Ready at Dawn here I come!

So I worked on that mmo for a long time, the one called Wildstar I mentioned in an earlier post.  I learned a lot from working there but I was not happy with how things were.  When I started it was pretty awesome as a first job and lots of things were super amazing but towards the end it had changed so much I couldn’t really enjoy the small things anymore.  I was becoming very burnt out on dealing with everything.  It just wasn't a culture for me and wasn't the game for me.  After all I don't play traditional mmo's anyways.  I don't see the appeal to them as games.  Not to say they are bad games, just preference in the end.  I still think the game looks awesome and Cory Loftis's style is so amazing that it deserves its own big budget movie and I bet in like 6 years from now we'll see one too. But as for places I could be going to I couldn't be happier.  It was a bit of a surprise to me but some of the best news I’ve had in a long time, a really long time.  I worked really hard and didn’t give up. I learned a ton just taking a test and when I finally had my interview I was nervous and very excited to see anything I could.  You can soak up so much information from people around you, I just wanted to talk and ask so many questions but I tried to hold myself back a bit.  I’m extremely impressed with what I saw and can't wait to do whatever I can to contribute to it.  I am working as a "Design Technical Artist".  I love that my title has both “design” and “artist” in its name, my two passions in one title.  I really do feel this is a good place for me to learn, grow, and help out.  I have a lot of respect for the people there and always have.  I feel really nervous and lucky to get the chance to finally work with these people.  So wish me luck in my new endeavors!

working on a pedestal for some art

Art always looks better looking like a toy, like on a pedestal.  so here is a pedestal i'm doing for some art.  not sure how i'll texture it but i'm doing some League of Legends inspired work.  yeah i play that game now...

I feel like I should mention this...

so for about 3 years I worked passionately on this game called Wildstar by carbine studios.  I was an artist as well as a designer there.  I added a lot of assets to the game, even some game features, as well as a couple of tools.  there are a lot of talented people there and it's an amazing looking game.  Not a fan of that type of mmo myself but if it's your cup of tea feel free to check it out.

if you'd like to see what it looks like, here is the site.
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/

(this is an awesome picture from the concept guys showing off the style.)

the style of art is after cory loftis's work.  the guy is amazing and one of the most talented people i've ever met.  he can show you how to paint something in 5 minutes that would take you 5 months to learn.  he works at disney now working on motion pictures so congrats to him for scoring a dream job.  if you'd like to check out his personal work head on over to his blog.  I highly suggest you do.
http://tabletmonkey.blogspot.com/

I have some of my work backed up from working on wildstar but I don't think I can post it online so if you want to see it you'd probably have to ask me :/

update to the hair. this is working a lot better so far than the old way.

update...

just real quick i need to explain that i am working on art and design still.  so the twins have been worked on since i last posted but i just want to finish them up more.  i've been super busy with moving, finding work, tests, sick dogs, etc...  but i will get on top of things, hopefully soon.

Be my penguin?

Well there aren't words to describe how i feel right now.  but i remade this last frame of a comic for someone special hoping that somehow it makes an impact on them.  it's a comic that always reminded me of her and i wanted to do something special for it one day and i wanted to wait for the right time.  although not sure if this was my opportune moment though.  now it might all be too late but whatever i'm just rambling and this is an art blog so lets talk art.

i have no traditional art here so i had to call in a lot of favors super late at night looking for whatever i could get my hands on.  i had some water colors, black spray paint, drawing paper, colored prismas, and some tape.  so i wanted to try and reproduce the last frame of this comic.

i thought first of using water color for the colors and stenciling out the black areas for the spray paint.  so i did a quick grid drawing and cut out the stencils.  then traced a second one to paint and well... the paper didn't take to kindly to water color.

so it was so crinkled up i couldn't lay it flat.  meaning there is no way the stencils would even work.  did i mention i didn't even have a paint brush?  well i had one that was for painting houses but that made things a little difficult...  so i said screw it i'm going to take my chances and just spray paint a page and hope for the best.

this was the first attempt and i didn't have any glue or anything else so i just taped down what i could and laid flat the other pieces.  it actually worked out better than i thought and those misty areas where the paper wasn't perfectly flat i actually liked.  kind of a happy accident.  although what is not a happy accident is i forgot the girls mouth on the right...  so i had to cut a page just for the mouth.

so that big page with the hole in it is the page for the mouth.  you can see the black pieces on the cardboard that i used for the stenciling and the white cutout from remnants of the stencil.

that's it cut out with her mouth there, and look! there is a yellow spot from paint i spilled... i need more room to work.  after all of this i just started coloring and well... pretty self explanatory

the paint made it difficult to color but i still did the best i could.  i hope she likes it and i hope that she remembers it. it was like 4 years ago after all. 

