Halloween Assignment - Monsters!

It's that time of year! I haven't quite finished with this one but here's what I have so far.

Obligatory mood board. I wanted a humanoid looking creature, but I then wanted to dehumanise it by obscuring the facial features and/or distorting the proportions.

Using this, I created 2 practice pieces.

Monster with barbed wire, a direct inspiration from The Evil Within and a masked metal band called Mushroomhead.

And then a monster with its eyes sewn shut. This one came from a strange inspiration - a sketch from a show called Cardinal Burns. The sketch involves people eating cake at an office party, then they awaken in the office after having been attacked with office supplies and stationery. One image of a woman with her eyes pinned shut with cork board tacks stuck in my mind and gave me an uncomfortable nights sleep.

I think I need help..

Return of the Turret!

Starting to model the high-poly model! Really enjoyed doing the smaller details on this:

I know I'm going to have tone down the details when I bake the normal and occlusion maps, but I needed the practice with small scale stuff and, thanks to this, I can use most of the EditMesh tools with ease.

More 3D!

Some more 3D work - learning and experimenting with actually giving objects a skin rather than a UV map.

That said, here's the basic model of a chair:

And what it looks like with wood grain on it!

With how my last set of props went when I UV mapped them, this went very smoothly. It's all mapped correctly; there's no stretching or condensing; I'm quite pleased with myself.

Sci Fi Weaponry

Been a while since I posted, so here's a little catch up.

A couple of weeks ago we were given an assignment to create designs for sci-fi themed weaponry. They had to use conventional ammunition (no laser or plasma unfortunately).

I prefer my sci-fi to be near future, so I grabbed pictures of modern and plausible looking weaponry as a jumping off point:

I also took some inspiration from Aaron Beck, a concept artist who's worked on films such as Elysium, District 9, and Avatar. Great artist, definitely worth a look.

Next I did a few mashup's of weapons in my mood board in pencil because I'm still not comfortable with doing this kind of straight edged stuff in Photoshop. Anyways, here's my two personal faves:

And my final design - a hi capacity pistol based on the strange looking orange gun in the mood board, mixed with the pistol in Blade Runner:

I came up with a couple of different grip designs but overall I prefer the look of the top one.

One Point Perspective

Just a quick bit of perspective practice, with a Fallout twist!

"Nevada Highway Patrol, what is your emergency?"

I used to do this for landscapes a lot in college, so I handled this quite well. It took me about an hour to draw it out in pencil and ink, and then I decided that it would be a good idea to paint it in Photoshop rather than in watercolours.

And this is the result.

Considering I'm still very cautious with this programme, I'm rather pleased with the way this turned out. I perhaps should've added an orange/yellow tint to the sky around the mushroom cloud, and made the top of it less see-through, but other than that I'm in love with this piece.

Turret - Long Term Project

As the title suggests, this one is in for the long haul.

The task is to build a turret, UV map it, texture it, detail it, and animate it, thankfully over the next month though.

Half complete

UV Mapped

UV mapping is a bit of headache for me, as I've never done anything like this before. I can get the large areas done just fine, but the smaller bits such as the gun barrels and the cut outs for the doors are a nightmare!

Stay tuned for more!

Tentacle Creatures

And now for something completely different.

The theme was tentacles this week, and I did what any self-respecting horror nerd did - I looked to H.P. Lovecraft for inspiration, along with H.R. Geiger, Bosch, and once again those daft old B-Movies.

I started off with a mood board, just to get my ideas flowing.

The first design I came up with is this - the Tethkrall. It's a small, bat like creature that dives onto it's prey. From there, it crushes their skull with its tentacles, and then uses it's Lamprey like mouth to suck out the brains.

I like to think of this as "what would happen if Lovecraft and Spongebob had a baby?"

The answer is pretty horrific, but still my favourite design of this task.

Finally, something remarkably different. I wanted to do a more light-hearted variant of the Tentacle man, so I chose the B-Movie stereotype of a man being turned into a creature because of some sort of nuclear accident. Behold, THE WERESQUID!

I laid this out like a poster, and the layout takes inspiration from Forbidden Planet. All it needs is a title.

Robots!

Finally! Something I feel ok with!

Tasked with creating robots in traditional media, I feel a lot more at home. I went with a more retro/futuristic aesthetic due to my love for classic Sci-Fi B-Movies, and the Fallout series. Naturally, this led me to the idea that the robots would be used mostly for household tasks.

This model took inspiration from Gort and Liberty Prime (though I guess Liberty Prime took inspiration from Gort too, just more jingoistic. He'd be bipedal, tall, and probably chromed.

These guys are designed to fly about the house and do the chores willingly, as opposed to begrudgingly by your pesky children.

This is the culmination of my ideas - a hovering, nuclear powered vacuum bot! Chromed, with a CRT TV for a face, he'd be the perfect robot maid for the 1950s!

UV Mapping

I hate this I hate this I hate this.

So UV Mapping is something that went into my latest assignment on Maya, and I've come out of this a changed man.

Here's the sledgehammer and crowbar I made for the UV Mapping task. This went a lot better than the fish, and I'm rather pleased with them. This was the easy part though.

It took me an hour to finally get to this stage, and technically this is the halfway mark as there should be a texture over the top of it.

Sigh..

Silhouette Technique

We were tasked with experimenting with the Silhouette technique - blocking out the form of a creature in near black, then putting the detail over the top. This was a speed painting exercise, and this was a difficult thing for me to learn, having become used to sketching out my ideas and then committing paint to my piece in my fine art course.

However, after a few hours here are the results of my experiments:

A quick mood board of my ideas.

This was my initial attempt, and I fear I was being too precise with it. The many brush strokes and scruffiness doesn't look profession and it's not what I had in mind.

This is my second attempt, which I prefer far more. I feel like the forms are cleaner and crustacean-esque, and I'm particularly pleased with the red coloured creature.

Learning to Use Photoshop

First two tries using Photoshop. This I'm a little more used to than the 3D stuff thanks to using Corel Painter in College. Started off merely copying other works, though hopefully moving onto more creative stuff soon!

Here's three stages of a cranky old lady (still a WIP):

And now an exercise in multiply layers and overlaying colour, in the form of a bug person:

Starting Maya

Well this is a headache.

3D modelling and I have developed a love/hate relationship - when it's going well, I'd happily turn into pixels and kiss it. When it's wrong, I want to take and axe to my machine.

I'm getting there.

Here's what I've created so far:

Here's a fish with a unique problem that I've been unable to solve. Somehow I've managed to duplicate the low resolution model, and it's merged with the high resolution model. I'll give anyone a cookie if they can tell me how I've managed this, and how I can rectify this.

Seriously, cookies ARE on offer here.

Previous

Well, here we are. My first post!

I've been a fine art student for the past 4-5 years, and figured that showing some of my previous work would be a good way to start things off.

Here's some landscapes:

And some figure/creature design:

All traditional mediums - acrylic and graphite.