PlatypusGreen

doodle 120609

2009-06-13T20:39:00.001+01:00

WIP of a doodle I started on paper last night then took into photoshop today.

DWIV sketch 02

2009-03-28T18:40:00.003Z

First concept drawing for the demon prince character for this yearrs entry to Dominance War IV.

DWIV sketch 01

2009-03-26T17:32:00.003Z

Sketching out an idea for this years dwar. This'll be the steed of the character i'm working on. I've been a bit busy of late and haven't had any time to deal with Dwar yet, but hopefully after about the 5th April I will be starting on my dwar entry properly.

Sketched on paper and a quick PS colouring.

zbrush doodle 270209

2009-02-28T20:15:00.001Z

Doodling in zbrush from a polysphere last night. Took about 3 hours.
Unfinished.

Blender + Sunflow test render

2009-02-11T08:54:00.000Z

Testing a render style for a short animated sequence, using Blendre and rendered in Sunflow. Took almost 6mins to render this frame. meanign the full sequence will probably take over 100 hours to render out. I need to find ways to reduce the render time I think.

Blender LuxRender Haruhi

2009-01-06T11:27:00.004Z

I took the lowpoly Haruhi mesh I made a while ago and rigged it in Blender and then rendered it from Blender in LuxRender. Took about 30mins to render down to this quality.

LuxRender is a great rendering solution, plus it being opensource is a great bonus. See the LuxRender site for more details and for the download. You can find LuxRender plugins for Blender, XSi, Maya and C4D.

Blender Game Engine

2009-01-04T02:47:00.003Z

I've been attempting to put together a short game demo using the blender game engine. Hopefully I can get a full demo working. It's going to be a point and click adventure game system. I have a story i've been meaning to make into a game for a long time, if I can get a chapter of the story sorted out I will probably use that a s a base for the demo. Blender is an excellent package, and it being open source is a big plus too.

This is a quick sketch of what the main player may look like. It's a bit plain atm and lacks much character. But it's a start.

This will be more of a portfolio piece rather than a game. So hopefully I can get some nice looking things into it and have a failry competant and stable game system working. BlenderGE uses Python for the scripting, a language i've enver programmed in before. At first it was quite puzzling, but I think i'm getting the hang of it.
Maybe I can get a wip runtime up with some assets in. I'm currently trying to get the movememnt system working (pathfinding specifically) before I put any graphics in. The player is currently a cone standing on it's point.

sketch compilation

2008-11-25T19:32:00.003Z

Some sketches for a project I'm doing the art for.

sprite animation test

2008-10-24T20:31:00.002+01:00

Image above is the sketched animated line test that I hope to complete for the sprite below. I'm aiming for something like a high-definition 2d beat-em-up idle animation sprite. I'm working non-antialaised so that it has a low colour palette. The initial animated sketch was done in the free application Pencil, and the sprite was done in Photoshop.
I based this sprite off a photo I found using google of a figurine. I think it's a character from one of the Ikkitousen series/games.

comic colouring practice 20081006

2008-10-06T20:06:00.002+01:00

Lineart from the Topcow website (found HERE). Trying a method I haven't tried before to colour this, using one colour layer; using alphas to store the area masks. Still a long way to go to finish this off.

speedpaint 20081004

2008-10-04T02:59:00.002+01:00

Another 15min speedpaint in photoshop.

speedpaint 20081003

2008-10-03T18:51:00.002+01:00

15min speedpaint in photoshop.

Photo retouch practice

2008-10-01T17:48:00.004+01:00

Following the Gnomon Photographic Retouching dvd as a guide I had an attempt at working on the second image on the dvd.
Learnt quite a bit about photoshop's photo retouching tools from this dvd.
Most of the changes I made were very subtle. Things like cleaning the skin, or reducing the wrinkles on the hands, etc.

Original image below.

Colouring b&w photo 02

2008-09-27T02:28:00.002+01:00

Another photoshop colouring experiment of an old black and white photograph found using google.

doodle 260908

2008-09-26T20:12:00.004+01:00

Quick speed sketching in Photoshop of some random characters. 10mins each.

creature_01

2008-09-23T22:50:00.001+01:00

Blocked in the basics of this creature sculpt.

Colouring b&w photo 01

2008-09-13T02:02:00.002+01:00

Decided to have a go at colouring a Black and White photo I found on the net.
A Barbarella photo. Original photo on the left, my colouring attempt on the right.