Oh well, i guess i should say Merry Christmas everyone.  i hope everyone is happy.

been awhile but i am working...

so it's been awhile, i needed a new computer, i needed a wacom, i had to work late, and lots of other drama involving my life but that's no excuse to stop working.

so here is the latest WIP. there is still a lot to do...

working on cloth folds, i'm all meh about them.

trying to work on this lately but i've run into a few hiccups. mostly crashing, redoing work, and then having my comp say it's out of RAM to subdivide any higher. so since that happend. i'm ordering new computer parts.  probably won't get here fast enough, i may have to work on this at the office :/

still working

mmmmm.... yeah still working on it

detailing phase

note to self, surface noise modifier in zbrush is a little too noisy and uniform and clean up is a bitch. 

i think she looks good but i have no idea.  i went back and looked at my art from when i was in school and i thought that was pretty good at the time so right now I'm wondering if this is crap.  i am one paranoid person.

fixed her proportions

 

after a paintover from a friend i fixed her proportions.  i think it's better now

mini update

only really been working on the smaller details of the model so they may not be obvious from the last post. but i added a bit to the shoulder thing as well as to the hands, knees, elbow, and face.  all stuff so small no one would probably notice in these images.

save often...

once again i forgot to save after two hours of work.  lost it all and apparently the shoulder thing i had before that i made as a temp should not have been sculpted because the poly count got too high and crashed the scene.  so after that i took the time to make a lower poly version and resculpt all the details i lost before.  so a 2-3 hour job turned into to 5 but i learned a valuable lesson so that has to count for something.

anyways here's real quick what i got around to doing.

almost there

started working on the twins again. had to take a break for a long while.  had some personal stuff to deal with.  but i can't ignore my work and i have to work fast so here is a quick update of what i have.

still not happy with the face but i'm working on it. got the blocked in shapes and now i just plan to refine the details in everything.  i'll start making it look worn and add in all the little details now.

Thoughts and Design... Today, talent systems.

well after talking with some coworkers the other day i wanted to explain my thoughts on why i disliked talents so much in world of warcraft or other games.  it's not that they are a bad idea to have but i haven't personally seen improvement on those in a long time.  the good part about talents in games is that it's a slight adjustment to your character so that two of the same character can play differently.  shitty part is that you then play like 1 of 3 types of your character.  it gives the illusion of choice  which is great and the default look and workings of a talent system also work great however it's getting a little outdated.  all i had to do was google talent system and i get a plethora of images of all the same thing but with different art.  stats and everything don't really matter at this point since what i'm looking at improving is it's overall way you get talents.

first problem with talents is there is usually 2-3 different choices and there are always 2-3 different choices to go and adding more talent choices isn't necessarily the answer if you want to the player to have more options.

second problem is they are all linear. not moving in some sort of way that allows the character to make their own choices and make that avatar unique to them and their play style.

third problem is that if you go one way you can't really go back if you decide you don't want a talent in one area, as well as if you have the option to mix and match you frequently miss out on the final talents in all areas.

ok so google has this to show us from the ever so popular games of world of warcraft and borderlands with their talent systems.

the same similar problems show up in each one.  it's a branch of 3 paths with a couple of choices that all lead to single and powerful talent specs.  if you start one path you immediately have made your choice and then mix and matching isn't as fun because you basically have to downgrade to try weaker talents meant for lower levels not knowing if it's all that worth it anymore.  this is one way to keep players from being over powered when in fact players like to feel overpowered and like to feel as if they have beat the system you've laid down.  my goals in design are to let the player make their own decisions and mix and match how they want.  give them the freedom they deserve to make their play style their own and not punish them for spending a talent point in something when after trying it realizing they didn't like it.

so how i determine that we solve this is to think more like a web rather than a box of possiblities.

ok so instead of making it so 1 talent now unlocks access to 2 more talents of that type and so on, i believe it should be more of a unlocking level 1 circle of talents gives access to all of circle 2's of talents.  circle 2 then unlocks all of circle 3 and so on. this provides the player with a way to customize a character to their liking and giving them a much larger range of possibilities but also a simple path if they feel like just sticking with one type.  it also makes it so that the player doesn't ever miss out on that final talent point in the other areas while still supporting multi talented system.  i also believe that the player should be allowed to take away a talent in one area and put it into another at any point in time.  trial and error is a fun part of design and i believe that talents is a player designing their character, that and it sucks not to have the chance to play with all aspects of the game without their being some sort of negative consequence for it.  so if a player wants to spend 2 or 20 hours perfecting the perfect system or mix in match in the midst of the field, then i say let them, if that's what they have fun figuring out, then i think it's great.

i believe systems in games should offer a realm of possibilities rather than just giving the player a single guided experience.

