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| "Drawn to the computer using Photoshop CS4 and an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet." |
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| "Showing how I do my rendering." |
I had a few people asking me what my technique was for rendering, so I made the .GIF to illustrate it.
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| "Showing the base of one of my characters (Never finished)." |
I also had people asking me how I start my works, so again, I created this to show. However this piece was never finished despite my intentions.
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| "Playing with 32bit images (saved as 8bit)." |
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| "The 32bit screenshot version." |
I started messing around with 16bit and 32bit images in Photoshop. I decided to try and create something in 32bit, but only ran into problems when it came to saving. Windows Fax Viewer could not view the image correctly (showing as black and white with scan-lines and colour artifaction.
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| "Drawn to the computer using Corel Painter 11 and an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet." |
Another program I enjoyed to use but found more messy than Photoshop (and so preferred Photoshop still), was Corel Painter. It had so many brushed to choose from, all of which emulated real-life. This was done using Gauche Paints and then the 'Just Add Water' blender to blend it together.
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| "Drawn to the computer with Photoshop CS4 and Wacom Tablet." |
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| "Custom brush created for the rain drops on him. Noise used with motion blur for the rain in general, then scaled up and down to give a sense of depth." |
Creating weather effects was fun. The original piece was supposed to be set in an overcast day, but this seemed to work well too, so I made both versions.
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| "Drawn to the computer using Photoshop CS4 and Wacom Tablet." |
I stayed with this style for a while once I got into it. It was during my first year of my degree at University, so I often didn't have loads of free time on my hands. This style starts from the base that I always created, but then just keep refining it until you get a clean image. It was much faster, and also felt much more free to edit contours and tones than my old full colour, 'inked' artwork, so in the long run I think doing these helped a lot with allowing me to develop my skills while still sticking to boring old University reports and dissertations.
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| "Camera Fog." |
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| "Camera Depth perception Fog." |
In University to show we understood the basics of Maya, we were told to make a small city scene. I later wanted to add in the distance fog you see in games in 'Grand Theft Auto IV', so looked into ways of doing this. The first way I found looked pretty bad, and more or less just overlaid a colour over the camera lens to simulate fog. After some more searching, I found proper fog. It takes into account its' distance from the camera, and increases in volume the further away it is; perfect for what I wanted!
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| ".TGA file format." |
This image represents the start of a long realisation of the difference between Alpha and Transparency, and how they apply themselves different to models. This was a .TGA diffuse map. Maya was picking up it's internal Alpha map, and auto-applying it to the 'Transparency' node in the shader. The way I got around this at the time was to lock that attribute before applying this texture map.
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| "Project 'Cindy Aramov' - Concept and reference boards." |
The concept was drawn to my sketchbook, scanned, cleaned and coloured in Photoshop CS4. The reference boards were drawn to the computer in Photoshop CS4 also.
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| "Final Renders." |
She turned out to be one of the scariest looking things to ever be created :O She looked constantly surprised and I didn't even notice until I had her finished! Still, she brings together more knowledge; the use of Alpha maps, more Normal maps from ZBrush, new ways to use Specular maps (on her dress to make its pattern shiny and her dress itself, not), and so on. She also had parts of photos used to texture her such as her hands.
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The Forum Comments:
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More kind words from SDink that keep me going <3
