Daily Art: Three Weeks of Daily Art

I've been working on the most recent pages of my Cut-Up Sketchbook for the past few days while I've been out of town:

Day 98:

Day 97:

Day 96:

Day 95:

Then I spent this past weekend with my niece and nephew helping my sister prepare for my niece's birthday party, so the art on those days is all party and kid-related:

Day 94:

On Sunday I acted as the unofficial photographer of the birthday party. I won't post pictures of the kids online, but I will show a snippet of an action shot of the piñata smash:

Day 93:

Saturday was cupcake decorating day:

The crab was following a design that my sister found (on Pinterest, I'm sure...)

Day 92:

On Friday I drew some pictures of "Frozen" characters for my niece and nephew that they chose to fold into fans. My nephew wanted Olaf and Sven, which he then colored before adding drawings of his own of Anna and Cristophe:

And my niece wanted Elsa, which I colored for her:

Day 91:

And before that was more Cut-Up Sketchbook:

Day 90:

Day 89:

On day 89 I spent the better part of my work time taking screen shots, editing, and compositing progress photos for this blog. I think this qualifies as Daily Art considering the amount of time that I spent working in Photoshop, but it does not yield its own images. You'll just have to look at days 76-88 to see the results of day 89's work...

Day 88:

A tree:

In the form of a photo collage.

Day 87:

I made a list of all of the remaining tasks to complete in the revision of my Juggler's textures this day.

And then I decorated it:

Day 86:

The 86th day of Daily Art was a Saturday on which I spent 5 hours face painting. Here's a sample of my work:

Day 85:

I also face painted on Friday:

And made a quick sign advertising the face painting:

Day 84:

On this Thursday and the two days before I spent time creating a 10 second long demo reel for my former school's Spring Show. As a student who was enrolled in the fall I still qualify for entrance into this year's show despite the fact that I've already graduated. This is the reel that I submitted:

Day 83:

I submitted that reel because I realized that the submission guidelines prohibited having any contact information anywhere other than the first frame of the 10 second time span (I edited out that frame for posting on the internet). This is the reel that I created the first time around (and the way that I would have left it had I had free reign).

Day 82:

This was the day that I began the reel-editing process.

And the day that I discovered that the resolution requirements were full 1920 x 1080 HD and that I had to re-render a couple of my turntables.

(such as the Juggler wireframe turntable that includes the image above.)

Day 81:

I spent this day trying to turn detail that I'd previously achieved through a normal map into detail achieved through a displacement map.

It worked in general, but lacked much of the sharp definition provided by the normal maps...

Day 80:

Daily Art day #80 was filled with technical behind-the-scenes stuff that provides no great imagery, like transferring sculpting from one object to another to utilize the UVs of the new item rather than the original one...

Day 79:

On this day I concocted some designs for face painting:

Day 78:

I reorganized my Juggler's UVs this day so that each individual piece of her won't require its own unique map when I texture paint her. I probably ended up averaging 3 - 5 items per map instead:

Day 77:

On this day I finished UVing every single piece on my Juggler so that I could really texture paint her rather than relying on procedurals as I did previously:

And, before that, I built a new mesh for the tire in my Juggler's shoulder:

It has far fewer polygons than the tire with the modeled tread, but I think that I should be able to create the same look of a tread by creating a displacement map with the tread pattern in it.

Day 76:

And, finally, on the first/last day (depending on how you look at it) of Daily Art for this entry, I created a new, solid mesh to replace the very high-poly wire mesh in my Juggler's tea ball.

Then I created and tested displacement and transparency maps to use on the new mesh to make it look like it's built from the same wires as the original mesh:

That's all folks!