Twin update...

i'm continuing to try and get better at sculpting, anatomy, and hints of stylization.  ignore the face for now.

i was hearing from people to stylize it a bit more and have it look more like the twins original concept.  my original goal was to land somewhere in between real and stylized but i think i went a little closer to real as time went on so hopefully these adjustments will help.  i think i need to thin her out a bit still to match the concept as well.  also something is still up with the shoulders and i need to play with them a bit more to figure out what i need to do.  oh yeah, i hate sculpting feet too...  and hands...

i feel like i don't need to update this much but i also feel this may be a good exercise in updating this blog on a regular basis as well as for me to better see my progression over time.  right now i'm improving slowly, but i feel like i'm learning a lot and i'm remembering a lot about anatomy that i forgot so it's been a good exercise so far.

Twins mini update

Small little update to show the work i got done today compared to yesterday.  she's coming along in the body but the face needs a lot of love still. trying to balance out the manga/real look.

Twins!

ok so jason chan's work of the creepy weird twins was my choice for my next piece. 

i think it gives me a chance to do something outside of that toony look but still keep it slightly stylized. as well as if i do this i get two models for almost the price of one!

ok so i tried a bunch of different things to figure out which work flow is best for me since i've been away from characters so long, especially more real looking ones.  first i tried just modeling it for zbrush which failed horribly.  i'm much more used to traditional means so modeling it straight out with no side view and front view was kind of hard. haven't really done it that way in awhile.

 

embarrassed to even show this but hey it's process.

next i said screw it to this whole thing.  modeling it out wasn't working. even if i did want to take it into zbrush later.  so i went straight to my new friend i made last year...

good ol zspheres.  you get really bad topology with these but i find it so much easier to get my shape down.  at first i was going off the super stylized sketches that had the long legs but i changed that during sculpting.  looking back that was dumb to even make them that long.  oh well, live and learn.

so i started sculpting from that piece of crap round blob and got this basic body that's got some more realistic proportions

now like i said topology with zspheres sucks so there are few iterations in the head and many in the fingers. such is the curse of zspheres.  so i decided just to make a good base mesh that had the decent proportions and i could throw away later.  by no means is this a final sculpt at all.

so i took that and put it in 3d coat and made this mesh

got some crits on it that i still want to fix but this is my new female base mesh that i will use when sculpting females from now on. case by case of course.  so it's made up of mostly quads and now when i want to sculpt a female character i have a mesh already available so i don't have to go from scratch anymore, cause screw sculpting hands over and over again!

ok so now comes the fun part, the actual WIP of the final high poly i'll use.  it's still very early on so don't judge too much but i think it's coming along and the base mesh is relatively friendly. only a few things to fix.

the only parts i'm having the most trouble with is making it look like the twins but at the same time work in 3d.  the faces are the hardest part because the look a certain way in the concept but to get that to work in 3d really doesn't work from too many angles.  however i'm still working on it everyday so we'll see what happens tomorrow.

I think i'll get back to some digital stuff for a bit.

Now that halloween is done i think I'll get back to doing some digital stuff online to help improve my skills for work.  I'd like to do something a little outside my style for a bit so i think my next inspiration will be Jason Chan.  if i do anything I'll try to live stream it though so people can watch.  just wanted to post saying I'm on to the next project!

Finished Dante

this one is a bit of a leap in post but i was so busy putting the costume together i didn't even get time to post so i'll be showing you the few in between shots i have on my computer already.

these are the guns after a lot of epoxy, wood, and sanding.  i took off the back piece to make a straighter handle as well as extended the magazine.  i added wood and epoxy to the ends to extend the overall barrel length since ebony and ivory are pretty big.  it no longer shoots pellets but you can still pull the trigger. 

 

 this was the final look of the guns, i didn't paint them as long as i should have cause i learned quite a bit after making these. first, primer is a better coat than just the paint sometimes.  second, contact paper is kind of a lame wood pattern, third, primer, which i thought was a bit thicker, is actually quite thin when you spray it on. fourth, krylon spray paint that dries in 10 minutes sucks.

so yeah i'm kind of meh on the guns after all that work but with some sanding and more work i might be able to save them

necklace was pretty easy to just rig something together.  just metal wire wrapped around leather straps. sculpey objects painted silver. they deserve some more painting though, flat silver is lame.  the image of the bucket is me stirring the jeans in the red dye for an hour.  cause putting it in the washing machine will only make it a pastel pink so a bucket works a lot better, just eats an hour of your time...  the last image are the pants and boots on me for a test fit.  my friend angie sewed a quick zipper to them to help seal the deal.

 

After a bunch of make up and grunge this was the final look that day.  i painted red stripes on the arm for the next day cause i forgot to buy red acrylic paint but for this one it worked out fine. i feel alright about this costume, i think next year I'll do something better.