3D pose + lighting ref

This was supposed to be a quick perspective reference and I got a little carried away.


I think lighting and texture are my favorite things about 3D.


EDIT: So, I received critique that my reference was too washed out, which is TRUE. I ended up upping the contrast a lot in the final, which was made in, of all things, Tegaki.


I'm not fully happy with it, as is typical, but it was a lot of fun trying out a different process. Next time I'm using Photoshop, though.

Wild Career Change

Not that wild.

Following an enlightening conversation with someone at a DigiPen alum meet, I suddenly realized that all that level design stuff I was doing for fun is something I could do for a job. Crazy!!

I'm working on fixing up my site, but in the meantime I really wanted to get something up here!

These are some areas I made for Arkaz, the NWN1 server I work on, in the Aurora toolset. It's a little old but we still have a lot of dedicated players.



These ones are from Neverwinter Nights 2 and were made for ID Tech as my demo project.




These are some screencaps of the project I'm working on right now. This is the Dragon Age toolset, which is probably both the BEST and most difficult tileset I've used so far. It has 3Ds Max-style rotation and that makes me soooo nerdily happy.




The tower is constructed from a lot of pieces of things that I'm pretty sure aren't supposed to be tower-parts. There's loads of bugs with the level but I'm working on it. I have a story planned based on tarot, should be interesting.

I've been doing this for ages and felt it was "cheating" to use a toolset so I never posted anything about it.

Zach, Andy, and other mythological creatures

Forgot to update!!

I completed my contract work for BrandX Games and they have given me permission to post the final two images! This is "3D Concept art" for an unreleased and unannounced game.



The project was a little rushed, but I think it came out very well for the amount of time I had. I also taught myself ZBrush for this project, and while I'm still fairly new to the program, it's SUPER FUN to model with it and I look forward to doing more ZBrush work!

However, right now I'm trying to get this painting finished!

I think I'm getting close to "finished" but there's a lot of untouched areas here still-- check out Andy's white blob of a spellbook! I also checked my sketch and realized I read some of my lines wrong and gave Zach a huge butt, so I might try to fix that too.

Progress

I can't believe I forgot to put this here!



I applied some critique from some other artists, particularly on minor tweaks to the anatomy, and I'm working on detailing and better defining the forms now.

My current project for BrandX is due to be finished on Monday, though, so I'm a little busy with that and can't work on this right now. I'll hopefully get some time to finish this up next week. :)

Fairytale Colors - From Scratch

So, remember this?

I took another look at it today and all I could think was, "wow, this looks awful." So, I ditched everything but my linework and started over completely on the colors. I entirely threw out what I was trying to do and worked differently, and I think it's a better painting for it. Here's what I have so far:

I think it has more life this way. Obviously it'll require a lot of work still, that's very roughed in, I just wanted to get the colors and lighting right off the bat. I also threw it into greyscale to see how it looked, and I'm much, much, much more happy with how my eyes flow along it now.

I'm excited about this, because I had gotten stuck and stopped working on it entirely. I'm really happy to get it going again. :)

progress and lost lighting

This might have been slightly ambitious given the amount of available time I have right now. Anyway, I've finally got Zach's face to a level where I don't cringe to look at him, I've put in the base of a sword and some placeholder lightning. I had some blue light on them from the placeholder lightning, but accidentally closed the file without saving it, so that will have to be redone. I've also adjusted the seams on Andy's robe in the sketch so that it actually makes sense... might seem like a small tweak, but it was driving me insane.

I think their hair will stay as-is until I get the clothes to a more complete level, since I'll probably end up with some flyaway strands on the clothing and I think it will be more efficient just to do that once.


Here's what it looked like with the blue lighting I lost. The previous picture is more recent and has some tweaks to Zach's face to make him look a little better.

Arinae with lighting

I made some simple rocks and posed Arinae on them with Max's daylight system.

That one doesn't actually have the lighting working properly, but it almost has the look of a night shot, which I really enjoy.

I think I might look into finding a way to make her eyes glow more, and maybe put a spec map in there. Probably not though, I have seven other models to do!

I started on Lue's texture today, but I don't have any renders of him yet. He'll be finished within the week, and then I think I'm doing Drea next because I am DYING to do the little metal things on the ends of his coat, which is not weird at all.