Here's what I've got in the High Poly, I'll be tweaking this in the weeks to come to get it ready for the portfolio review but here's my first pass.

Dragon Cannon Wireframe sans the titular dragon, imagine a cannon with a rifle butt

Cannon poly groups, there's a number of divets into the cannon that were easy enough to extrude in, I imagine I'll be going back over those with Quad Draw to reduce poly count on my low res once I'm doing my final passes.

Canon UV Shells, generally split up to maximize the size available to the body of the cannon.

The Rifle Handle, adding a shell specifically for the elements of the brass cap at the base of the grip was important because i want to get enough UV to give it some nice metal textures and some cratches and dings for character.

The rifle UVs are a little ugly for now, I think I may end up splitting the rifle apart when I have to inevitably retopologize the whole thing.

The Firing Pin

Honestly I probably could have made this part of the cannon but I wanted to give it the opportunity to animate the cannon actually firing so I kept it separate.

I think I'll need to take another crack at these as well, while this object itself is pretty small, the way these UVs are laid out are just kinda ugly.  I'll talk with Nick in the coming weeks to get an idea of how to layout awkward objects like this in the future.

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.