More Horses

Complete with the machine.

Horses

Some late night horsey sketches.

Dinosaurs

Raaaah

Update - 4/8/14

Hello blog,
It's been a while. I'm doing an online mentorship class with Anthony Jones and this is the first weeks assignment. 5 silhouettes with some rough detail.

Rendering forms.

Basic 3-ish tone rendering, no material indication, no light decay, no nothing.

Study Journal: 09_June_2014 - Matte Surface Rendering and Shadow Plotting

I did some more practice on rendering, trying to apply the techniques I learned recently. These are taking me quite a while but i'm enjoying the process. I'll need to get some feedback on these to see if i'm actually doing them right.

The steps I went through were: 

• Layout a perspective grid and define the picture plane.
• Draw out the geo forms.
• Plot the shadows
• Fill in the main values
• Push and pull some of the values to get a better separation in the planes.

Study Journal: 08_June_2014 - Matte Surface Rendering and Shadow Plotting

I'v been working through more of Scott Robertson's Gnomon DVD's, mainly the Basics of Perspective and Matte Surface Shading (Planar) ones. I'm finding the techniques extremely useful for solving many of the problems I have when trying to draw things correctly (perspective, lighting etc.)

This weekend i've been studying the Matte Surface Shading lesson and learned about the Half-way to Black value assignment technique. It's a good starting point for learning how to decide how dark and light the different planes of a surface should be.

Assigning Values

Main things I learned:

• 1,2,3 Read is important.
• Form Change = Value Change
• The darker a surface is the less light bounces off of it.
• Light bounced onto surrounding surfaces is also tinted to the colour of the surface the light is reflecting off.
• The gradation of bounced light on surfaces has to be extremely smooth to avoid the value change looking like a form change.
• The brightest surface of an object is one that is closest to perpendicular/90 degrees to the light source. 

Plotting Shadows

Notes:

• Shadow construction is made up of 3 main components: Light source location, length of shadow and direction of shadow.
• Because the sun is so far away, it's light rays are almost parallel when they reach the earth. Meaning they all can recede to one point.
• When front lighting objects you only really need to determine the shadow vanishing point, wherever you feel the shadows should recede to and then drop the sun in 90 degrees to that point below the horizon line.
• Side lighting is the same: if the scene is directly side light though, the shadow direction can be parallel to the horizon and the light rays can be completely parallel to each other.
• Diagonal lighting provides the strongest 1,2,3 read + a good cast shadow out of all the possible lighting strategies.

I think i've learned enough of the very basics to start practicing applying all of these techniques on my own for a bit before I move onto more complex techniques.

Note: I understand that these posts won't be interesting to anyone apart from myself but I feel it is really useful for me to journal my "boring" study stuff, so I can keep better track of what i'm learning and so I can collate any notes/thoughts I have on it in one place.

Character Poses for School

As part of the character design assignment we're doing for school we have to draw our character performing some actions. This is the catch and lift actions I did for it.

Doggy Character Design

I did this character for a design contest where we had to design an app mascot. Unfortunately I didn't win but it was really fun to do.

Sketch Version

Finished version.

W.I.P Helmet

Trying Zbrush out properly for the first time. I think it might be the best thing ever. I'm trying something generic and simple just to get used to the software. It's an armored bust that I'll hopefully be able to 3D  print soon. I <3 Zbrush.


Super W.I.P

Face drawing practice.

Rough Mime Character Poses

Character Turn-around

Finished my character turn-around for my mime. He's in dire need of a name and some colour.

Finished Shaders and Texturing Assignment

This is the finished render of my scene, I added some weathering and camera effects to it.

Update on my texturing project.

This is what I've done so far on the scene i'm texturing, there's still loads of stuff to fix and add. Also i've had lots of practice gamma correcting nodes and using (too much) bump mapping.

Thank you for perusing. 

Robot Design

Been working on this thang all day, it was pretty fun. I think I spent half the time doing the orange things because I suck at digital.

Figure Drawing: Longer Drawings

I spent a bit more time on these drawings, tried to add in some basic shadows.

Finished Scooby-Doo Re-design.

This is the finished Sooby-Doo noir drawing I did, just added some smoke and clouds.

Figure Drawing

Some figure drawings/random doodles with a few corrections.

Aw yeah shadows.

Shaders and Texturing in Maya

Today I managed to do the UV's for a scene we are doing in class. There's just one light in the scene at the moment.

The desk is supposed to look like someone had been researching about a potential experiment and that they're not the tidiest researcher.

Note: Geometry not made by me.

Figure drawing.

Some gestures that I did earlier this week during a figure drawing class I'm taking.

I didn't draw the eyes on the above image (I wish I could). And the drawing on the right had corrections made to it. Really enjoying doing these and it helps a lot getting direct feedback on them.

Character Design

I'm trying to do my character design, except I'm terrified to re-draw the character in different positions. I've never been able to get a result even remotely close to acceptable. Psssssht.

Sketch dump from the last couple of days.

I've been working on some head stuff recently, I'm getting more comfortable with drawing the basic shape of the head now. I'm using QuickPose.com for my reference, best life drawing site I've found so far.

Also been messing around with game maker studio and trying to learn GML.

I learnt how to make aliens and a ship to shoot them with. 

Trying to code/script makes me feel very inadequate, mentally.

Gesture Drawings

Did a few gesture drawings today so i'll post a few of them:

:D