maandag 14 november 2011

Sketching @ DOK

 

By sketch Wednesdays: 

This month we have a special SKETCH night! This will take place at the beautiful DOKkantine during some amazing concerts organized by Subbacultcha and Ladda. We’ll be there on the 16th of November (upcoming Wednesday) from 19u30 to 23u, listening to the tunes of The Sandwitches and Love Like Bird. All info can be found on the Facebook event page. All the wonderful artists listed here will be showing their skills:


° Val Gallardo // illustrator & comic artist // site

° Sara Gerard // illustrator & graphic designer // site

° Jan Werkt // illustrator & graphic designer // site

° Bram Borremans // level designer & 3D generalist
// blog


° Ruben Accou // photographer & illustrator // site

° Jangojim // illustrator & cartoonist // site

° Kristof Van Beversluys // illustrator & graphic designer // site


° Wouter Sel // 50% of Volstok // site


° Britt Raes // organisator // illustrator & animator // flickr


° Eveline Thijs // organisator // illustrator & graphic designer //
site


Lots of links, be sure to click them all people! :)

woensdag 17 augustus 2011

Styrofoam sculpting!

For a friends bachelor party, we wanted to transform his kayak into a viking ship!

So me and my friend Kristof ( http://www.kristofvb.be/ ) set out to create a dragon's head to mount to the front of his ship. we used some styrofoam boards, glued together, and went from there. Enjoy the pictures.




The brown base layer of paint done with an acrylic spraycan, as the normal spraycans contain chemicals that eat away the styrofoam. Touch ups afterwards were done with regular acrylic paint and brush!



Overall, with no real world sculpting experience, this went better then expected! It survived the kayak ordeal, looking amazing, but sadly no pictures were taken ...


woensdag 22 juni 2011

Sketch Wednesday #3

Next week, I'll be attending sketch wednesday, at cafe Boho in Ghent.



some more info can be found on their facebook page, and it's organized by The lovely people of birdbee
Here's the full list of sketching folks:

° Daniel Rivero – Topo // street-artist en grafisch ontwerper // TOPO COPY in DOK

° Pieter Rosseel // illustratie en striptekenen // site

° Michèle Vanparys // illustratie, animatie, grafisch ontwerp // site

° Kristof Devos // illustratie en grafisch ontwerp // site

° Bram Borremans // level designer en 3D generalist // blog

° Jan Werkt // illustratie en grafisch ontwerp // site


° Anna Heuninck // studente animatiefilm KASK // site

° Lees Asselman // studente animatiefilm KASK

° Elske Jansen

° Eveline Thijs // organisator // illustratie en grafisch ontwerp // site
° Britt Raes // organisator // illustratie en animatie // flickr

All in all, lots of awesome people who are way better then I am, so just happy to be able to be part of such a great initiative!



woensdag 25 mei 2011

WIP: tribute to pixar!

guess who :D

Been trying to do this in sub-D as much as I can, so far its working great, starting to get the hang of it, knowing how to avoid weird pinching etc, ...

Been basing myself off just 1 perspective reference, and not even bringing it in maya, just, unforced, playing around. Im happy with the results so far. 

head 'final' render

made a quick render setup for mah head,
As I feel it, the materials need lots more work, and Im not happy at all about the eyes ... but It's time to consider this finished as it is, and move on to something new. something ... more Zbrush-ish

maandag 23 mei 2011

Head, kinda done ...

Last time I wrote here, I was struggling with attaching my ear to the rest of the head. I found a nice way to loop my edges resulting in nothing but quads, and still a nice smooth result:



After this was done, all that remained was starting to unwrap my UV's, and add the texturing. 

Unwrapping the UV's seemed a daunting task, especially for something organic like a human head. I spent some time manually tweaking, and going through it meticulously. Until I watched a tutorial explaining that since maya 2009, there is a relax and unfold tool available in Maya's UV editor. Messing around with those I had a basic unwrap I could work with. now came the hard part: Texturing.


Texturing is something I've never really gotten into. So my photoshop skills in the area are quite lacking. I found it very hard deforming my pictures as to correspond with my UV map. So again, I cheated a bit. 

Using Adobe photoshop extended, it's possible to create a 3d layer. Using an exported version of my head model, I created a 3d layer in photoshop. Texturing then becomes a game of adjusting a layer above your 3d model, then merge it down onto the model. This is the tutorial I used to achieve my results:





I then created a specular map by desaturating and manually adjusting here and there, and I ended up with these maps:


These are far from perfect, mainly due to the lack of decent photoshop skills. But for now, they'll do the job!


the eyes I created separately and still need some work on their materials:



Next up, I'll experiment with SSS on this model. 

As always, criticism is much appreciated. 



dinsdag 3 mei 2011

MOAR SKETCHING

Some more Sketches from this week




And some Blind Sketching exercises.


woensdag 27 april 2011

Ear, Ear, Ear

so I started on the ear ... how I underestimated the complexity of this shape... I took me several attempts, but eventually, I found a way to work that I felt comfortable with, and Im quite happy with the resulting topology.



I based my technique on the methods shown in the book "Stop Staring" By Jason Osipa, a book I can highly recommend when you're looking for information on modelling heads, and also animating them! (Available on Amazon). Many thanks to Edwin for suggesting this book to me!

I didn't follow the book to the letter, because the Ear I was going for had a slightly different shape then the one made in the book. Anyway, time to show off my stuffs!

This is my first basic shape, from where I started:


The main thing that was new for me, were Edgeloops that looped back into themselves, which requires some more manual tweaking, as it confuses the f* out of Maya's tools.

Once I had this down, I just extruded some edges down and winged it from where, ...



And the final shape. The backside of the ear is fairly straightforward

Then, on to stitching this thing to the ear, the stage I'm currently at! I've managed to stitch the back of it, but the front edge is having to much detail for the 2 edges on my head model. I will either have to merge some endpoints on the ear, of add more detail to my head. I think me solution will be somewhere in the middle.

Also got some funky shapes when smoothing my mesh, not sure if that really needs fixing, but it's feeling a bit off anyways ... might come back to that later. Still need to fix up the head after adding the extra loops on top and in the back of the head to support the edges coming out of the ear. 






Still lots of work to do, see you next time!










maandag 18 april 2011

Just ignore the ears





Been working more on this head, just started trying to block in the ears, just ignore them for now ...

woensdag 30 maart 2011

progress is a good thing!

I think I got all major loop issues out of my head model, so Im sharing the progress, as I add more and more detail. Still having a bit of trouble getting the perspective silhouette right.




donderdag 17 maart 2011

Sneak peak: Project Courage

Just a Sneak Peak at something I'm working on :)


Some Sketches

Dumping some sketchbook stuff, old and new.
Sorry for the bad quality, I should get my scanner up and running...