Work Week: Elderbeasts 07

Monday Night: Loose Pencils and Inks

I’ve always wanted to do this, but the time just never was there. So here goes…

….we get a lot of questions regarding process of developing characters for games. It’s a very subjective process and every artist handles it differently based on their experiences and the tools available to them. I’m going to attempt to bring a loose design all the way through to a final game ready model! Tomorrow night I will update this post with the current loose drawing/inks all nicely painted up ready for a proper 3D interpretation…but I need your help. I’m only gonna do one of these cronies, so I need some feedback on the Elderbeast you would like brought to the modelling stage!

The theme for this set of beasts was old school tough guys/ drapery/ craggy ugly old man toes! Pretty straight forward thought process.

The Big Plan

Tuesday Night: Final 2D rendering

****Alrighty….here’s the colors on these guys. I’m curious if it will sway any of you folks in different directions!

Wednesday night: ZBrush high-rez sculpt

****So I did a pass on the third concept “C” in Zbrush which I now call “Twinkle Toes” (That’s what my dad called me when I was a little kid….ugh). I had only few hours tonight to do the high-rez sculpt, so I rushed the base model in Maya a little which ended up giving me some trouble. My bad. But I think its a decent rendition anyway. I can make the tweaks I need in the low-rez while I bake the maps. Tomorrow night will just be casting and junk. I have life drawing tomorrow night, so I can’t get too much done. See you then!

Thursday night: Casting onto low-rez model in Maya

****Alrighty then, now we’re getting some where. I got the low-rez model made, UV’d, cast and a super basic color map set up. Displaying here are a color map, a normal map and an ambient-occlusion map. Tomorrow night I’ll do the final color map, the spec map, along with a few other maps to get the surface materials to sing. I have a super rough skeleton set up so I can hopefully pose him in a more pleasing personality pose for the final piece. We’ll see, it’s always a gamble with this junk. Stat tuned, my work week is almost over!

Friday night: Final texture maps and hopefully a final render of the model in all its glory!

****Well that does it! I painted up the final color map, spec map and rendered this bad boy out in Mental Ray. I had meant to use a real-time renderer I found, but I had rendered my normal maps in the wrong axis so everything was inverted. This worked fine. On a side note, I am a terrible rigger, so the jowles didn’t translate as nicely as I would have wanted among other things, but this is the best I can do in a 3 hour block. Hope everyone enjoyed this, thanks for all the input!
*I’m well aware I’ve bitten off more than I can chew…but heck, you only die once!

The Evil Beneath

We’re closing in on our October 18th release date for Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. We can’t wait to get this adventure out to the public – it’s an awesome time to have solo or with friends! The image above was one of the first production paintings as we began to define the massive scale encounters you’ll be able to experience with your friends. The battles are epic!

If you’re the preorder type, be sure to check out the Playstation Blog for some cool bonuses. We also have an updated Fankit available with new images of all types (the pack with the monster is the most recent). Download away here!

Odds and Ends

It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to paint for myself so I took a bit of time to finish off a couple of odds and ends that popped up in our twitter feed a couple weeks back. Our daylives have been filled to the brim lately with the final development of Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. The team has been pushing hard to really make something special and we look forward to sharing in October.

In other news, the short story we worked on with the maniacal maestro Skottie Young hit the iPad and other IOS devices last week – for free! If you’re into cats punching pigeons in the face, you owe it to yourself to give it a click…or touch…or something. Do you prefer print comics? Not a problem! Spider-Kitty will join three other stories in the Spider-Island: I Love New York City one shot on shelves September 7th. USA Today also gave a preview of a few pages.

Last but not least, we updated our shop to include some new original sketches and prints! If you missed out on the originals, be sure to hop on the Twitter Feed – we tend to give a heads up before selling them. More to come!

Gone Fishin’

As you might have heard (’cause we can’t keep out mouths shut about it), we got to work on a short comic with Skottie Young for Marvel. It was a blast! You learn a lot when you just have to go for it. So today I wanted to see if I could do a full page from concept to color in under 8 hours. Turns out you can, but you gotta hustle and be happy with all of your mistakes! Here they all are!!!

Elderbeast 06

It’s awfully late for me. But I wanted to try out some more critters, but with some shells. Back from Heroes, we had a chance to really hit traditional work pretty hard. But now that we’re back to the grind, it’s probably gonna be a bit of a mix.

Bad Day

Dave and I are hard at work prepping for Heroes Con this year. We’ve been under the gun with some heavy deadlines all year, and we finally get to push towards a deadline for ourselves. Tonight I got to sketch for no reason a bit, I knew I wanted to draw a robot (duh)…but then every night when I’m working in the pitch black huddled over the Cintiq, my cat sits and watches me releasing these little curious meows that I only hear when the music in my headphones quiets for a second. Scares the crap out of me every time. That and I watched a documentary on trash pickers in Brazil tonight…I have very very little to complain about anymore. So here ya go…