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 !!!

Old stuff 3

I was drawing a little this week. Really. I just didn't feel like I was suppose to save what I drew.

Any ways I have next batch of old stuff. Enjoy.

Back in 2013 I thought I can learn how to draw at decent level in 2 years. Well... Life happened and it turned out I would need a miracle to do this.
I was "studying" perspective, and all... These are few of exercises I was doing.

Long time ago in a land far, far away the author of that post lived in perfect harmony with the surrounding him world. One day, totally out of blue, he decided to be a concept-design artist so he started to observe and learn perspective by drawing on the top of the car photos the perspective grid.
At least he thought he did.

 

I did 20-30 of these /\ . And then this \/

 

/\ That's simple, but forces you to think in three dimensions. I have done maybe 30-40 of these before I even started to draw. Really.

 


 

/\ Then I started to draw really simple, rough representation of scenes, toys, pretty much everything I could think of, in 3d space, using horizon line, vanishing points and all of that. 1-point perspective and 2-point perspective is pretty much all I was practicing at the time. Oh.. and why that saloon is from 2016? It is kinda obvious it's from 2014.




Recently I started draw people, study anatomy, and frankly, I think I should have stick to that whole perspective thing.

So long.

Value studies 2

What a times we live in!
10 years ago I would have to gone to the live drawing class of some kind, or at least set up the scene with a bunch of random stuff, get some consistent lighting and draw for hours.

Now we have something called internet - the largest instrument ever developed. We can find references for pretty much everything that can be drawn.

Want to draw an elephant? - Google > elephant > lots of references!
Want to draw cute girl portrait? - Google > cute girl face portrait photo > lots of references!
Want to draw some mountain environment? - Google > mountains > lots of references!

But what if you want to do some SIMPLE value studies, with SIMPLE shapes and SIMPLE lighting situation?
Well finding that may be not so simple - even though you'll probably find hundreds of pretty decent photos, you may find nothing that suits your needs. What then?

Answer is rather simple - 3D. You can use, for example, Blender for setting up simple scene. Half an hour, two tutorials from YouTube, and you're good to go. You won't be pro after such a short time, but it'll be enough for creating something simple. Render stuff you want to draw from any angle you wish and draw.

Learning some of 3D basics won't hurt, and really can help you.
Any ways, I forgot to save my process, so I've got some scraps of layers that I didn't delete.

That's it.

Some value studies

Remember when I said I've made some "value studies"? Well I refined them. One of them to be exact.

That isn't supposed to be pretty and all, so it is not. It's just me trying to nail the values, where the "trying" is the key word. Meh...

Lets begin!

1. Rough sketch, simple indication of facial features, size and shape of face.

2. Some flat values, just to avoid that shiny 100% white.

3. Sculpting nose and face, toning down that moustache.

4. First of all, I liked third phase far more than this one, but I had to bring some value to his face. It's kinda shame I did that the worst way possible.

5. Some darks to make him pop out bit more.

6. Further sculpting, some hard edges to make him look less feminine and blurry. I messed up eyes pretty badly. Again.

7. Eye speculars, some details. At the moment I don't give a crap about hair - too time consuming, and that's just some value studies.

I know the self-portrait November was, as the name says, in November, but I'm always late.

Is that just me, or I look like psycho-junkie? Duh...

So long

Old stuff 2

Five days since I posted something, and guess what... You guessed right - I have nothing new to share.

I made few "value studies", though they suck balls so much I need some time to put them here. I mean some refining, aka redrawing whole image until it's good enough.

Fear not! I got something though. Plenty of stuff that sucks balls even more.

For example that lil' fella you all should know:

I've found Peter's Dinklage promotional photo in Google - simple as that. Simple, low-resolution, black&white studies. You can see a construction lines, and all that stuff. I really like to have that sketch layer not entirely covered, even if at my level of drawing that looks just messy. I don't give a crap. Period.

Another value studies:

Guy who did this is certainly good at what he's doing. I was drawing few of his sculptures as a studies. For these who are interested - here's the link to  his DA

That's just a bunch of random drawings from the back of my head:

More like warm-up sketches huh... crappy, and old, and crappy, but that running stickman tho'

Oh.. and I've got that, for these of you, who think I'm drawing only the faces:

I couldn't decide what pose I like the most, so I scraped that. Maybe one day I'll render that, or at least give her a face... and clothes.

For you it may be not such a big deal. For you it may be not worth a second of your time. For you it may look like 10 years old kid's drawing, but hey - when I was starting 2 years ago I was drawing like 5 years old kid... I'm never that positive. Hope I won't be sick.

I'll post something when it's ready.

In the meantime
May the force be with you!