Night Photo Outing

Well, the weather's good here, and I've got the bug to go out and get some shots of some wreckage I spotted a while back. Before I head out though I though it would be good to put up some of the shots I took a couple weeks ago. I headed out around two in the morning and I wasn't sure where I would end up, but I'm happy with the results. These shots are real long exposures, and I swear it was almost pitch black out. Anyway gotta head out while the light still holds, hopefully I'll have some more to post soon.

Unearthly Challenge '09

I've started work on a new challenge. Unearthly Challenge '09 This one is an environment challenge rather than my usual characters, so it should be both a chance to stretch my legs and to trip over them. I'm still refining ideas and trying to decide on which one I should follow through on. My work in progress thread is HERE at game artisans.org

Final LJ and Peach

I Finished! ... Both.

I managed to finish both the competitions I was working on before. While I can find many things I wish I could change about how I submitted the final work, I am very happy with the models that came out of this.

As you can see, there's no Mario here. I chose to cut down to one character for time, and Peach in all his flamboyancy was way more interesting. And it seems I was right. I got 3rd place on this one.

I didn't get all the images for this one looking exactly the way I wanted. I'm really happy with the model and I learned a ton that has helped speed up my workflow. I've gotten tons of complements on the quality of the base, and while it used up a day and a half during my final week, when it comes to overall quality I don't think it was time wasted. I'm still waiting for some kind of info on how the judging is going on this comp. I don't expect to place, but the blind waiting is awful.

Doubly Challenged

While I wait for the voting to finish on the Biomech sculpting challenge, I've started work on two ther low poly challenges. First I started work on 3dTotal's low poly challenge #30 Gender Bender where the goal is to take a beloved game/comic/cartoon character and swap their gender. My concept work for Prince Peach and Maria is above and my progress thread can me found here. Then I was made aware of an even bigger challenge taking place over a GameArtisans.org. Their second annual ComiCon challenge involves modeling any comic character. I've chosen what may be a bit obscure character Lobster Johnson from the Hellboy series, but I love Mike Mignola's art, and there are always way too many people doing Hellboy and Abe Sapien. The due date for the Comicon challenge is two weeks before the Gender Bender one so I'll be focusing most of my effort there for now. Follow along here.

Biomech Hybrid "done"

Voting has kicked off for The Sculpting Challenge 17, I got mine done at the last minute. Here's a shot of the final model. As I have been doing lately I'll take a couple more days to make a lowpoly of this guy to texture and get some practice with realtime workflow. Here's the model as submitted to the competition (under 8 hrs).

Troll head Textured

Here's an update on what I've been working on this week. This shot is from inside 8monkey labs' marmoset engine I picked up over at the poly count forums. It's really nice to get a pice smoothly into this realtime engine since that was one of my major hangups during the dominance war challenge. Just needs eyes then I'm gonna call this done.

Troll head WIP

Here's quick look at what I've been spending the last couple days on when I haven't been working on the biomech challenge. I'm using this piece to flesh out a few workflow problems I had during Dominance war. All work up to this point was done in zBrush.

Celebrity Caricature Challenge (CCC)

Here's the work I did on the 14th Sculpting Challenge, Celebrity Caricature. Clockwise from top left: Niel Patrick Harris, Clint Eastwood, George W. Bush, Liam Neeson, Winston Churchill and George Lucas. The challenge was to sculpt a characature in under five hours. Most of these were done in under two hours. My George Lucas Sculpt actually won third place.

Sculpting Challenge 17

I started working on 3d total's sculpting challeng yesterday and got a couple hours start. The brief is to sculpt a model of a biomechanical hybrid. I've never really tried hard surface modeling in zbrush so i'm going to try and get several done for practice so that I have a few to choose from for the final submission on july 20th.

Alchemy doodles

Figured I'd put something simple up for my first post. Most of what I'll be posting are regular sketch work in 2d and 3d, mostly using zbrush. I'll shortly be uploading a bunch of work I've been doing in Zbrush, but just to get things started I figured a small group of sketches made this morning using Alchemy. I love this program, and I've heard some people call it gimmicky, but it really gets my creativity flowing.