Update on my little smithy !

I'm soon finished with it. It became more fun to work with it when I started using 3D Coat to paint in. Much better than Mudbox! Really nifty, makes me happy.

Just don't mind the ugly tiling grass texture and its alpha, heehee..



Oh, and my poor kitten Spock broke one of his teeth yesterday. I don't know how it happened, I just found it lying beside him. Will be calling the vet tomorrow to see if there's anything we should do about it. Meanwhile he's hunting a fly in my apartment. He really wants that fly, my apartment is in ruins after his crusade. So I don't think the broken tooth bothers him that much, really.

Some stuff I made a while ago .

Just thought I'd post two heads I speedsculpted in Zbrush a while ago :D !

Pokeymans!

Aw darn. I want it too, it's not fair. It's really. Just. Not. Fair. Anyway, I should sleep but I felt like I needed to laugh a bit so I went to the pokeyman project. Always gets me in a better mood, no matter what. It's like, I scroll down until I get to when she's drawing Gardevoir, and I'll just lose it everytime. It's so damn retarded and great, I mean, that Pokémon actually HAS a red triangle coming out of its chest, I mean, what. I'm mostly familiar with the 151 "first" Pokémons, although I've played some of the later games. I've never seen, or noticed, Gardevoir before I stumbled on to the Pokeyman Project site though. Gardevoir is so weird. Haha, ooh...~~ Another thing that makes me insta-better-mood-ish is to watch that youtube-video of that guy playing Amnesia with his friends on Skype. It's so insanely hilarious, I could probably watch it a thousand times and still think it's funny. Oh lord. I've watched it so many times I can even quote it. Don't know if that's weird.

Study, cat, house .

I am so unsure about my graduation project. We're supposed to come up with some kind of problem and then do research about it and write a paper. Or something, I don't even know how to explain it in english. Naturally, I wanted my "problem" to be related to what I've been studying the past years so that'd be computer graphics for games. Textures was my first though. Stylized vs. realistic textures. But what IS a stylized texture? For me, it's the kind of texture that's hand painted where you can see brush strokes (not neccessarily but yeah..) and they are almost sort of cliché. Like, wood is always painted as you would imagine the most wood-like wood ever in a cartoon movie. Anyway, almost every game that uses realistic textures, as in, textures with a photo as base, are touched up and painted on aswell, so it's SO hard to draw the line, in my opinion. It drives me nuts. I also don't know what the problem itself IS. It's not a problem. And it has to be. I've been thinking along the lines of, what difference does the style of textures make to the player. I've been reading on a lot of forums where stylized and realistic games are being discussed, but these discussions usually involve the style of the overall game, like stylized models, aswell. Which of course is a very important aspect of the whole deal, but I'm not sure as to wether I should incorporate that into my thought process as well, or just stick to textures only...

My cat Spock is mean, he doesn't make this any better. He keeps eating on all of my shoes and I don't appreciate that, even though I know he's just a kitten. He can bite some of his toys, he's got like six balls (not balls as in testicles, he only got two of those) and some ball with a stick (? looks really odd..). Recently I found him carrying a ball of toilet paper around as well, he's got toys everywhere, and still he thinks my shoes are the funniest. Whyyy~...

So, instead of studying (I'm reading some papers and books here and there but still, at a loss) I'm just mindlessly browsing internet. Jumping between Reddit and Facebook, so tiresome. Found cute and sweet pictures of cozy homes. Some day I wanna live in one of those cozy homes. With an old fashioned bath tub, lace curtains in the kitchen, a fireplace and dark brown bookshelves. On top of that it feels like everyone is moving in together now and I keep wondering what happened? It went so fast, feels like yesterday I was 16 and moving - yet, moving IN with someone, was SO far away. And now, everybody's doing it. Well, not me. But everyone else. But yeah, not me.

Spock's asleep .

This is basically how my kitten Spock sleeps while I'm working on my computer. And it's very nice, very nice indeed. Warm, fluffy and sweet. Yeah...

Human Paladin lowpoly model .

Finally finished my miniproject for school, been working on it on and off for the last months alongside a lot of other school work.

This is the concept I started out with, didn't really know what I was going for but that it was supposed to be a human paladin inspired by the game World of Warcraft. I was very inspired by this creation by slipgatecentral so I decided I'd also stick to 2000 tris and 512 maps.

Procrastinating...

... yeah, when you got a lot to do and keep scrolling through Reddit over and over again for serveral hours. That's pretty bad.

