Inktober

'Tis the season for ink. Using it to practice more ladies.

Aaaand a dragon reading, cause why not? 

RPG Backlog

Some stuff I can now show that was recently released. A bunch of dragon illustrations for Paizo Pathfinder pawns and a creature design for DnD 5E's new monster manual. 

These were all done sometime last year~

Chuul for 5E

Paizo Pawns:

Lava Drake

Mist Drake

Shadow Drake

Ladies

Character Practice

Trying out different methods of doing things, getting the hang of stuff.

Sketches/Studies

Miscellaneous practice, speedpaintings, studies and the like

View from outside my workspace window.

Street-view studies, minus the bottom right image which is a partially photo referenced speed painting. And by speed painting I mean maybe 30-ish minutes.

Photo and artist studies. Some Wyeth and Sargent. Figuring out skin tones.

Zbrush Noodling

Been absent for a while, I should really try to update this blog more regularly than in the spurts it receives. As per usual, this is older stuff, just trying to catch up. 

Practicing scales with Arrogath, an old character of mine. Gonna try and do maybe a crocodile study later and try out some different methods of making scales. This was all done by hand without using alphas and I think it looks a little unnatural as a result, albeit these scales are based on pangolins, not reptiles.

A rough bust I sculpted live during the 3D Printer World Expo in Bellevue that I was invited to.

Tiny printed manbat!

Deer God Renders

I used this recent zbrush sculpt to test out my different rendering options. Which essentially equates to me meddling around for far too long and figuring out how to get the lighting to do what I want. Sculpting is one thing but actually getting the small details to show up is another. The bust itself started out as a dynameshed sphere.

Renders in Zbrush, which are quicker to generate but not as realistic in terms of how light actually works. The images themselves are generated as psd's whereas I can get tiffs out of keyshot.

The rest are renders from keyshot.

Straight keyshot renders. The image on the left provides the lighting direction and deep shadows, the one on the right is used to fill in any surface detail lost in said shadows. 

Taking the vanilla renders into photoshop. I darkened the second image and brought out more detail by overlaying it on top of itself as multiply and overlay layers until it matched the first image in terms of value. Then both images are placed overtop each-other and I mask out the features I want to discard. That along with high-passes, level adjustments and the usual tweaking produce the image below. Still not entirely what I was after but I think I'm getting close.

Zbrush Creature Design

Followed along with a Gnomon workshop by Jerad Marantz that covered creature creation using zbrush and keyshot. 

Quick initial concept.

Reference! My ideas were all over the place and I think it shows in the design. I was pretty eager to get started and didn't spend as long figuring out what I wanted to do as I should have. 

Finished Model.

Slapped on some colour and overlay layers in photoshop to test out colour schemes. Settled on a mixture of hippopotamus and rhinoceros. 

Polypainting in Zbrush

Posing using Transpose Master

Renders straight out of Keyshot using hdr images

The final results after plenty of manipulation, tweaking of render passes, and over-painting.

If only I could have come up with a proper name for this guy. Rendering out a turn table soon, whether or not that turntable will be rendered with Zbrush or Keyshot depends on how long I'm willing to go without use of my computer (Keyshot takes forever).