Daily Art: 3D Print Prep & More

It's been a busy week and a half since I last posted. I let a bit too much time get away from me between posts again, but it was for a very good reason: I put in an application to a Talent Development program at a major animation studio this week. Fingers crossed that something amazing comes of it! Now, back to daily art practices:

Day 75:

I revamped my demo reel a few times this week. Today I completed the most recent version; I fixed a couple of errors in the revamp that I completed earlier in the week. In the earlier version both my Gecko and my Juggler models disappeared shortly before the screen faded to black. One minute they were there, then suddenly they weren't, then the frame faded to black before progressing on to the next set of turntables. They both did this in slightly different ways for slightly different reasons, but I was able to identify both problems and adjust the file accordingly. I don't know how I missed it before I uploaded the version that I completed earlier this week to the internet...

Day 73 & 74:

I worked on the same thing two days in a row and never paused to take in-progress screen shots of it. So here is the finished image covering both days' worth of work.

 I didn't complete this entire storyboard in the two days that I worked on it. I actually began the thing a few years back, then lost interest in it in favor of other projects. It's been nestled in the back of my mind on my to-do list, however, and for some reason I really felt that it would be a valuable example to add to my Talent Development program application portfolio. Most of the work that I completed over the two day span was coloring the panels. All of the initial drawing and layout was already completed, and I had blocks of color multiplied over each panel depicting the dominant shade that I wanted each frame to be. The work that I did over the weekend was pretty akin to coloring in a digital coloring book of my own creation.

Day 72:

Saturday's work was just a quick sketch of a lion head. I found myself studying the contours of the face of a leopard whose photograph appears occasionally as my computer's desktop wallpaper and wanted to draw a new version of it. Changing the proportions of the face turned it distinctly lion-like, but, as I wasn't really aiming for any type of cat in particular, I was pleased with it. I'd like to turn this sketch into vector artwork in Illustrator someday.

Day 71:

Friday I spent a short amount of time UVing the clock on my Juggler:

 

I've been UVing all of the Juggler's pieces separately because I started working on the character this way, but I know now that that was a mistake. Having a separate UV map for each piece of the character wastes space and makes the character far too data-heavy to function efficiently. I can't do much to fix all of the UVs on the objects that I've already added normal and texture maps to without re-doing an awful lot of work, but I can, and will, combine the UV maps of some of objects that have no texture information to them yet before I go about adding such information. I'm planning to dispense with the procedural textures that I gave the Juggler for my thesis and texture paint her in Mudbox instead. She will be a wonderful piece to add to my texture portfolio, which is distinctly lacking at the moment.

Day 70:

My art on Thursday consisted solely of a quick little face-painted mask of-sorts. More practice for when I begin doing this at the farmer's market.

Day 69:

Wednesday was the day that I truly revamped my demo reel. I fixed the little issues that I missed later in the week, but this was the day that I truly put effort into working on it. It's fairly similar to the reel that I've been using (it features many of the same models with the same turntables), but the turntables are re-ordered to showcase my best models first. I know that this is how a demo reel should go: you show your best work first so that the recruiter who views 100 demo reels per day becomes interested immediately and doesn't just turn your reel off thinking that everything on it must be as mediocre as the first thing and move on to the next reel. I know that's how it works, and yet... I've been using my thesis reel because I know that it has my best models on it. The problem is: I designed my thesis reel to work up to my best work because I knew that the panel that it was intended for was going to watch the entire thing and then discuss it. I saved the best for last, which is exactly opposite of what you should do when you create a demo reel. And somehow, until quite recently, I missed the error. I never revamped my thesis reel to make it more appropriate as a demo reel in any way other than changing the slate information to be more suited to its purpose; until now.

The new reel puts my Addict first, followed by my newly-textured Gecko. Then comes the Juggler and the Warrior. Next is the Gallery environment. I nixed the still image of all of the models in the environment together because it no longer reflects the current state of the models now that the Gecko is textured; it also makes the addition of my Felix model tagged onto the end distinctly out-of place.

This version of the reel includes the 8-bit Dragon for "Amazing Adventure" at the very end after Felix, but I nixed that turntable later in the week when I fixed the errors in the reel because I'm just not happy with the quality of the turntable that I created for that model. It's not lit properly, the speed isn't constant, there's no wireframe view... It just looks unprofessional compared to the rest of the reel. Felix doesn't have a wireframe turn either, but the quality of the turn-around that he does have is so far above the one that I quickly set up and rendered of the dragon that I'm still satisfied having him at the end.

Day 68:

I spent the first three days of this round of daily art prepping my Szeth-Son-Son-Vallano model for 3D printing.

I'm not planning to sell him or anything of that nature, but, after the artist who designed the character said such nice things about the model, I figured that it would be nice to have a physical representation of him. I might even try to send one to the artist and the author who created the character if I'm successful; I know that the author, at least, really appreciates fan art.

Unfortunately, getting a model such as this ready for 3D printing is no easy feat. First off, The model has to be water-tight, which means one single, solid piece. When I built the model he consisted of exactly 15 different pieces. It also has to be under one million polygons, and the model that I built had something like 8 million quads if my memory serves me correctly. There is also a minimum thickness that any part of the model can be (how much that is depends on the material used to create the print), a minimum distance between two separate sections of the model (which means no intersecting or otherwise touching geometry), and a slew of other stipulations about the dimensions of the piece which will cause me less grief than the few that I have already mentioned. This means that I had to decimate the model to bring the poly-count down below one million while keeping all of my sculpted detail, and then connect all of the different pieces and any piece of geometry currently touching any other (this includes connecting the fingers resting on the surface of the model's face to the face as well as attaching the wrists to the sleeves and the coat to the shirt and the pants to the belt and every other piece to all of the other pieces).

I originally thought that I could complete the task of connecting all of the different pieces of the model fairly easily by putting all of the subtools on one layer in ZBrush and Dynameshing the entire thing, but it didn't work as well as I'd hoped. The geometry that Dynamesh produced needed so much clean up that it just wasn't worth it - at least by pixel-pushing and merging vertices in Maya I have more control and can keep track of what's going on with the shape of the model. I couldn't even make sense of all of the intersecting geometry that Dynamesh created...

So, after trying and failing attempted shortcuts in ZBrush a few times I brought the decimated model into Maya and have been merging vertices "by hand" ever since. The model will still require a lot more work before it's done, as well as some additional ZBrush sculpting to clean up the flow of the seams once the model is all one piece, but it's coming along:

The above image illustrates where I've deleted geometry from both the shirt and the belt in the areas that it overlaps. Next I will connect the vertices to make it water-tight.

This image clearly illustrates why the model will require extra sculpting in ZBrush to clean up the newly-created seams between the previously separate items.

Day 67:

On this day I connected Szeth's calves to the inside of his trouser legs:

 This image shows all of the successful connections that I have made thus far:

Day 66:

The first day that I worked on Szeth I began by connecting his shoes to his feet.

That's all that I did last week. The coming week should be very heavily Juggler-oriented, as I'm trying to create all-new textures for her in the hopes of submitting her for consideration in the Academy of Art's Spring Show. I think she'd be a fine fit for the Hard-Surface Model category.

Daily Art: Film Art

I've spent the last week working on the film artwork that I mentioned in my last post, and I've gotten permission from the director of the project to share the pieces that I've created for the film here. The drawings that I created are basically set dressing pieces that are supposed to have been drawn by the main character in the film. So, without further ado, here are the pieces that I created for my first outside freelance art contract:

Days 51-57:

The First Concept:

The Drawing:

(Actually, the "concept" for the first one is really just the same drawing minus a few revisions. I just started sketching with pastels after I got the job and came up with that image, then decided that rather than creating everything on-the-fly at full size I should do a few thumbnails to give the director choices for the final pieces. Hence, from here out, the concepts will actually be completely separate images from the finished pieces.)

The drawing is pastel on black paper; approximately 11 x 17".

The Second Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is pastel on black paper; approximately 10 x 13".

The Third Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil and marker on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

The Fourth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is marker and watercolor pencil on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

The Fifth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, marker, and charcoal on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

The Sixth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is colored pencil on black paper; approximately 12 x 16".

The Seventh Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, charcoal pencil, and colored pencil on paper; approximately 11 x 14".

The Eighth Concept:

The Drawing:

The drawing is watercolor pencil, pastel, colored pencil, and a tiny bit of liquid paper on white paper; approximately 11 x 14".

I finished the last of the drawings yesterday and spent my artistic hours today fixing the extremely quick cell phone pictures that I took to document the drawings into something more professional looking.

Here are a couple of examples of today's work:

and

I am satisfied.

Daily Art: Discarded Concepts

Day 50:

Today is my 50th day of Daily Art.

I should have something really special to share to celebrate that, right? Well how about this: Rejected concept art from my first paid job doing artwork for a film.

That's right. I got my first freelance gig from someone outside of my own circle of friends and family!

The work isn't either high profile or high paying, but I don't care: I feel like I'm on the way now. As much as I truly appreciate compliments on my artwork from my friends and family and anyone in my own circle of acquaintances, it's been difficult to keep my dream of a creative career intact when no one outside seems desirous to pay for my work. Then I got a call from a friend of a friend whom I'd never spoken to before this, and now I'm being paid to do artwork for set pieces in a film.

I spent the last two days after I finished editing my Gecko video drawing concept sketches for the artwork that the director wanted, and today she made her final selections. I will not be posting the concept sketches that were chosen or any of the closely related variations on the ones that were chosen because of their direct link to what will be in the finished film, but the sketches here were just free-flowing ideas that I conceived to depict either trauma or fantasy. They have no direct links to the plot. There are, of course, elements in them that tie into the film project, but it won't give anything about the film away to share them. The main ties are things like color scheme or the emotions being conveyed, and you can't put a copy-right on that. In fact, I like the top three images so well just as fantasy scenes that I'm considering doing full versions of them with just a few minor tweaks as portfolio pieces in the future. (Then again, maybe more than just minor tweaks on the far right one: I want to play with the composition of that one a bit more...) I'm especially fond of the top left one - I already have the paper and media picked out for it and everything.

So, here they are: rejected concepts from my first professional freelance art job:

Daily Art # 19

Day 48:

I've textured my Gecko in Modo.

I altered his color maps just a bit, tweaking levels and saturation for individual diffuse and specular color maps, and I also created maps for specular amount from a combination of the color and normal maps. I put them on a metal-like material that I made in Modo and the above images are the result.

Next step: rendering a color turntable. 

Daily Art # 16

I have begun the digital painted version of Mother Nature.

Day 45:

The first stage of the wind turbine on which Mother Nature is frolicking.

Day 44:

The sketch depicting the general layout of the digital image.

Update on 2014-02-24 05:26 by Amber Nicole

A Little More Artwork That I Did Today:

I started painting textures for my Gecko model in Mudbox.

Then I cleaned up the textures a bit in Photoshop:

Daily Art #12

Catching Up: Part 2.

Day 32:

Today I have spent a lot of time fixing photos.

I've been cropping, tweaking perspective, adjusting color balances, levels, and saturation, painting out random tiny artifacts, and much, much more. And after all of that, I did this:

This is an early stage of a painting. It was originally intended to be an acrylic painting, but after adding a quick layer of color to the cloak I'm considering switching it to a digital painting... We'll see how it goes I guess.

Day 31:

Yesterday I drew the sketch that was the beginning of the Red Riding Hood image:

By the end of the evening it looked like this:

Day 30:

I drew some thumbnail storyboard sketches. 

The heart image series is separate from the other images. I wasn't really going for full-on storyboarding here: I just wanted to get a few images that I hope to properly storyboard later out of my head for now before I bury them with other ideas and forget what they looked like. There are still more images related to this story that I need to get down, but this is all that I've gotten to for now. The first two images are crossed out because I simply wasn't pleased with how they turned out.

Day 29:

This day I just spent time drawing grids on paper to have a place to work on my storyboard thumbnail sketches.