Zer0 less than three.

Inbetween all work with my lowpoly-character (á la WoW-style) and my two other characters I really needed a break. So I thought I'd to a little closer render of Zer0 and this time I thought it'd be fun to add his heart-emoticon. Cute. Now I guess I'm gonna get back to work...

All I do these days is either 3D or 2D, gah. I keep my TV on sometimes just to hear voices, haha, sounds like I'm totally lonely but I'm not, it's just that with all this studying one hardly ever leaves the apartment. I've no idea what date it is. I know it's december and that I've got a showreel-assignment due to next sunday. That's really bad, I haven't even started and I have NO IDEA what I want to put in that showreel. I don't have that much finished work I'm proud enough of to put in a showreel. I want to have my miniproject-character I'm working on in my 3D-course but I doubt I'll finish it by next sunday.

I needed something else to do apart from all the musts and have-to's that comes with the studies so I continued a bit on my smith workshop. I had some problems when I was about to bake my AO-map where the wooden poles would be visible on the map and I was like, nooo~... and then I tried baking AO in Maya and I was like ihavenoideawhatimdoig.jpg.. and then I suddenly remembered, oh, I've stacked uv-shells! So I removed the stacked ones and yay, it turned out fine!

So, here's some WIP on the smith workshop. I've been doing hand-painted textures all week for my miniproject-character so I'm starting to get a hang of it and I dare say I'm almost beginning to enjoy it! I hope that feeling lasts because it's SO satistying to sit for an hour or two in Photoshop, painting a texture, and then apply it in, like, Maya and WOOO the model is coming to life! So much fun. So nice.

---

Oh my I just noticed, I have no floor. Damn, gotta fix that.

Smith shop.

It feels like I have a lot of spare time right now (which is weird because I really don't, but oh well...) so I thought I'd start something new. Found this old concept I did a while back of a little smith workshop that I thought I'd bring to life.

Also, I really like lowpoly (ehehe) so I thought I'd make it below 1000 tris.

So... this is how it looks like right now. Not very fun to look at, all lambert-y and stuff. I uv-mapped it tonight IN Maya and, Maya, as usual, gave me hell. I've always uv-mapped most of my models in UvLayout but I thought, heck, I might aswell learn how to do my uv's in Maya instead (although I really like UvLayout). But Maya, y u so bad to me.
Now afterwards I'm thinking of adding more detail to the pillar-thingies. They are supposed to be stones but right now they are just plain poles, almost. Yeah.

Little Zer0 chibi.

Right before Borderlands 2 was released I started working on a little chibi-style Zer0 (character from Borderlands 2) because I wanted to try making a character from scratch in Zbrush aswell as trying out its retopo-tools. I didn't really know what I was doing with all the hard surfaces on Zer0's armor though, and some ended up wobbly :( . NOW I know there are easy ways to achieve hard surfaces in Zbrush... haha oh well.
I would have wanted to give him a cooler pose in the end but I'm not very good at rigging characters (yet), something I really should get at least a little good at so I can show them off in more interesting ways than just regular t-pose or whatever.

Oops!

Oh long time since I updated, totally forgot about this blog or something.

Recently took a course in Zbrush so I got to know the software a bit and this was the result of that course, basically. An old man torso! Haha.

Assassin portrait!

Been quite busy doing schoolwork last weeks. Will be quite busy keeping on doing schoolwork for the upcoming weeks, aswell. Our group is working on a game called Army Blitz as first project in school. I'm working on the assassin-unit for the moment. This is a portrait of it. Enjoy.

The broken column.

Last art-related picture I'll post for today, now that I've spammed quite a few!
The task was to take a famous painting or picture and turn it into your own. Now afterwards, I realize I MIGHT have misinterpreted that task a little bit, haha, but what the hell. It's my own, in my own way, we'll say!

I decided to go with a painting by Frida Kahlo,("The broken column".)
I really like her as an artist and that painting has always fascinated me, so, yeah.


My version:

One small step...

School: tasked with modeling a humanoid creature in Maya which will be used in the animation courses later on. I had an idea from the beginning, I had sketches, but the final result is not even close to what I wanted at first, so I'm not even gonna post any of them pictures 'cause that would be a bit embarrassing. I think she did turn out okay though, though she gave me soooo much trouble along the way. When I was working on the face, something really weird happened with the surfaces and the more I tried to do something about it (fix it) the more I ruined it. Luckily I had a copy of that file on my laptop, but I still had to redo quite a lot but it was really worth it in the end when I saw that I've created something, haha! It's so fun when you like, push some keys and click stuff and suddenly something is there like, an object! Woo! It's like, magic! AND better than clay, did I mention that before?
I didn't even get my hands dirty! I hope I will learn Maya better so I can make beautiful things that will make other people happy to look at! Pretty things. I would really need to practice a lot for that, too bad I don't have like, a Jedi Master for that...

