Nuf Said.

I don’t really know what this has to do with anything except I really wanted to draw antlers tonight. Nuf said.

Art for Hope

A little while back, our good friends at Autodesk asked if we would help support a project by VIZ Media to support the affected people in Japan when the tsunamis’ hit their homes. As you can expect we were honored and jumped at the chance to help out however we could! Dave and I both presented a piece and they will be included in an upcoming ebook published by VIZ Media through their VIZ Manga app on the Apple Store December 1st. This one is mine, but you should check out Dave’s bot too! If you think you have a little extra you can give to help those in need and love having fun art to look at, check it out! It may not be in the news any longer, but there are still a lot of people in Japan who could use a helping hand.

Below is a video of us doing some live demos at NYCC. It was a blast, and as an added bonus Autodesk was giving demos of Sketchbook Pro away with our Art for Hope images on the covers. Those guys are worldclass.

CTN-x Wow.

When we headed to the conference we didn’t quite know what to expect. We heard amazing stories from previous years but nothing could have prepared us for the grandeur of this show. Our schedule was packed pretty tight and we jumped in head first.

There are lots of shows across the country throughout the year with plenty of talent and panel talks. Yet none celebrate the art of the animation industry in this way. In depth discussions and intimate creator group sessions combine with an onslaught of remarkable creative talent from wall to wall. It’s rare in life when you can talk to one of your heroes. Now imagine meeting dozens of them day after day.

And that’s where CTN-x truly shines. You literally can’t walk ten feet without bumping into engaging talks about art, design and the industry in general. We had the supreme pleasure of talking shop with countless friends both old and new: Francisco Herrera, Tony Bancroft, Florian Satzinger, John Nevarez, Jose Lopez, Leonardo Olea, Kent Melton, Jake Parker, Ty Carter, Kohl Glass, Doug TenNapel, Steve Talkowski, James Gurney, Terryl Whitlatch, William Stout, Sue Nichols, Phil Allora, Willie Real, Stuart Ng, Colin Geller, Britney Lee, Peter de Seve, Rachael Mark, Wayne Medina and the list goes on and on. And many thanks to Tina Price for inviting us to this crazy carnival of art. We’re already looking forward to next year.

We also wanted to thank all the kind folks who came out to our talks. This was a new experience for us and you all made us feel right at home. And many thanks to Tony for keeping us in check on stage. And to the students, we’re jealous that we didn’t have a show like this while in school — soak it up!

Finally, we’ll leave you with a glimpse of madness — a climactic collaboration sketch during our last dinner in Burbank. Yeah, like we said.

Wow.

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!

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.