Day 28:

Some work in my Cut-Up Sketchbook:

Day 27:

More Cut-Up Sketchbook:

Day 26:

Even more Cut-Up Sketchbook:

Day 25:

The day that began this particular series of Cut-Up Sketchbook doodling:

Day 24:

Switching gears now to painting:

It's not much to look at - just the early stages of a painted project. I bought the wooden tree with the black outlines on it, but I'm going to paint it my own way. It'll still be owls and hearts in a tree, but it should end up fairly different from the original design.

Day 23:

This was quite a long day of art as I painted mailboxes for my niece and nephew for Valentine's Day.

They're quite simple, but I figured that I didn't need to make them masterpieces since they're playthings for a three and five year old...

Day 22: 

This day was the the day that I painted the base coats of color on the above mailboxes.

Day 21:

And this is the day that I completed the base coat of paint for the owl tree:

Whew! That was a lot in one post. Hopefully I'll keep this updated more regularly in the future. (I was doing so well for awhile there...) :)

Freedom Post #2: Daily Art # 1

Now that I am out of school and done with my thesis I need a new topic for this blog.

I have decided to do some kind of artistic/creative exercise every day. It can be as simple as a doodle or as complicated as a full painting. It can be a whole, finished piece or it can be just one step of a multi-day project. It can be a mundane task that practices technical artistic skills (like color correcting images) or a much more creative process (like designing a new character). I just want to keep practicing and do something every day to keep my creative skills sharp while I search for my first real artistic employment.

I'm viewing this as an exercise for myself, so I won't be posting every piece of daily art; some pieces may be too personal for posting on the internet and some too mundane to be worth sharing. I also won't be posting daily. But I'm going to try for weekly. I'll post up to seven "daily art" pieces at a time. Not all of it will be my best work. Some of it will be just for fun, and some of it will be projects specifically aimed at enhancing my demo reel or portfolio, such as texturing my untextured thesis models.

I think that that about sums up the concept. Now to get down to it.

These are the pieces of "daily art" that I have completed so far this week:

Today: Base coat of paint on a mirror that I am painting as a gift for my mother's birthday. I painted her a mirror in cool tones as a Christmas gift, and she requested a warmer piece to complement it. I will be finishing the imagery on it tomorrow.

Yesterday: Digital Paint Doodle created in Adobe Photoshop

Sunday: Color corrections of photos documenting portfolio-quality work from my AAU anatomy class that somehow never made it on this site before. I manipulated about ten different images; the rest may be viewed in the "Anatomy" section of my "Portfolio" page.

Saturday: Charcoal self portait that I choose not to share.

Friday: Wooden plaque decorated with a quote from an unknown source that I found on the internet and accents in acrylic paint. This was a birthday gift for my stepmother.

I think that that selection gives a fair indication of how varied these posts are going to be. This week has included two acrylic painted projects so far, which is rare for me. I expect drawings and doodles in a variety of media to be pretty frequent in the future, and once I get all of my job profiles updated on various websites over the next week or so I'm going to go back to working on my "Fearless" thesis project models, so by then much of my progress will be digital work. I'm looking forward to it.

Fall Directed Study - Week 4

At the start of my fourth week of directed study I was concerned that my character's body had lost much of the volume that I had sculpted into the high resolution mesh. I had particularly noticed it in the shapes going down the character's back: according to my character design, you're supposed to be able to see those shapes puff out from the back a bit, but the back was nearly a flat curve. I had checked to be sure that the second subdivision level mesh that I exported from ZBrush retained volume in the shoulder area and detail in the face and fingertips, but I hadn't ever had an issue with a character's back, so I didn't think to check it. It was, however, a problem that was bugging me greatly - and one that I couldn't figure out how to fix without having to bake out all new normal maps and re-do all of the texture painting I'd done.

The problem was: I had changed the Uvs after choosing the second subdivision level of the ZBrush model to export as my low-res mesh to apply the normal map (created from the high-res mesh) to; therefore, I couldn't just export a higher resolution model that would hold the sculpted volume better and apply the same texture maps that I had created to it because the UVs wouldn't match up.