Sketches of woman with big shoes.

These are from the first task we were assigned in the sketching techniques-course.
Our group got "woman with big shoes". I'm glad I had access to a scanner for these, it turned out really neat. I wish I owned a scanner, a pretty one. I want a scanner.. I wonder how much they cost?

The one I chose to turn in:

The girl and the retarded Devil Cat.

School. Task: make picture of you. Snow. Electricity. Herro!
Waaat, I sat with this task for such a long time, couldn't come up with anything at all. I was like, electricity-y-y-y. So I squeezed in a lantern in the background, haha.
It is SUPPOSED to be me and my cat, Kevin Krösus, BUT! BUT! I know it doesn't look like him. It does look a bit like me (at least I think so, but my mom disagreed), but the cat in the picture looks so off. Look at its eyes, look how retarded it is! Haha, Kevin is cute, that cat is not, therefor it's that retarded cat, relative to that retarded horse.





And here's the original sketch for the picture:

Such a long time since I....

¤ wrote here
¤ made anything non school-related
¤ washed my hair

I'll just skip to the posting of images, since people likes images. I do, at least. I rather look at pictures than read something, EXCEPT for the lovely and oh-so-hilarous Hyperbole and a Half blog (can't mention that blog enough, I love it to death). A delicate mixture of images and text. (I like the word delicate, by the way).
But now: images!

School. The task was to create a table with tablecloth, a bowl of fruit and a pitcher with two glass in something called SubD (which I still am not quite sure what the hell that is... I think I have an idea but... no). I really wanted the tablecloth to droop prettily from the table but I couldn't manage to make it look good so I decided on a table runner instead (it's made out of cloth so I hope it does count).
When I textured the chairs I had not yet learned how to UV-map correctly (or at all, for that matter), so their texture looks a bit odd. Question is wether or not it would look more nice now that i DO know how to UV-map... hurr hurr... (probably not).

Update of my toy-rocket.

Though I'd upload the finished toy-rocket I made.
It doesn't differ from the previous version a lot except from the lighting and so, but I think this picture is better so this is the one I turned in.
I hope I'll manage to learn Maya and become good at it because it's really fun!
It's like sculpting IRL but you don't have to get your hands dirty with clay. I seriously HATE clay, I hate getting dirty and I HATE HATE HATE having dirt under my finger nails. And in Maya you can, like, undo and redo. And duplicate stuff. That's not something you could do IRL with stupid clay, I don't like clay. Maybe I mentioned that earlier?
Now, I've only worked with clay like, one time and that was during my first year in high-school.
We were assigned to sculpt the head of one of our classmates, I still have mine (resembling Helen) placed on a drawer. It lost one of its ears during the removal from the mold, so it looks a bit funny.

So. Conclusion of this post: Maya is cool because it won't give you dirt under your finger nails!


So, this is my finished rocket!

The Silver Surfer result !

So many things happening, I can't keep track on everything!
So I failed the game analysis, just as many others did. I hope it's just some supplements and that I don't have to re-write the whole paper 'cause that would seriously suck so incredibly hard I'd probably implode.
I'll just wait until tomorrow, hope I receive a mail about wether it's about supplements or a re-write. I'll invent my own God of luck meanwhile whom I can pray to! Yes, my own religion, that'd be cool. A lot of cats should be needed for the religion, like, everyone who wants to adopt the religion must love cats, as in LOVE. Loooove. Cats!

My cat is lying next to me (and my Paradis-box of chocolate) snoring. He's so cute when he's snoring. I think he does it just because he tend to lie with his head buried in the sofa. He looks like a grey rock.

I started on our sketching techniques assignment earlier today but it turned out sooo bad. We were supposed to use greyscale (I think..?) and work a lot with volumes... err err...
So my lineart representing a man turned out to look exactly like the Silver Surfer (but uglier). Not cool at all, Silver Surfer isn't even a cool guy!!! Damn! ..
So I tried a speedpainting of a male face instead, (Notice that the painting I posted here is not the Silver Surfer one!) just to do SOME painting today (since tomorrow's workshop is cancelled, <-- aw!).