Alien Rocker

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This is my latest finished product.

All the adventures of his creation are chronicled in this thread on Polycount.

There will be more* soon!

*It won't be an alien.

Alien Fisherman - Finished!

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There it is - my alien fisherman finished. I'm a few minutes away from hitting "Batch Render" which start rendering out a turnaround of him but I snapped off these still frame renders of him to show off on my portfolio.

Not much else to say - I'm happy.

Toybox Fightsters

I couple of weeks back my group and I finished our work on our major game assignment. Our game was called "Toybox Fightsters" and the goal was to have the player be able to customise their character (called a "fightster") and battle with them in an arena-type format.

My role as lead artist and lead character artist was to create the textures for all the characters we came up with (about twenty or so). I spent two weeks creating around twenty-eight characters - by the end of it I was able to create one in an hour.

About four ended up being used in the final build.

Here are the Fightsters which used the basic body mesh, there were others which used a robe body mesh e.g. a wizard, king, death but I shall post them in a later update.

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I also came up with this nifty logo for the game.

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Alien Fisherman - Cage Mesh

Cage mesh is complete! At a grand total of 3417 polygons, here is the Alien Fisherman in a stance which says "I'm about to get UV mapped":

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Kind of makes that whole "Pants" update even more lame.

Alien Fisherman - PANTS!

Not the most exciting update ever but here is the cage mesh for the Alien Fisherman's trousers:

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Business Cards!

Hello internet.

I'm heading up to GCAP (Game Connect Asia Pacific) next week and I feel like I'll need some business cards to hand out to all the important people I'm likely to meet. I checked out some websites where you can order cards based off a pre-made template and they look horribly generic and boring. I don't like to think of myself as horribly generic and boring so I decided to make my own:

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Here is how this particular design developed, I had the typography and composition down within a few minutes but it took my so long to decide what to add as my own personal touch... I ended up with a slug:

Oh yes, these cards also reveal my new online portfolio internet website which is still in development... well, it has all of my concept art and sketches up, I just need to sort out the rendering of my 3D artwork.

Alien Fisherman - Retopology

In lieu of my ZBrush study I have discovered that the program actually has some nifty retopology tools, I'm slowly working my way around the mesh, adding polygons here and there. The face tendrils are giving me the most strife but I feel there's enough information there for the time being. Here's what I have so far:

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As you can see I have finished the head and I'm working my way down the neck 'til I reach his... hips? Or torso stub, I'm not quite sure what to call it. I'll do each of the objects separately i.e. the straps, the wading trousers and then it's on to UVing and texturing.

Here's a neat animated gif of my work in progress:

Alien Fisherman - Final Sculpt

Yikes, it's been nearly a full week since my last post but that's not due to a lack of working on my part, in fact I have a finalised sculpture of my alien fisherman - BAMF!

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I'm pretty happy with it, seeing as though it's my first ZBrush sculpt an everything but God DAMN did this guy's face annoy me. I started sculpting last Tuesday and I didn't get a face I liked until sometime in the afternoon today.

Here are the many iterations of Alien Fisherman's face:

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And these are just the ones that I saved. There was probably about ten more between versions two and three, eugh! It's kind of funny, I was so fed up with changing his face that I just cut off his face which lead to version four and it wasn't until I looked back on it later on that I realised I liked the look so I combined the tentacle look with the nearly final version six and we have the final fact of Alien Fisherman.

I still have (to learn how) to pose him and texture him but for now I'm content enough to sleep.

Goodnight, Internet.

Alien Fisherman - Junk Mesh

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This alien fisherman is becoming an obsession.

I just finished the junk mesh which I'll import into ZBrush and use as a base for my sculpting. There are four separate objects; the body, the trousers, the trouser straps and the boots. The mesh is completely clean, no faces with more than four sides, no holes and pretty decent edge flow if I do say so myself with edge loops added in areas where more detail will be needed i.e. the head, hands.

Working time: 2 hours.

Polycount: 1876

I'll begin sculpting on Thursday.

Alien Fisherman - Messing around in ZBrush

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I'm currently learning ZBrush and I was itching to put my current knowledge of the program to use so I spent about an hour sculpting the head of my Alien Fisherman and here's the results.

Alien Fisherman - Concept

As the title suggests this is the first instalment of a series of developmental blog posts chronicling the conception, refinement and finalisation of an alien fisherman.

I've been needing a concept to develop into a 3D sculpt for my research assignment and showreel and this is he. I knew I wanted a classic alien-looking character and I was gathering images from Star Wars and old kids shows like Plasmo for inspiration. Despite presenting my eyes and brains with such delicious eye candy I really wasn't getting any good ideas so I fell back on my method of just drawing shapes until something is spawned upon the canvas and voila! it worked once again - I was given this as

a starting point:

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I was really liking the design at this point, he was unique and simple. Now, I honestly don't know what lead to the next stage of this guy's design but I decided that I wanted him wearing wading trousers. Wading trousers are hilarious, the image of huge pants hanging off a slim frame by means of only two shoulder-straps has always tickled my funny bone and it makes for a distinct silhouette so, go time.

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Obviously drawing baggy trousers is not one of my strong points but he was starting to look more like a character, and that was all I wanted at this poi

nt, I knew I could stress over drawing good-looking wading-trousers once the concept had been finalised. Of course, now we have a fisherman without a fi

shing rod which is... unprecedented to say the least. I knew I didn't want him to have a humanoid fishing rod as I feel like I'd just be placing an alien head on a redneck fisherman which would seem more like a shallow punchline than an interesting character.

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Regarding the fishing rod (which I'm referring to as a "rod" purely for my own ease), the mechanism works as such; the end of the rod emits a force which holds the bait in place and also emits a light which shines a spotlight on the bait attracting the fish. Once the bait has been bitten the indicator lights on the shell of the rod signal as such and a button is pressed which projects the harpoon out, piercing the fish.

And so, after a few more minutes of colouring and about thirty or so minutes total, I present the concept of the alien fisherman:

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Creature Of the Week #187: Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin - Part III

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She is complete! The creature I have dubbed "The Venomlash". All that has been done since my last update was the reconfiguration of his chest area and a lot of finishing touches. Here is my description (which is required for every entrant in these Creature of the Week competitions):

"The Venomlash is a natural assassin; in the wild it would crouch behind it's forearm plates and blend in to the lush, vibrant vegetation of the planet Gnixxian and wait until it's prey within rage before whipping its incredibly powerful barbed-limb at the poor creature and stabbing it with it's poison-filled tip, killing it instantly.

The Venomlash were initially only hunted and bred by the citizens of Gnixxian for their poison which coated every blade and tipped every arrow but recently, factions have begun warring against one another on Gnixxian and Venomlash are being trained to kill the opposing factions. Camouflaged with paint, the Venomlash are stationed in select areas and are instructed by their trainers to kill on sight. A single Venomlash is capable of taking out an entire platoon of Gnixxian soldiers."

If you'd like to check out the other entrants here is a link to the finals thread.

Hopefully this becomes a regular occurrence and additional hopefulness for me getting at least a couple of votes.

Now, back to Chime.

Creature Of the Week #187: Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin - Part II

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As you can see the concept has been fleshed out much more since yesterday. I still need to refine the area where his back lets connect to his torso but other than that it's looking pretty good. I've created a time-lapse gif of my work today, I was only able to add five images (out of my seventeen layers) so I'll walk you through each one to give you a better idea of what I went through.

1. This is the image I thumbnailed yesterday, resized and placed on a white background - nothing special here.

2. I added two colour balance layers in Photoshop to mess

around with colour schemes. The idea for this creature is that he blends in with the lush, al

ien environment of his planet and once something gets too close it whips out with its stinger-face and injects venom into them. I could have gone for any colour scheme given this logic since the planet is alien the flora could be any colour but I decided upon pink/purple because purple is a colour naturally associated with poison and pink works nicely with it.

3. Took away that rib-cage area of the creature and gave it more of a prominent feature on its stomach which could be used to hold venom.

4. The arms were looking really wonky at this point so I decided to increase the size of his forearm plates and duplicated his right arm over

to replace his left arm. I also added some stripes along his face and neck to give him some more visual appeal and added some more colour to his chest area.

5. The colour has now been removed from the chest area! The arms were still looking wonky so I moved his right elbow to a point where it woul

d make sense and now he looks much more comfortable just standing there. I blocked in the colour of his forearm plates since they were annoying me and I shall work on them a bit more in my next session.

A couple of people over on the ConceptArt.org forums seemed to like my A thumbnail so if I get time I'd like to render him out in the same way as this creature here.

Stay tuned for Part III of Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin.

Creature Of the Week #187: Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin - Part I

Here are my thumbnails for the latest C.O.W:

Here is the full brief:

"Bring to life a creature whose sole purpose is to take life. The Assassins are a special breed of creatures from the planet Gnixxian, a lush and dangerous planet, hunted and used as special weapons against those that have earned the distinction of being high priority hard targets. Your design can range from a small creature that kills in inconspicuous ways, to a stealthy

hunter that overwhelms its prey with strength and speed. As usual, get creative, and it probably wouldn't hurt to show your creation in action."

They're actually less thumbnails as they are progressions of how I came up with the idea for the concept D, an evolution chart of the murderous intent-gnixxian assassin as it were. To give you a better understanding of my workflow I'll detail the steps I took to get to the final design:

I started by searching for references of animals that I would consider to have assassin-like qualities but the only real animal I could think of was the Whip Spider so I typed "natural assassin", "nature's assassin" and "assassin bug" into Google and found some very cool results such as a spider aptly named the Assassin Spider, check it out:

Horrifying, huh?

I then began sketching using the common features that all of those assassins shared i.e. thin legs, small abdomens and cold, dead eyes. Using this method I ended up with Exhibit A - something resembling what it would look like if a Tyrannosaurus Rex had a headcrab for a head. I wasn't too fond of anything in A other than the front legs... or are they fangs? I wasn't sure but I copied them over to the right began sketching again, after a short while B was created. At this point I still wasn't liking anything about the design other than the legs (which I refined a bit more). Once again, I copied the legs over and took a new approach which ended up looking a bit like a scrab from the Abe's Odyssey universe:

Once C had been finished I noticed that the legs didn't really fit the new torso and head (both of which I was quite fond of) so I duplicated C in it's entirety and reinforced the forearms, gave him stronger-looking hind-legs and added some cool finishing touches such the poison dripping and the stripes across his head and legs.

Overall I'm happy with the design. The next step is to go over the concept with cleaner, more defined lines and anatomy to get it ready for colouring.

Stay tuned for Part II of Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin.

Art Dump: Creature Concept Art

Here's some of my past work:

A concept I did for ConceptArt.org's Creature of the Week; the brief was "The Creature that Changed Mankind's History".

Saw-head.

Golem

Brief: Capable of a high-level of mathematics; employed by some secret U.S. government agency; consumes bacteria.

Creach & Kidd: Concept for high-poly advanced character design.