Intro to 3D - Textures

CDDA - Prop beauty shot edit

After showing my previous version of this beauty shot to my lecturer she showed me a few parts of the beauty shot that could use improving which I hadn't really noticed until after having them pointed out for me. The most major change was the gold shading.There wasn't enough contrast between light and dark to give a real 3D feel for the image. I've gone through and added much heavier shadow on the left side using a mix of brown and a mustardy green colour. The other change was only minor being that the hammer and pickaxe were more or less grey scale. I have added hints of blue, mainly to the darker areas to make the shapes more interesting to the eye and more realistic. I intend to leave this image alone now unless I happen to have spare time once all my work is finished (which is unlikely). 

Intro to 3D - Base texture colours

Today I started texturing my vending machine. At the moment I'm only doing base colours on the diffuse map just to make sure I have a colour scheme that works and I like. 

CDDA - Environment 3D mockup

I just finished work on a 3D model of a previous environment design I did a while back. I did this because it will help tremendously with the perspective of the scene as there are a lot of objects and many of them are round too which would further complicate drawing them. I also took the opportunity to make some plans for the lighting of the scene. My final scene may look a little different composition wise but it will be pretty similar. I also want to darken some areas as the scene is too bright, I wish to darken the back wall quite a bit and make lots of shadows in the scene too. This didn't take long either so I think making it will pay off in the long run.

CDDA - Hammerpick beauty shot

Today I finished my beauty shot of my prop, the hammer pick. It was quite fun to do and taught me a lit about metal textures, specifically gold, and photo overlays. I ended up making the gold quite dirty because I didn't really like how it looked when it was clean. 

CDDA - Life drawing no model

This week at life drawing our model was absent again so we drew pictures of poses that couldn't be done by a single man. We were given 5 minutes to draw structure and add some linework then 10 minutes to add to the picture. Whilst it was kind of interesting, I didn't really feel that it was useful to me or my skills. I also got quite bored by the end. It was an interesting yet mostly useless session.

CDDA - Artist Research

This is some research into a few artists who I really like and have come across recently and not so recently. 

Frank Franzetta

I came across Franzetta’s work by chance whilst reading a digital art magazine in an article based off using some of his own methods. The magazine article was discussing some of the great things in his work. He has a wide variety of work mediums to start with: having produced comics, paintings, album covers and many sketches among other things. What most attracts me out of his work is his use of light and dark, particularly in his ink artwork and paintings. The lighting combined with the composition tends to give the viewer a great feel for what the atmosphere and emotions in the paintings are. His work can capture the drama of a scene perfectly.

Bao Pham

Another artist I came across in tutorials except this time written by himself using his own art. He has some brilliant artwork and the actual contents of the paintings are what attract me so much. He comes up with many fantasy ideas and delivers them beautifully. Colours in the paintings are brilliant, sometimes featuring high contrast whilst other times characters almost fade into the background. His original fantasy designs are my favourite works of his though, featuring monsters he has created and fresh takes on the existing.

Mathias Kollros

I came across Kollros whilst browsing on DeviantART about a year ago. He creates fantasy art and has done work for Wizards of the Coast, Warhammer and freelance work. I really like the detail he gets into his images and his backgrounds are done really well, fitting the image perfectly. The textures of his work and all their details are done really well, something which I would like to try and imitate one day in my own work.