2D Week 09 - Vampyre Silhouettes

 This week we started on our semester projects. I was drafted into the Vampyres in Space team, lead by Zach M. I had the job of silhouettes some of the minions that would be around Dracula's ship. First, were the regular ghouls, humans in mid-transformation. I wanted to have a separate group for heads, which could be put on any of the bodies to either create a variance or allow for two decent ideas to come together as a good idea.

Next, I did the ahool - a man-bat creature. Again, I wanted some separate silhouettes for the body and face to get a sense of detail for both and allow for easier mixing and matching for later. 

Finally, I created a few concepts for the Mindsplitter - a vampire that hypnotizes and paralyzes its victims with psychic powers and a poisonous fog.

2D Week 08 - Concept Rd2

This week I mostly spent just making touch-ups to my image and adding some extra details to fill up some of the dead space, such as a fan (which I had to add after resizing the image to 8.5x11) and a phone. I wish that I had 3D modeled the environment first to get a better sense of scale and perspective, but by time I had thought of that it was too late.

Portrait by: Pedro Martin Rojo @ https://www.pedritoart.com/

3D Week 08 - Cannon Final

My time in 3D has come to a close with the final presentation of my cannon, put into Unreal. I think that it turned out well, and it would be interesting to see in a game. 

And here it is manned by a brave and loyal Guardsman:

2D Week 07 - Concept Rd1

For this week's assignment, we were to create a rough draft of our character and environment concept. For mine, I decided to recreate the story of the Snow Queen in an 80's Miami proxy. The Snow Queen of Sugar City, Camila Blanca:

While I was originally going for a Ivan Reis style of art, I ended up creating a character who looks like they came out of Archer, which I kind of like.

3D Week 07 - Cannon Texturing

For this week's assignment, we were to bake maps and make textures for our cannon in Substance painter. Below, I have my low-poly model and the decimated high-poly that I exported from ZBrush. 

The first thing I did was make fill layers of rust and steel for the underlying metals. I decided to make my lascannon from the Armageddon Steel Legions, so I then added layers of painted steel in their colors all about the lascannon. I added some plastic to the power cable, leather to the handles, and shiny nickel to the scope to give some extra definition and more correct reflections and texture where it was needed, then I went about getting the cuts. I added a mask to my paint and my steel, erasing from it to give the appearance of missing paint, and then lower layers of rusted metal in the deepest parts of the cuts.

2D Illustration Topic

HCA's "The Snow Queen" as an 80's Miami drug queen-pin

Artist: Ivan Reis

2D Week 06 - Lighting

IT'S A NEW DAY, YES IT IS!

This week's assignment was to take an object, light it in an interesting manner, take a photo, and draw it. I chose to draw one of the New Day Funkos on my desk, specifically the one of Xavier Woods. To light it I had the light from the cohort space, an extra spot light from a camera phone, and a blue rim light from John's safety flasher.

I think that the shading came out well enough, but not all of the coloring did. I also struggled with Francesca (the trombone) and eventually got fed up with it and called it done. I also struggled with getting the bright light on his face, and decided to not include it instead of muck up the image with it.

3D Week 06 - UVs and High-Poly Sculpting

For this week's assignment, we were to take our cannon from last week, UV unwrap it, and send it into ZBrush to create a high-poly sculpt.  I started by UV unwrapping my original low poly version. I decided to make as many of my major pieces (barrel, scope, tripod, cable, battery, and base) one UV shell as I could to minimize the amount of seams in important areas of the mesh. 

I then threw a few subdivision levels on the mesh and rounded out the flat edges.

After much time, effort, and pain, I created a high-poly version of the cannon. The story I decided to tell with my lascannon is that the gunnery team survived an encounter with Tyranid hormagaunts and was badly scratched up by their claws during the encounter.

The high-poly after being decimated and put into Maya: