Some final comp designs

This is one of my weak points, coming up with pleasing designs for a final comp. Any suggestions would be great!

Rigged and ready for action

Now its time to put the comp image together and submit Iron-Sack!

Some glow and some background

Thanks for the comments guys! This one has been a lot of fun to make. It has forced me to learn about some new things about maya (glow maps, spec maps, and shaders) but its all well worth it. Here is Iron-Sack with his glow map. For some reason the glow isn't showing on his hands, unless I face the camera right at it **shrug**

Iron-Sack updated

Iron-Sack

Got the landmarks done so I can start working on the details and lighting

Another Comp

This is for another Game Artisans competition. Take the Sackboy character for PS3's Little Big Planet and combine it with a well known character from movies/games. I jumped on Iron-Man because he's awesome.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that I can finish this one in time.

A new direction

Upped the Saturation

Looking over some WoW reference and realized my textures were a bit too unsaturated for how "bright" their stuff is. So I upped the saturation.

Chugging along

Finished up the shoulder armor

Working on the textures

I'm suffering from not spending enough time in the design phase to really nail down the armor design. I focused a bit to much on the modeling part. With that, I ended up going back and forth a lot and wasting time not moving the project forward.

I've finally gone with this design (helmet, shoulder armor and sword not shown). For those that play WoW, my idea is that this armor set is for the Unholy talent tree. In this tree you focus on summoning ghouls. And Ghouls in the game having lots of mummy wrapping and buckles, so I wanted to echo that in my design.

I have a lot more to do but thought this would be good to show for now.

Here is the model. Different sword, tweaked the collar to include an amulet hanging from chains, and finally got the time to unwrap it. Now for the hard part.

Collar?

Not sure if I like the collar yet...

Couldn't Stop

Had to see if I could do the statue's on the shoulder pads. And judging by my last entry, it only took me 50 minutes to complete.

Game Artisan's dot ORG

Game Artisan's is having a competition sponsored by Blizzard and I decided to put the Crow Shaman on hold for about two weeks while I work on my entry.

The rules are that you have to design your own Death Knight which is a Hero class from their new expansion. Mine is a male Orc and I'm going for this Angel of Death motif. Which means wings and stuff. On his shoulder pads I'll be modeling small statues of the Angel. Looks cool in my head anyways hahah.

Texture Start: Crow Shaman

Model Finished

Yatta! I'll be changing the claws. I don't like them to be just planes. Keep a look out for when I start adding the texture maps.

Face your fears

Model Time

Decided that since I had the major volumes down I'd go ahead and jump into the modeling stage. The Hands and Face have still to be done.

Since the idea for the character is that its a PC for a MMO I wanted the back to have the most visual interest, and so it got the most polygons. Tris are at 2364.

MORE!

More values, please.

Still working to get more values into this painting. I've always had the problem of being afraid of going to dark. I'm not sure what keeps me from doing so. I'm still struggling to get over it and that's what I'm hoping this turn around will do for me.

Shored up the back on the side view. Made the face line up better and started seperating the values in the face a lot more. Though really I should be going over the hole figure at one time and just pulling out my darks. That's what I'll do next. Can't get bogged down on the little stuff just yet.

Start: Crow Shaman turn around

Trying out a new way to do turn arounds using a painting method. Its fun so far. The only issue is trying to build up everything at once. Instead of one figure, its four. But I suppose just like any painting with more than one person that’s how it goes.

Color Study 002

Color study 001

I wanted to get better at varying my color pallets and sticking with a theme. So I went to googles and got some pictures of musicians during shows. Concerts generally have some pretty dynamic lighting and colors so I thought they'd be great to study.

Here is my first go: Brian May of Queen

Done?

Last post for the night

To fast for you to handle

Keep it updating

Ventrue Update

Restarting this Vampire

new pose!

Finished with this study

I put another few hours into it and finished this one up. I didn't pay attention to how the gun in my reference image was composed so my barrel ended up being to short. I feel like despite that I've learned a lot off this one.

needing to take a break

I'm going to step away from the Vampire for a bit and just do some other stuff. Found a new technique for digital painting and so I wanted to test it out. I found a good reference image of a gun and started a redraw of it.

Also, I'm going to start on some animations for the Protagonist so keep an eye out for those.

Things have changed a bit

Been getting some great feedback and have been able to fine tune the image a lot.

Red Line

Some folks over at ConceptArt.org had some good suggestions on my anatomy. So I red-lined my drawing to get a better handle on her pose.

Back to the main attraction

Worked the bottom of the dress more, the folds in the gloves, the mouth, and nose. I was trying for the sultry-mouth-slightly-open effect but now i think she just looks like she's smiling, hrm...

Color and complete rig

Just a quick screen grab of the updated Protagonist.

Modeled by David Drinkard, designed and Rigged by myself

A break in the transmission

Just wanted to share a screen capture of what our Protagonist is looking like these days...

Modeled by David Drinkard, designed and Rigged by myself

Clean Edit

next part I need to work on is the drapery of the dress, and wrinkles in the gloves

Dirty Edits

Just editing the jpg for right now
edit: I wanted to show some of the red line edits I drew over the top to work out some of the problem areas people pointed out.

Some tweaks

per comments and critiques

Here is a side by side comparison. I drew over the image I have posted here because I don't have access to the high rez file to make edits. But I wanted to test out the fixes on this while it was fresh on my mind. Her right forearm is crazy long so that will be a fix I make when I get home tonight.

The Beginning: Gray-scale

Here is where the fun begins. I'm working very hard on this one to lose as much of the line work as possible and just use the colors to separate the different parts of the character. I still have a ways to go with that but so far its doing well.

The next updates will be adding the color and all that fun stuff.

Ventrue Cont'd

I got a new idea for the Vampire. I felt that the Victorian era was a bit played out and it struck me that I haven't seen many Flapper Girl vampires. So with that in mind I got a ton of reference and came up with these 12 dress ideas.

I'm leaning towards 10 and 12

A break from the art to bring you a website

http://www.posemaniacs.com/

This website was shown to me by a friend and its pretty sweet for those of us who find it hard to get out to life drawing sessions.

It helps simulate a normal drawing life drawing session by cycling through these 3D models in different poses. You can do 10 sec, 30 sec etc poses. My only issue with it is that the models don't have "skin", there are no overweight models and the breasts on the females don't stretch according to how the arms are raised. But for just needing to get warmed up, not a bad deal.

Nothing beats a live model though.

The Ventrue: Dress Designs

I threw down these thumbnails today and just tried to come up with as many designs as possible. I'm in a challenge here because it needs to be realistic, not cheesy, but something cool. So I don't know where that line is of 'to much'.

The first two are the 24 I drew. The last one I got by accident when I kept both of the layers on at the same time. I actually end up getting some really neat designs by combining the two layers. I may play around some more with putting two dresses together and see what comes out of it.

edit: Added numbers to each page

The Ventrue

I'm starting on a new project. Over the next several weeks I'll be developing a vampire character. The parameters I've placed on myself are that the character is female, sexy (not cheesy), and based on the Vampire Clan Ventrue.

I've done a few drawings real quick to familiarize myself with some fashion poses and work out some quick dress ideas I had floating in my head. Now I'm going to be taking this template body and do very quick dress paintings on top of it. I'll be focusing on shape and design at this stage. No real details.

Once the character design stage is complete, I'll make a turn around and then model her in Maya. Rig the character for animation, and then do some game style animations for her.

This should be a real challenge, but I'm looking to have a lot of fun with it.