Figure Drawing Week 08

Cannon Edited

Even though I didn't pick my Cannon for industry review, I made a few edits to the metal spec in substance.

Cannon Project - Painting with Substance and Importing into UE4

To finish up the cannon we've been working on, we imported the low res mesh into Substance Painter and baked a high res map onto it for details.

 I made several black mask layers to add details and materials to each part of the cannon.

And placed it into UE4, hooking up the maps into the material editor:

Figure Drawing Week 07

Lighting Study - 3 Point Light

For this assignment, we picked an object to light in a 3-point light setting, take a photo, and then re paint digitally. I took this photo of an amiibo from my desk:

Rough initial sketch:

Soft brush color blocking:

Flat colors:

I played around between the flat color layers and various other layers to add shadows and highlights for more depth, resulting in the final piece:

Jim Henson Reference Board

This week's focus is lighting with Jim Henson:

Cannon Retopology for Substance Preparation

For this assignment, we took the high-res cannon that we sculpted in Zbrush and made new topology for any parts that had silhouette changes. I exported a High-Res and Low-Res (Decimated) version of my cannon from Zbrush and put them into a Maya file with my old cannon that I had made and upped the resolution on, but had not yet smoothed, to compare the shapes.

Decimated Zbrush import(left), original Low-Res Maya mesh(center), and High-Res sculpted cannon(right), with and without the wireframes.

These were the meshes I retopologized from the previous, decimated cannon, before placing them on the original for UVing.
Once everything was in its place and had some UVs straightened out, I went through the mesh to delete some faces that arent seen by the viewer, as well as deleting some extra edge loops that didn't make major silhouette changes when removed, to keep the tri-count under 10,000.

This was the final UV set I had to work with once everything was in its place and had been cleaned up:

Figure Drawing Week 06

This week we focused on the muscles of the lower arm:

John Berkey - Perspective Assignment

I chose this work of art from John Berkey to recreate for our perspective practice this week:

I then took this painting and placed it into Maya in an image plane to reference for some proxy box modeling. I also placed a blue plane behind the scene and set a very light blue directional light to give me an idea of how the light hit the surfaces.

Finally, I put this render into Photosop and painted over it, keeping the original up for extra reference, and using loose gesture strokes to focus more on the general shape and location of the objects, rather than focusing on small details.

John Berkey Reference Board

This week we gathered references of John Berkey paintings for our assignment on perspective.

Cannon Sculpting in Zbrush 02

This is the second sculpted half of the cannon from before, this time with the wood grain carved out. We imported "orb" brushes that had a lot of cracks and crevices to sculpt or drag onto the mesh to give more of a woody, grain texture. We also learned to use the render function instead of just snipping out a screenshot this time.

I myself am fond of the Rake brush, and used it quite a lot on a low Z-intensity to go over the wooden planks several times to get a solid base down, so that I could then go over it with smaller, more detailed brushes for splits and cuts in the wood.

Figure Drawing Week 05

This week we worked on the anatomy of the hands and upper arms, with a new, female model.

For the last drawing, George suggested I try  making a gesture of the figure with charcoal and darker gestures in the outer, negative space, making only a few single lines to create the shape of the figure. At first this seemed complicated, but I really liked how it felt after a while to get loose with the drawing and not worry about making a mess.

Artist Study: Drew Struzan, Composition

This week we focused on composition by looking at movie posters he's done. I chose this unused Harry Potter movie poster art:

My best guess for the composition style in this picture would be something like a radial set up, with the focus on Harry  and leading out with the smaller characters.
This was my initial sketch for placement blocking:

Then I did some overall lining to try and refine the shapes:

And added some flat color for blocking:

Then I went to work on adding shadows, highlights, cleaned up color areas, glowing effects, and cleaned up some of the line work for the final picture: