Kayen...

...is taking shape :)

This is a project that I've been working on for the last two months, approximately. This blog is going to be a short rundown of what was involved in creating this guy, up to where I am now.

Kayen is being made for several reasons. The first reason being a small competion between me and a friend. See who can create the coolest character, that would be at home in a game like LoL or Smite. It could be a recreation of an existing character or you could design a new one. I designed a brand new one.
Another reason for creating is because it's fun.

The first step to creating him, was a rough sketch. Put simply, I began with a line that felt right. As I had no real restriction as to what the character should do or look like, I could do whatever I felt like.













The first line turned into a series of rough sketches. I modified these in Photoshop to create a concept that felt good. A lot of changes were made to get the right balance in the character and the right sense of scale and mass.

After that, I made a workable modelling sheet. I refined the side-view and created a front-view, based on the side-view.

After that, I made a basemesh to take into Mudbox. I soon found out that Mudbox would not be able to give it the detail i wanted it to have. So I learned how to, very basically, use Zbrush. That pushed the sculpt to new heights. The end result was a sculpt that had more detail and a higher resolution than any of my previous work.

The next step was to create a new low poly model. I also tried to create a fully edgelooped character. This should prove beneficial when I start to animate him. Getting him fully edgelooped meant using far more triangles than I had anticipated. Although not insanely high, by modern standards, it ended up being far higher then I had first envisioned.

the unwrap was created using a plugin for 3DSmax, called Xray Unwrap. Unwrapping was fairly pain free. That meant I could take the new low poly model into Mudbox and start texturing. After several experiments I now have something that works fairly well. I am still not certain I will keep the current colorscheme and I think I'll change it to something brighter.
For the sake of adding mode color and breaking symmetry, I added some warpaint and I will add more. It had proven fairly tricky to get right, as most warpaint means something. So I've had to create a very simple cultural backstory for Kayen.

All this work had taught me a great deal about character creation. A creature, like Kayen, requires much more work then I had thought. It is deeply interesting and gratifying to do, though.

It is...

...balls warm 0.o

i hate this heat. i am not built for it. i prefer 25-ish degrees, not 33 :S
i cant do anything with this heat, because i feel sticky and crappy and just...mehglsfblagh

when it wasnt this freakin warm, i was working on a new project. it's a game character for a moba game. i call him Kayen, after a scientific name of a turtle. i forgot which one tho. doesnt really matter anyway. Kayen sounds reptily and fits the character nice enough.

the high rez sculpt is done, at 18 million polygons. the low rez is about half done.

blahg! too hot :S

working on...

...Jin Roh project: take 3-ish.

the first project that i'll be doing over the summer, is recreating a character and armor from a really cool anime movie, called Jin Roh.

what i'll be making is the protagonist in his Protect Gear. basically a heavily armored SWAT-like armor, with nightvision and they go around wielding MG-42's. it's a really badass, almost iconic piece of armor. the red eyes have inspired a lot of other, maybe even more well known designs. designs like the Helghast from the Killzone-franchinse.

so far, i've made a sculpt of the head and a low poly retopo of that head. next up is to create the armor/body. it's gonna be fun and a bitch :) 

so here, enjoy screenshots of each stage :)

Getting...

...in shape!
a less bulbous, jiggly shape :) that's the plan for the next two months. as a 3d artist and gamer, i do tend to spend a lot of time sitting down. that aint good :)

so im gonna use my vacation to work on myself. im going to try and reach the goal i set for myself. and the goal is to get rid of my mantits.
when i reach that goal, im gonna get a tattoo done.

in the meantime, im going to be working on several projects. one is going to be a revisit of a project i did years ago. a 3d reproduction of the character Fuse from the Jin Roh anime. should be fun :)

next to that, im gonna do a small competition with a friend of mine to create a LoL-like character. and i might do some work for a few mod/game projects. we'll see :)

Provisional plans...

...for my vacation.

the plans i have are not many. i plan to go to campzone for a few days, because it is awesome!

the other plans are to make an awesome character, either from jin roh or game of thrones. those are my main plans. the secondary plan, that i can do regardless of what i do for the rest of my vacation, is working out like a motherfucking beast. i had a nice month or so long run and it felt great. but now i really want to get back into it and loose a ton of weight. i want to get rid of my manboobs and be less of a lardass :)

plans, so many plans.

Drawing...

...is not my cup of tea. and i love tea. mostly.

i also like coffee. 

but that's besides the point. 

drawing is hard and i am really bad at it. well, compared to a lot of my classmates. that doesnt really bother me. but i want to be at that level. and im a long way off. 

i did finally learn some techniques that i find very useful. now i just need to apply them properly. so far, it's not going to my liking, but practice makes perfect.

stealing examples also help. for instance, andrew wyeth. brilliant artist, with a very nice mix of subtle and bold lines. and a great grasp of what is needed to represent an image.

so, that is my goal. gonna take me a while tho :)

I have...

...a twitter.

been avoiding it for a long time. it feels too much like a "look at me" sort of thing. i dont know. it finally came to a point where i wanted to know what some devs and artists and such were up to and i didnt want to check their sites every day. so..twitter.

i think twitter, much like facebook, is a first tentative step toward a technological singularity. i have a very romantic idea about this, and the future/reality of will most likely be fairly grim, but i can hope.

my hope is that a world where a large portion of the population is connect by thought will decrease war and crime. but, as with most thing we invent, some method of profit will be built-in. commercials streamed into our thoughts, viruses, spyware. all that kind of nonsense in our brains.

but i can still hope. and in that romantic vision of the singularity we can communicate directly using thought. and not just text, but feelings, thought processes, all the things that contribute to the creation of an idea, but are lost in translation.

but, most likely, it will be created as a tool for war or used as such. maybe it will spark a leap in human thinking. but it's still a long way off. best guestiments say that it's going to happen sometime in this century. but predictions vary wildly. but combine the singularity with the expected growth in lifespan, you can begin to imagine humans are on the verge of becoming living demigods.

living for possibly hundreds of  years, increased intelligence, better health, more knowlegde. it's possible we are on the verge of a revolution, perhaps even more significant than the renaissance or industrial revolution combined.

regardless if it's for good or bad, i cant wait.

and how the hell did i get from the start of this blog to the ending? 0.o

Motivation...

...is sometimes hard to find.

At the moment i am working on an architecture project. I really dislike architecture. I've done it in that past and it is just not for me. I cant keep my attention on it, because it's just annoying to me. Recreating a building is so boring to me.

The plans are already there, you aren't making anything new, you're not designing anything. And on top of that, we have to build it using a specific building method. there is nothing wrong with that method, apart from the fact that it too, is boring and annoying to work with.

I would much rather work on characters, creatures, vehicles. But sadly, im done with character art, this block :(

To try and get motivated, i'm drinking loads of coffee, gonna work-out. that usually works.

i might even get a webcam and make some kind of vlogs/reviews/tutorials. just to mix things up a bit.