Slowly but steady making progress on the sage stick during streaming hours.
Sage stick Highpoly
Sage Sticks Lowpoly with Alpha card placement
Sage sticks with textures!
Lowpoly - no baked maps
Reference to the left!
Next up is to make another sage stick with a bit different shape and colors to get some more variations in there. I also want to do some work on the bottles, like adding labels and perhaps making some color variations and shape variation there as well.
I'm back! Man it's been a rough year in general, especially that last couple of months! I had to take a break from streaming and art, but it feels good to be back :)
I kinda put this project on the shelf for roughly half a year, I wasn't happy about it and couldn't really figure out why. Eventually I decided to just leave it be and return to it in the future. Having a break from it was a good decision, fresh eyes and a new perspective.
So what I came to as a conclusion is that it's missing some colors! Its just very brown and it makes it look quite dull. So to give it some more colors and enhance the feeling of it belonging to a doctor, I decided to add some herbs! I found some colorful sage sticks and I think those will add just the right amount of storytelling and color variation I'm looking for.
I think I will be adding two sage sticks, one more yellow-ish and one more purple and pink :) Probably finish one of them first to see how it looks!
Cheers!
Started texturing the Doctor's Saddle Bag and thought it was time to share some more WIP.
I also never tried using anchor points in substance, had to try it out this project and it's really nice for layering of damage, once you get it working.
Base layers added for color and type of micro details
Additional colors and rough detail start of the metal
First rough pass of main leather parts
Second detail pass on main leather
Overall progress for the entire bag
So still a lot of thing lefts to do but I'm making progress!
Progression Progression!
I'm still trying to figure out the layout, composition , level of details and the general concept of things. It's nice to just do fast and dirty speedmodels as it's quick to mock up new things and try out various designs.
The latest direction is to remove the stone head, sad as it is (may the stone head rest in peace). The only reason why I kept the head in there for so long was to make it work with the "remake" of my old environment. Seeing as things have already changed a lot, it's no longer really just a simple remake, it's almost an entire different diorama piece. I'm now playing with a suggestion I got from one of my viewer (during a streaming session) to go for a ornamented door or just a carving in the mountain. Keep it simple, keep it clean. Let the diorama breath a little and lead the eye towards the pond/tree.
Blockout + Speedmodel iterations
Quick blockout is helpful for determine the initial layout and sizes, does't really tell me much about the composition or how the various individual object plays together. By iterating on each piece to the same amount of details all the time, moving in between the objects, it helps giving a hint on the potential final look.
As with the head being out of the picture, I didn't end up wasting that much time and can continue on finding a solution that would fit the overall scene more.
A lot of my later speedmodels consist of super quick-low-res zbrush mehses, as the example to the right (latest speedmodel iteration). Sometimes I already have a library for speedmodel meshes and sometimes I have to make them quickly, like the tree example below (made quick speedmodel bark pieces to test out if it would be a potential look combined with roots).
Cheers!
So new project! Thought it was about time to update the Art-blog with some WIP from the previous streaming sessions.
First stream was all about moodboard and reference gathering, putting pieces together and figuring out the direction for the scene. Keeping the theme and spirit of my old student project, while improving on overall layout and composition. I quickly made a blockout to starts to visualize the shapes and construction (I can't draw so I always do blockout in several steps, but always start with really blocky shapes).
So the diorama kinda increased in size (I always start grand and then scale down). Last stream I took the blockout a step further and started to refine and improve on it, making very rough and quick shapes in zbrush, to see the silhouette a bit better. This process also helps me determine which pieces that should be modular and what requires a more unique touch.
So the layout is starting to shape up, but there quite some steps left before I feel that I am done with the 3d concepting phase and can move onto some proper modelling. At the moment I have a Nordic setting with some star gazing stone to the side, a gigantic stone carved head (I know looks like a creepy baby face right now!), wooden logs to form a stair; sunken into mud, mossy cliff formation in the background with some rune stones ornaments.
So next step is to grasp the story. Why and for what purpose did someone build this? Is it a ceremonial? A meeting place? Maybe they just started construing everything and nothing is really completed yet?
I also started to consider using Unreal Engine for this project, instead of the initial plan to render it in Marmoset Toolbag as the old diorama is. I feel I might need material blending and be able to paint moss etc, something that isn't really supported in Marmoset (there are some community made scripts though.) However, it was a long time ago I used Unreal, so that would be something I need to investigate in before starting to import the blockout pieces into an engine.
Until next update, cheers!
So it's summer and even in Sweden we are melting in the heat!
I started my new job at DICE just 2 month ago (exactly on the day on Saturday 14th of June woop woop!). I have been quite busy with learning the ropes but I have still tried to be online and stream once a week.
I'm now working on a new piece, since I finished the skull barrel one already! (Yay!)
This time the concept is from Becca Hallstedt, a stylized crossbow. I'm making it in a similar fashion as the skull barrel, same type of stylization :)
Below are some WIP pics from my stream and the current state of the project. Only thing left to do now is the cloth pieces and the ropes, which I plan to wrap up in the next streaming session.