Suzumiya Haruhi - update

2008-09-10T20:33:00.002+01:00

Update: Worked a little more on the model. I decided to use a cell style shader on this. Using a blend map with two standard materials set to 100% self illumination, one darker than the other. Using a fall-off material set to light/dark to control the blend. Means I can control transition easily. It also renders off a lot faster than 3dsMax's ink&paint shader. Atm I'm thinking of using either Mental Ray's contour shader system or try to find another good system for rendering the outlines. 3dsMax's ink&paint is too slow.

Suzumiya Haruhi low poly

2008-09-05T23:50:00.004+01:00

Making a low poly Suzumiya Haruhi model in 3dsmax.
About 1400 tris atm, a bit higher than I was wanting, but should deform ok.
I'll probably model the hair simply rather than using a poly surface with transparency mapping; to try and get a cleaner edge to it and also so that it can be viewed from the side without it looking too flat.

Also I'm aiming for the model to be viewed unlit, as if it was running on something like the DS. So the shading will be painted onto the texture map.

If anyone knows of an easy way to get a simple 3d animation running on the DS I'd like to know. Would be quite fun to have a realtime animation of the dance running on the DS with the ability to pause and navigate around the scene with the stylus.
But I guess that it isn't easy.

doodle 290808

2008-08-29T18:34:00.001+01:00

Started sketching an image, been a while since I tried any freehand 2-point perspective. I did the basics on paper and inked it then scanned it in and re-sketched over it in photoshop. I didn't get it quite right, but looks good enough. I haven't yet decided what to do with the arms, hence the lack of hands.

I think I'll work on this some more and use this is an illustration practice.

Revolver 2

2008-08-06T01:14:00.004+01:00

Did another revolver model in 3dsmax, then this time used the zbrush retopology tools to make it into a single surfaced model.

Sphere sculpt 01

2008-08-02T00:27:00.004+01:00

Sculpt in zbrush starting from a sphere with no plan. Took about 1 hour.

Speed Sculpt: Archangel - update

2008-07-31T21:55:00.006+01:00

Worked a little more on the Archangel speed sculpt that I did for the Threedy speed sculpting challenge. Spent another hour cleaning up the sculpt and adding another piece of cloth in.

Sketch video 2

2008-07-31T16:03:00.004+01:00

Another Photoshop sketch, took about 40minutes.
Video capture.

Sketch video

2008-07-30T22:17:00.009+01:00

Click here for the video capture of the above sketch. To test the free video capture software CamStudio.

3dsmax - Le Mat Revolver

2008-07-30T02:56:00.005+01:00

It's been a while since I did any SubD surface modelling in 3dsmax, so did this today. Took about 4 to 6 hours.

It doesn't have all the details and lacks an assymetrical main body, as I had no reference of the revolver's left hand side.

No textures yet, and probably won't have any as this was only a modelling practice piece.

Using this as reference

30 minute doodle

2008-07-28T03:07:00.003+01:00

30 minutes in Photoshop.
Just started laying down strokes into Photoshop and improvised from there. It's quite fun to start a quick painting with no plan on what you are wanting from it.

My sense of anatomy from memory needs a lot more work. But each drawing gets me closer to where I want to be.

Speed Sculpting Challenge 06

2008-07-27T03:20:00.003+01:00

Just finished my entry to the Threedy speed sculpting challenge 06.
The subject this time was Archangel.
Time limit of 4 hours using only the provided basemesh.

More videos can be found on my Youtube page

skin practice paint

2008-06-06T22:33:00.004+01:00

A Photoshop paint practicing skin tones; photo referenced from an image found on an imageboard.

zbrush scripts

2008-05-25T00:31:00.004+01:00

Just found a couple of scripts for Zbrush that I find incredibly useful.

ZsphereTweaks : Enables you to change the resolution of Zspheres after you have placed them and even when in adaptive skin preview.

and

SmoothGroupImport : Enables you to import obj files retaining their smoothing groups from 3dsmax. This is really handy for doing hard edge geometry as I've always found setting crease edges in zbrush a little time consuming to do.

Boa Vector WIP

2008-05-21T15:37:00.001+01:00

Worked a little more on this image last night. it's taking a while to build this up in Adobe Illustrator using the gradient mesh tool primarily.