God of War Weapon 3D

Holy crap 4 days without an update; my most sincere apologies. Silly life has been consuming art time, and the art time it hasn't consumed has been spend on obligatory and unpostable work, herpderp.

Hopefully I'll solve that problem this week though, I want to start doing 30-60 minute warmups every morning before getting in to official work. I think it'd be a great way to prep for the day as well as make it feel like I'm not doing school all the freakin time, so I should be able to throw those up if there's nothing better and keep the daily updates rollin, yeauah!

On the subject of this, it's just the next step in the process. We had to model out our weapons in 3D and for next class we'll be painting on top of all of them for our final images, which should be a blast. I've been having a lot of fun messing about in 3D lately and have learned a lot, now I just need to learn how to do it in 3DSMax and make some legit usable geometry. Funtimes!

<- Previous update

Scupltris - Male Torso

Edit- Added a rendered shot of the back view.

Here's some more experimenting with Sculptris. I spent the whole afternoon putzing around with it and having a blast, and this is the result. I was gonna do a copy of the Belvedere torso, but decided it'd be more fun and less tedious to just make one from imagination, and I'm pretty satisfied with the result.

It's a lot of fun to mold and sculpt everything out, Sculptris is really intuitive. I think it definitely helped solidify some anatomy troubles I was having too, it's quite easy to figure out how all the forms are wedging together when you can navigate them in 3D space and don't have to worry about a bunch of overlapping lines. Definitely gonna try and do things like this every now and then.

After I was through sculpting it (which took about 6 hours), I brought it in to Kerkythea for final rendering, which I think I'm starting to figure out. I had a few mishaps and had to re-position my light due to me not paying attention to what objects I was moving halfway across the world, but I think the final render turned out pretty lifelike, so that was fun to experiment with.

And oddly, I think anatomically this is one of the most accurate things I've ever done from imagination, which has gotten me to thinking that I've got enough knowledge to draw figures from my head, but have gotten stuck in muscle memory formulas that I need to get out of, hopefully all these Bridgman studies will help with that.

Still Life Pt. 4

Here's the final for the still life! Gone in and tweaked a few things, cleaned up some of the cloth and flowers, and put on final adjustments and effects to make it shiny and delicious. This one was a lot of fun to do and a great learning experience, I think it's a big step forward in my understanding of light and color as well, not to mention different textures and surfaces. This will definitely become a regular exercise when I have the inclination and time, so much to learn from it, and since you're working from observation all the answers are you in front of you, all you have to do is find them.

And for your potential viewing pleasure, here are some closeups at almost-full res: [Link]

Oh, and on an unrelated note, there's a blogger glitch which was keeping my images from being clickable and enlargeable, but google rustled up a solution so all images from here on out should be able to be viewed at a higher resolution!

Have a good one!

<- Part 3

Still Life Pt. 3

Here's the progress on that still life so far. Just lots of rendering and refining; it's not quite done, all the major elements are in place, but I've been working on it all day so I'm gonna wait until tomorrow and come back with fresh eyes and fix whatever needs fixed, then call it done. I think it's turning out pretty well though, lots of improvement over my last still life with the apples and stuff, starting to see much more subtle things going on with the colors and surfaces.

In this first image I refined the cloth and emphasized the form of the book.

More rendering, cleaning up the conch shell, foreground flowers, and the glass vase. Subtle color variation is very important here, it would be easy to just make the conch shell orange and make the flowers red, if this is going to be a realistic final product there needs to be a range of color, warms and cools, in each object.

And in this version I cleaned up the flowers in the vase, added some text to the book, and refined the wooden stand a bit.

There's still some things that'll need to be cleaned up, which will come tomorrow!

<- Part 2 - Part 4 ->

Constructive Figure Drawing Pt. 3

Here's an update on that figure drawing. It's made some progress, but is in a done-for-now stage. It's not as polished as I was hoping to get, rendering out small forms and everything with the help of some ref, but I'm pretty happy with where it's at. Might revisit it later, might not, but school's back in session so homework comes first!

The main things I did between this and the last update was strengthening shapes to make the figure feel more solid; in the last one all the shadow patterns were just squishy concave messes that followed the overall form changes. Making smaller angle changes on them and keeping them either straight or convex makes them feel much more solid, same with the contours of the figure itself. Then I did a bit of more detailed rendering in certain areas and added a bit of texture.

Constructive Figure Drawing Pt. 2

More work on yesterday's figure drawing! Still not nearly close to finished, but it's getting there and will be done by the end of this week for sure.

The first thing done after getting a good night's sleep and coming back with fresh eyes was to correct some drawing issues; getting back the original gesture of my skeleton and correcting proportions and forms. The main things here was getting the curve of his back in the way it was in the gesture, and also giving the leg on the left a bit of a bow to it like a planted leg will usually have. The hand and face were also tweaked a bit.

Next is to establish where this is going to head as a painting. He could just be left floating in gray smoke, but if I'm going to spend a good 10 or 20 hours trying to render him out to perfection it's going to be worth it to spend some time and make a nice composition out of it.

This step is also very important cause it determines the light source, which is going to need to be very clear if this is going to end up looking realistic. The light here is coming from above, in front, and to the right of the figure, and I'll need to keep that in mind for the entire process because each plane will need to be considered and how much it is facing the light source, then shaded accordingly. Value change = form change, so if there are incorrect values somewhere, the figure will look less realistic because it will seem to have unnatural forms.

However, at this stage big forms come first; just like drawing the big masses, the whole torso is thought of as a block, the arms and legs as cylinders, and shaded like that. All the smaller forms of the muscles need to follow the overall form of the larger masses, or else the figure will flatten out. It's also worthy of noting that this is all from imagination; the goal here is to create, not copy, so it needs to be established the way I want it to look before bringing in reference. Photo reference will only be used to refine the things that I already decided are going to look good.

And now it's off to rendersville! All the layers are merged down to a single layer and I begin painting on top of it. The goal here is to reinforce all the larger forms and get them reading clearly; this first step of rendering is not about detail so a lot of the subtleties are being left out for now. Most everything is left fairly soft-edged, hard edges will be brought in later with the smaller forms. The main thing here is simply to establish front and side planes of each body part, and each major muscle group. From here it will be refined with smaller forms and muscles, piece by piece, which will need some photo reference to get some of the subtleties a real figure has.

And that's all for today; some things are still mushy and need clarification, especially in the legs, and some contours and proportions need tweaked, that will all come next now that the overall figure is established. Also, I'll continue to work on this, but there are some other projects that need to get done so it might be a few days before it's progressed enough to update again. It should be completed by the end of this week, though!

<<-Part One