Slowly making progress on the Trooper

I am using Substance Painter to make a texture for each piece of the trooper's armor. We'll see if this is efficient enough to work in the end. I may have to combine them all into one texture to cut down on file size and render times.

The gray pieces are currently UV'd, while the white pieces with no texture are not yet.

Add some Photoshop and what have you got?

Meanwhile,

I have posted the final episode of

Chapter 1 of Kiergo on Tapastic.com!

Suddenly addicted to rendering Legos

Apparently I can't get enough of this.

And apparently from now on, my blog posts will always be at 2 in the morning.




Here's a little bit of the process I finally got to work:

Step 1: In LeoCad, I build the model I want to render. In this instance, I based my model very closely on Horcik's Space Sweeper, as I wanted to focus on rendering rather than designing.

I only build one side of symmetrical portions, and I don't get too caught up in how the interior of the model fits together, as long as the superficial layers look like they work.

Step 2: I export a wavefront OBJ of the model and import into maya. I then spend a few hours duplicating all symmetrical parts to the other side, fixing normals (because CAD), and reassigning materials for Vray.

During the process, I will grab pieces at random and 'loosen' them to create a more handmade look.


Because of CAD, the topology of pieces is all over the place, which makes for very fake looking renders. The lighting can be used to work around this, but I find that after a couple preliminary renders, I can figure out which pieces break the illusion and fix/replace them, so that I don't have to model EVERY piece from scratch in Maya.

I will also bevel the key edges of the pieces that I feel look too perfectly sharp. I don't do it to every piece for time purposes.

Step 3: My favorite part -- bringing it all together in Photoshop. Here I can add a simple Tilt-shift to create the illusion of Depth of Field, alter the exposure, add glowy bits, and finally do a final curves adjustment to get a nice color in the shadows and highlights.

Then, voila!

Vray 3.0 and my stormy

After a few mix-ups, I've gotten my hands on the newest version of Vray, and I'm super excited.

Here's a bit of a storm trooper that I've been working on.

Below, you can see the progress that I've made tonight. Nothing is textured except the helmet and the sash.

It's been far too long

Well, I haven't updated this thing in a long while, so I figure I'll catch you up with a series of videos.

Also, the teaser for a short film I've been working on for a year.

Color TV No Vacancy Teaser

I sculpted an alien bust tonight, and had a lot of fun. It's been a while since I've last created something completely from scratch, just because I wanted to, and sculpting while zoned out in the Drum an' Bass is really relaxing.

So this is the part where I dump a megaton of posts about art I did over the past few months, because I was lazy and forgot to tend to this blog thing. But I'll be trying to start it back up again.

I started a Turian hunter character back in November/December for a Bioware contest, but I began to feel like he wasn't up to par enough, and so I've stopped working on him for now. I may revisit him, though the contest ends next week, so I'm not sure I'll get him done in time for it.