May 5th:
I am painting a map of the world on cork board for my sister. I grabbed a free map image off of the internet, blew it up to an appropriate size, then cut it up into individual images sized to print on a standard printer in Photoshop. The above image is of the map printed, trimmed, and taped together. I plan to cut out the continents and use the map as a stencil for painting on the cork board.
May 4th:
More progress on the Mother Nature's body textures. I suppose I should start showing these views of her more closely since I'm no longer working so much on the whole spread of images as I am focusing on one angle at a time...
May 3rd:
I started adding some textures to Mother Nature's front-facing body.
May 2nd:
Mother Nature has hair now. I'm still just playing around with my ideas for her a lot...
May 1st:
Back to Mother Nature for May Day. Not a whole lot of progress today: just some side-view dress outlines and layer adjustments.
April 25th:
I put down some basic color on the character and her clothing. I'm not working very quickly on this character because I'm planning to make her quite complex and I still have a few too many ideas bouncing around in my head to nail down all of the details yet.
April 24th:
I started the digital work on my Mother Nature character today, but I didn't get very far. I was kind of having an off-day where nothing felt like it was working right...
April 23rd:
My only real work today was a little bit of photo adjustment and layout. I drew these basic turn-around outlines of a character that I've been working on designing for awhile last summer, and now I'm feeling like I want to get back to it.
March 30th:
I made the extra maps, masks, and materials needed for my girl's clothing and accessories. Then I fixed her skin material so that it appeared less rubbery. I'm quite pleased with the final outcome.
On to rendering!
March 29th:
Today I spent a lot of time working in both Photoshop and Modo. I painted material masks and tweaked texture maps to create new maps (like specular amount maps) in Photoshop, then tested the effects of those maps in Modo while I refined the materials applied to my girl's body.
March 27th:
My girl's body color texture map is done and I painted preliminary colors on her clothing and accessories.
March 25th:
Back home: back to modeling. Spent my art time today testing and fixing abnormalities in all of those normal and displacement maps that I baked before I left.
February 28th:
Love these clouds.
"Calendar" image of Daily Art created in January.
(Note: This image was actually created in February, but since I'm posting late I'm putting it here at the end of the month where it should go anyway.)
January 26th:
This is a small piece of a much larger collage that I put together of photos taken looking down over the city from Twin Peaks in San Francisco. This view is near the center of the collage horizontally, and shows nearly the full view vertically, as the collage is much more wide than it is tall.
January 21st:
Okay, today's work can't be summed up in one image, so I'm posting three. The image above is a collage of all of the texture maps that I created today. The color maps are modifications of the diffuse color maps that I created yesterday. I did a little expert Photoshopping using my displacement maps on top of the color maps to create darker areas of grime in the crevices of the sculpture. The black and white images are specular maps that I created from a similar combination of the original color maps and the displacement maps, since the projections will reflect more light than the grimy crevices.
The next image is a Modo render of the posed, textured sculpture:
I'm showing this image next rather than the A-Frame because this is the position in which I textured the Warrior. A-Frame may be the default position for a model, but this is the default position for a sculpture. This is what my imaginary sculptor sculpted; it therefore follows that the woodgrain would contour to this pose rather than an A-Frame one.
Below is a Modo render of the A-Frame textured model:
I must say that I am quite pleased with how he turned out.
The next few days will be quite a bit of rendering.
January 20th:
Today I texture painted my Warrior model in Mudbox. Then I added some grime in Photoshop and tweaked the images to make bump maps to accompany the color. There are far too many maps here for one character, but this is apparently how I laid out my UVs before I baked out my displacement and normal maps, so I'm just going with it because I really don't want to bake all of those maps again. I did, at least, resize the maps in proportion to one another.