Goldeneye Sketches

The top image are sketches I drew yesterday. Haven't drawn in a while so it took a while to warm up. The second image shows my sketches from today. The image of Boris and Natasha came out great. These images are the first two pages of a new A3 sketchbook. I hope I can continue with this quality and fill it up with even greater drawings. I don't want it to be a portraits sketchbook so I'll be drawing other things too in the future.

As a side note, the camera quality is really poor. I'd love to upgrade to a digital SLR camera at some point. It's an expensive purchase though!

P99 (correctly named)

I've been finishing off this model finally! Tidied up a lot of the normal maps and added small little details like the nuts and bolts. Built bullets which came out nicely. They add some interest to the image which I'm really pleased about. I can't decide if I prefer the gun with or without the silencer.

I shall be focusing on my 3D modelling for the next week. Hoping to start a new project soon.

Mud & Paint

 

 

I finally have had the time to get back to my Lancia. He's been unloved and neglected for at least a month.

Spent a while adding the paint lines in. As simple as they are, I was being too much of a perfectionist in positioning them and having be correct to the reference photos. I think this second attempt at mud is better but it still isn't quite there. The original rally car is covered in sponsor decals but I decided against them. Most would be covered by the mud anyway. :P

The car has a lot of life and history to it now. Actually feels a part of the environment. I tweaked the shadows and reflections again. I think they're right now.

My next task is to give more life to the muddy road by adding tire tracks and finally recreate some stronger grass textures. I also feel I could do with some bushes to fill out the distant background.

Lost Mariner Work

Here is a few of my favorite pieces from a uni project called the Lost Mariner. It was a very surreal piece based around a short story of a man who had no long term memory. He could however remember how to play chess. The piece was a group project and our ideas spiraled into a surreal chess board monolithic landscape. These are my concept drawings and there is also a 3D render of the environment I built.

Lancia Forest Concept

Concept piece for my Lancia forest. This is how it looked in my head.
The forest is based upon Black Park. I also took a lot of reference photos of Burnham Beeches forest which is a strong influence on this piece.

Xenia Portrat

This is another part for my Goldeneye poster. I feel like my tablet skills are starting to really show signs of improvement with each new portrait I create.

Goldeneye Portraits Continued

Been working on the faces trying to get some life and texture into them. I think they are almost finished. Just need to the get the shoulders of the suit sitting correctly and started creating the other pieces for the poster. I'm looking forward to seeing this come together.

Trainer Business Card

Updating my wood environment

The grass is the last bit I want to tweak. It looks pretty naff to be fair and really stands out now I've darkened the mud and made the hills more grassy. Also the bushes in the final shot look awful blacked out from the shadow. I'm really struggling to get my lighting correct despite reading a book on rendering and global illumination. Still on the plus side the scene looks stronger than ever. Just the car mud and decals to go!

Sky and Treeline changes

Spent a few hours last night cleaning up the treeline alpha and tweaking the saturation making them look like a background element. I spent a great deal of time getting the reflections right on the windows. It took me a lot of experimenting to realise the falloff map needed to be tweaked to get a higher amount of reflection. With that changed I felt a cloudy sky would have more interesting elements to reflect so changed out the old clear blue sky.

The scene feels more alive and interesting now with car feeling like it is a part of the environment. My next tasks will be to change the ground plane, make the mud more darker damper. I also want to decorate the car with it's rally colours, decals and some splashes of mud.

Lancia Body Work

Baked a the high poly normal maps for the doors and rear panels of the car. Just need to do the bonnet and boot door and then I can begin working on the decals, paint and finally mud.

Lancia Feedback Changes

I've been improving my portfiolio pieces. Today focusing on the car. I have re modelled a high poly body that I have begun baking onto the low poly version. One of the big points in my feedback was that the paint didn't look like car paint, and the reflections weren't strong enough to make the car feel like it was a part of the environment. I've started playing around with those areas but it's still not right.

Improving my PPK textures

I spent my day off re-modelling and recreating my normal maps for my PPK portfolio piece. With just the ambient occlusion, normal map and simple noise texture the model has come on leaps and bounds. I'll finish creating the high poly pieces for the other parts when I get some more free time.

