Monthly scraps - May 2016

Guess who's back!

I've got some stuff for you. Not much but still something.


1. Since my tablet lost initial levels of pressure sensitivity I had to came up with a way of blending colours/values that doesn't depend on pen sensitivity as much as standard airbrush whatsoever.
That's basically test of mixer brush. Nothing fancy. Just test.

2. Another test. The test of my patience this time. I mean sketching with partially working pen pressure... Pain in the ass. Took maybe 5 minutes before I quit.
And yes, she has feet that long. Yes, that's mistake I didn't notice.

3. That dude - you may see a bit more rendered version of him somewhen in the future.

4. Oh, and that one... That supposed to be some kind of children book cover. I mean that's just a sketch but I want to render that bit more.

Aren't they pretty? Ok, they aren't.
But as I said it's not about me drawing nice, but about me drawing better and better every month(hopefully). Even if the progress is so slow you can't even notice - I can. 

At this point I'm filling 30+ A4 pages per month. 2 months ago it wasn't more than 15. Consistency improved.
I know I suck at anatomy (look at these sketches LOL), values, colours and stuff but It won't stop me.

PS. I'll be posting more of old stuff this month.

Monthly scraps - Apr 2016 /update

That post can end up being long. Don't know exactly how long yet tho'.

First of all - that's monthly scraps post so I got for you this:

I wanted to check how my brain thinks the average French man looks like. Well... I've never seen so manly-looking French in my life, so I've no idea why he came out this way.

1. Terrible choice of background colour. I don't know what I was thinking...
Rough indication of facial features. I wanted him to have very sharp, heavy, though look.
I had no pre-existing sketch whatsoever, nor the references, so I was just squinting my eyes, and putting dark tones where I was thinking it's good place to put them.

2. Shape refinement, darker tones, lighter tones.

3. Guy with pointy nose, cheeks and chin needs pointy ear. That's a rule no.1 of painting (not really) - period.

4. I really wanted to take him to presentable stage, so I put some lines, to know where to put the lighter tones and hard edges. These lines were meant to be overpainted. Now I can see the perspective is a bit wacky.

5. Overpainted some of lines.

6. Added some lights.

At this moment I've lost ma patience and that's where the UPDATE part begins.

Long story short - my tablet doesn't work as it used to. I just don't have that 20% of the initial pressure levels. Can't draw light lines any more.
It's not the driver problem. It seems to not be the Win 10 default Pen and Touch service problem either. I have tested out few drawing programs and problem appears in every one of them.
CTH-460 served me well for 3 last years (end even then it was 2 years old model), so I think its time has come. I'll switch back to Win 8.1 just to be sure it's not the system issue.

I'll be still drawing stuff but it's fucking irritating. Maybe I'll figure out some camera and I'll be just putting the photos of what I drew in sketchbook... Maybe won't.

GL&HF
So long

Monthly scraps - Mar 2016

Right... 

Don't zoom in. It's not healthy thing to do. Not for your eyes.

Not so steel

Do you remember when I said all my stuff ends up in that far-from-being-finished stage?

I've got another one of these, and SPOILER ALLERT - it doesn't look good.

Here is my miserable process. Enjoy, and do not repeat my mistakes.

1. Sketched that guy in my organizer from 2012... Has lines, is outdated, but the paper it's made of is great. Then I added the earpads (I believe that's how they're called), and some highlights digitally.

2. Added some basic colours and started to paint over the sketch.

3. And here's the moment I decided I don't like what I see... So I scrapped that, blurred, and stuff.

4. I drew plains of the nose, paint over it, and did the same thing to cheekbone.

5. Darkened up entire image to bring up some lights. Also I painted that ball to keep in mind where from the light comes and what's the colour of his skin, tho' I didn't use it even once.

6. ...and I scraped everything once more. If you don't like it - scrap it and redraw. I think that's the main reason I have nothing to share with you.

7. Darkened up one side of his face (or rather something that supposed to be his face), and lightened up background, to make him pop-out more from the background and give myself some values to play with. Oh...

8. Scrapped it once more. Brought greyscale again, to not get distracted by colours. Drew it again with planes of the face, to have something to follow later. I thing at this point I've started using references. Made his skull more prominent. He seemed a bit to chubby in earlier versions.

9. Added some flats for armour, earpads and that horn thingy on his head.

10. Sorry about the "how to draw an owl - tutorial" syndrome, but I forgot to save all the steps. I just painted in some shadows on another layer.

11. Brought the colours again by adding some gradient-map layers for skin, earpads, armour, and horn.

13. Painted in some lights. Same problem as I had with shadows. No step by step images.

14. I was so tired of repainting that over and over again, I just simply added a muddy background, some rim-light, and called it done. I mean not really done. Just done.

And here's .gif presenting my journey through the dark valley of hell.

By the way. That's one of the champions that you can play in Paragon. Man's name is Steel.

That's it.
So long.

Paragon and banana

Ave Caesar whatsoever!

So why am I not posting anything? Well - I was playing Paragon Closed Beta. I'm under a confidentiality agreement, so I can not post much more than this: the game is freaking cool.

For these who don't know what the paragon is - tan da da DAN! PARAGON SITE

For these who are too lazy to click the link... It's MOBA with TPS view from Epic Games (these guys from Unreal Engine). I was playing LoL (League of Legends) before it was cool. I mean from open beta, for 2 seasons, and then community happened (I mean I grew up and reading what's-not 'bout my mother and my playstyle bored me), then e-sport happened (not good e-sport, but that I-am-12-years-old-master-of-lol-and-know-fucking-everything "e-sport").
I have never had that much fun in LoL, I've got here. The gameplay itself is rather for B+/A-, but their card system that lets you create your own equipment, for every single character, and about which I sadly can't talk, is great.
When it comes to graphics, game's gorgeous. If you see the trailer, graphics in-game looks same.
Early access beta starts on March 18th. Open beta somewhen in summer. Totally worth a try.