Then I had an epiphany: I could project the high-res detail from the ZBrush sculpt onto a subdivided version of the current mesh that I was using that matched the texture maps. Then I would end up with a mesh that had all of the subdivision levels, detail, and volume of the ZBrush sculpt, but with the same UVs that I had been using to build my texture maps. I even discovered that my current normal map functioned just as well when applied to the higher-res mesh as it did whern applied to the low-res one; I didn't have to bake a new one! 

Below is a comparison with some of the most visible differences between the lower-res mesh that I started out working with and the final mesh that I decided to use pointed out:

And the resultant character with the current texture maps that I had produced applied:

 Then I really got down to texture painting, and found out that I had grossly underestimated how long it would take to doodle for this kind of work...

As I mentioned in my last post, I had spent a day painting the texture map that you see on the character above. I had nearly all of the precise linework done. I figured that would be the most time consuming part of the process. I know that one can spend a very long time doodling; I've spent hours filling up a single page with doodles in the past. Key word: "hours", not "days"... Turns out, days is what it takes to doodle textures on a character like this. In fact, it takes the better part of a week working straight through with breaks only for necessities like eating and sleeping. I was blown away. I know that I have a tendency of underestimating how long projects will take me, but this was ridiculous... I had reference. I knew that it took me a day for the precise stuff and that doodling isn't that precise and therefore should require less time. I knew how long I'd spent doodling on paper in the past... I didn't realize that doodling on the computer with my tablet would be as different as it was.

Anyway, here are the results of my week spent texture painting:

Addict Color Map:

Addict Bump Map:

Addict Specular Map:

Addict Material Layer Mask:

(The layer mask is to distiguish the portions of the model that have a raw plaster texture on them rather than a painted plaster surface, as the entire visible portion of the sculpture does.)

The Maps on the Model:

I'm very happy with the way he's turned out, but one of my favorite parts of him is one of the least visible:

Now, you may be wondering why I'm so excited about the bottom of a foot (or, more accurately, since the character's on his knees, the top of a foot). What I'm most excited about, aside from the areas where the raw plaster sections transition into the painted portion of the model (which I think look very realistic, on the pink and orange toes especially), is that this is the first example of any work that I've done in Mudbox. That's right: I finally got around to trying it. I've been telling myself that I'll learn it eventually, whenever I finally work on a project that actually requires it, but I've produced surprisingly few textured models in my time at the Academy. I'm working on a "modeling" degree, not a "texturing" one, so I guess it makes a certain amount of sense, but, still, I'd have liked to have done more texturing in my time here. Anyway, back from my tangent: I had very visible UV seams showing up in this area where each toe meets the main body of the foot: the division line between the white plaster and black painted areas of each digit were uneven at those points. So, I took the model into Mudbox and painted out the seams. I'm very happy with the results. I know it's not an extravagant use of the program, but it's not bad for using a program for the first time with no training, if I do say so myself!

After I finished the texturing I set up turntable lighting, then decided that if he was going to be spinning he should have some kind of base to do it on, so I came up with this:

The Base:

Base Color Map:

Base Bump Map:

Base Specular Map:

The base took a couple of extra hours to make and texture, but I think that it's worth it. It should give my character turntable just a little extra "oomph", as they say. I think that he looks better spinning on a base rather than floating in mid-air. I did one final test render before I began rendering the turntable a few days ago. (And, if you're wondering, yes, it's still rendering at the time that I'm posting this blog entry. I haven't had it rendering straight through, but, regardless, the amount of time that this turntable will have taken to render when it's done will be measured in days, not hours). This is the image that I got:

I have since fixed the faceting on the base by setting it to render at a higher subdivision level. In fact, the image of the base by itself above was my test of the higher subdivision render, and is what it will look like in the final turntable. Once that render finishes, I will move on to rendering the wirframe and flat-shaded versions of this model, then I'll start rendering my Juggler. In the meantime, I'm also going to work on my gallery models in the coming week; I'm really excited about building the fretwork ceiling and the crazy light fixtures. I'll be working during the day and rendering at night - here's hoping that after this month is over my computer and I will both get a break for a little while, because, until then, it's work, work, WORK!