Bond and Trevelyan sketch

Continuing to work on this piece. The portraits feel very stiff, I need to work on my technique and perhaps work with some custom brushes to give the skin tones more texture. I did want a stylised look but I feel I'm not getting the same life I would normally achieve from a pencil sketch.

Bond Sketch

A work in progress for my intended poster. Experimenting with styles. I think I'll probably end up redoing a more stylised version.

Goldeneye Sketches

I've been doing a lot of work on the computer lately so I felt like it was time I got my sketchbook and pencil back out.

I've always been a fan of hand painted movie posters, particularly those by artists such as Drew Struzan, Robert Mcguinness and Richard Amsel. They created some of the greatest movie posters ever. Unfortunately the hand painted poster is a lost art with companies always using photoshop to advertise modern movies.

The James Bond films started out using amazing hand painted posters but moved onto digital photography for the later films.

I'm trying to recreate the classic poster look for one of my favorite Bond film's, Goldeneye. Above are some of my preliminary sketches where I'm looking at all the elements I want to use in the final image.

Just as a side note, these sketches were the last pages of this particular sketchbook. It only took me a year to fill it up! Maybe I'll go back to an A3 size for my next book.

1930's Streamliner Locomotives

I have discovered a series of American trains built in the 1930's that were designed with an Art Deco style. These Streamliner Locomotives are absolutely stunning and huge in size. Unfortunately they did not get much use in their time and were quickly replaced.

The looks of these trains are so unique and different from anything I've seen before. I find it hard to believe these were actually really built and run. They would look right at home in a science fiction film. Here's some quick sketches of three I found particularly inspiring.

Long and Short Grey

Just added a grey background to give a point of focus and make the text more legible.

Long and Short II

Here's a second go at the logo. The dog needed to be at a lower angle to see the short legs and long hair. I've also included my quick tablet sketches as I was looking for a pose.

The Long & the Short of it

This evening I spent a few hours making this logo. I only used my graphics tablet which was a nice change. There's possibly too much detail of the cute dog for a logo that would be lost in a small scale. It's hard fighting my desire to create realistic imagery. This made a nice change from all the 3D work I have been doing lately.

Lancia Delta Turntable Final

Updated the video for a final time to include the mud, environment and wireframe turn arounds.

Tidying up the mud.

I went on CGTextures and got some great splat effects and used these to create some create brushes. Adding in all the flecks and speckles of mud has given a much more realistic look.

You can really tell I've been playing Dirt 2 for the past few months. Watching all those rally cars and trucks drive through thick and heavy mud definitely influenced this pieces outcome.

I'll get to rendering out a full 360 spin next. Will take my poor PC a few days as there's so many textures. I must also look into upgrading my graphics card. It has been pushed to it's limits these past few weeks.

Muddy Lancia

I've been working non stop to finish this piece. One of the things I always intended to do but wasn't sure I would ever find the time, was to get it covered in mud and dirt.

I'm almost there with the mud. Perhaps need to even it out a bit with some more speckles etc. Also I have to add the reflections back into the body work paint but I'll do that tomorrow. Still not sure about the colour.

Lancia Turntable

Here's a quick turntable of the car to show it's current progress. My computer is quite slow to render so I'll update with a more comprehensive video soon.

I've been building a nice large tree asset which just needs leaves textured and built. Once that's finished I just want to play with the glass to get the correct reflections and I'll call this piece complete.

Improving the Lancia Environment

This is still a work in progress but I'm getting closer to feeling finished with this piece. I've added a background treeline to stop that infinite horizon effect happening. Already the car feels like it's in a wooded forest.

I'd like to build some stronger and large tree assets next. I've been back out with my camera taking lots of reference pictures so all that remains is to get building.

Modelling Portfolio

Lancia Delta HF
Polys: 11,705
Scene total: 34,123

This is still a work in progress piece. I still want to add more foliage to the scene and there are a few bits on the car I feel could still be tweaked. I've been working on this model for a few months now and it's great to have it looking presentable.

Telecaster Guitar and amp
Polys: 2,826

Walther PPK
Polys: 1,561