Oh, and as long as I won't paint anything new... Get my attempt to "sill life".

For your own eyes sake - DO NOT zoom in

That *ekhem* masterpiece *ekhem* is dated on January 2014.
I didn't set up the scene, nor even had any references... Again twisted mind of mine gives me vague picture of my painting objects.

That's not good thing if you want to learn anything. I should have paint that from reference first and then try repainting it with the knowledge I acquired.

Feel entertained. Or not. It's up to you.

So long.

Monthly scraps - Feb 2016

This month even less of them.

I kind of switched to pencil and paper for my day-to-day sketching.
Not that I will not draw on tablet, but well... My "work station" is not as mobile as my notebook.
Beside, I really like the feel that drawing with pencil gives.

DO NOT zoom in. I dare you. I double dare you.

Guess who's on the left. It's not hard.


So long.

Hardware upgrade and some Unreal Engine 4

Long time no see.
Unpleasantly seriously long.

What was I doing all that time?

1. I changed my hardware. It is not the most powerful PC on the Earth but gtx960 is far better than 9600gt.
One '0' less - a lot of power more. Beside that, I changed CPU, motherboard, and RAM too but the difference's not that big.

2. Installing Windows...
It wasn't suppose to last 3 days but it did. Installation failed on every possible step. Process was painful, long, painful, boring, frustrating and fucking painful.
Oh! and at the time I needed to update the shit out of Win8 to finally get my Win10,
my internet provider had some kind of issues with providing the internet.

3. Lollygagging.

4. Doing that:

 

It is not something I'm proud of. Not yet.

-materials have no textures nor the normal maps;
-Stones, rocks, and grass models are made in less than 10 minutes each;
-everything is a placeholder;

BUT

-landscape material automatically paints cliffs with grey, plains with green, and everything in between with brown;
-Green, Grey and Brown are material functions so I can change behavior of one layer without messing with others. Also, that means I can add to them textures separately;
-grass is generated procedurally - which basically means everywhere where landscape is green the grass appears, with density based on how green the surface is;
-rocks and stones are added as grass, but less dense;
-if I want to change something that the "algorithm" fucked up (or, more likely, I simply want to change it) I can paint it manually;
-grass WAVES ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ :D

Considering the fact all I did I did in one day, still being newbie to Unreal Engine 4, it's not that bad.
I'll be working on that.

So long  - hopefully not too long.

Monthly scraps - Jan 2016

Not much this month - huh?

Anyone wants to see something ugly?
Some scraps I wasn't able to even bring to "presentable" stage. 

Any way - catch'em all.

So long

The 3D stuff - beginings

Hi,
Long time no see.
January is the month of exams and stuff for most of students, and since I'm one myself, I'm pretty busy.
The fact that, if I ware a Power Ranger, my Zord would be a sloth, doesn't seem to help, either.

Any ways, I wasn't totally unproductive. I sat my ass in front of Blender (the 3d program, not the one from kitchen...), saw few tutorials, and made the use of them.
I based work-flow on one tutorial, made by Lance Wilkinson, and kinda ripped of the vibe of weapon. I mean I made everything by myself, but the process is the same, and look of it is similar, although my dagger is a bit "darker".

1. Concept of dagger drew myself. It's easier than I thought.

2. Then I sculpted it in Blender.
It has 204 vertices, 240 faces and 404 tris, so it's low polygonal mesh.

Why I went for the low-poly model?
Every object that you see in games, consists of faces and vertices. Lets say we've got simple cube. Six faces, 8 vertices - it seems like nothing. It's not that simple. Computer doesn't know if that faces are attached to the other, so it makes (6 faces)*(4 vertices for each face) == 24 vertices.
Still nothing? Remember that our cube has to exist in the 3 dimensional space - if not, It wouldn't be a cube. That means Every vertex has XYZ axis data. (24 vertices)*(3 axis)= 72 numbers describing the position in world. I forgot to mention that the world position has to be in some kind of relation to these vertices, every vertex has triplet of variables (or quartet when it comes to visibility) describing RGB color (orRGBa) in vertex shader, triplet (quartet) that describes color that radiates from vertex on the face it's attached to, and so on, and on, and on... and it's still a simple cube.
The point is: The more vertices/faces you got, the bigger shitload of data your computer has to compute.
In modern games programmers and 3d artists are using lots and lots of tricks to fool our eyes, to believe that something is prettier than it is in real.

3. Exported UVs layout (that spider-web thingy for these who don't know) as *.png file, and started to draw on top of them.

4. After few iterations I ended up with blade like this.

5. At the end added some details and dirt to make it look more used.

The final texture looks like this:

and has 1024x1024 pixels. For that low-poly mesh it's already overkill in my opinion. 

You can easily notice how flat the surface is. Originally I indented to create normal map for that dagger, but that would require high-poly mesh, or at least few hours of playing with texture baking... and since it's a low-poly mesh, and that hand painted texture already gives the illusion of depth, it would not be worth it.

Wait! What the hell is that "Normal map" Well... that creates the illusion of bumpiness on flat surfaces. You can find more on wiki HERE.

And if you want to see Lance Wilkinson's tutorial you can buy them THERE. That costs 8 bucks for 4 hours long video tutorial (entire series), 3d meshes, and textures, so worth it.

So long

Monthly scraps - Dec 2015

Nothing too fancy, but I'll still post that.

1. some portrait studies
2. desert landscape studies
3. desert landscape from imagination

All rough, unfinished, thumbnail-ish. Basically, as I said, scraps.

DO NOT ZOOM IN !!!