Heroes of the Dorm!

Today I went to support the students who were playing the final round in the Heroes of the Storm championship! Loved seeing all the enthusiastic fans (young and old)! I got to meet some of the recruiters for Blizzard and had a very productive chat with them about my work! And to top it off, played Hearthstone at the Fireside Tavern which pretty much had balcony view of the whole auditorium!

Some of the feedback I got from the Art Recruiters was:

*My work is a bit cartoony/too exaggerated.

There is a middle ground of painterly and cartoony. That's where World of Warcraft is. Looking at my stuff you can TELL wood is "wood" because of how I drew it. But it doesn't FEEL like wood. Some things we talked about that could maybe help my paintings was adding more texture, less contrast (less white highlights and dark areas). 

*Zbrush is good. But texture painting is KEY.

*I also learned that Fanny Vergne is a girl. I head-smacked myself on this one. For some reason I thought Fanny was some European name for a guy. Kinda like Adrienne. :P

And...here an old Lunch painting I forgot to upload!

WIP!

Latest progress! Done with wood for now. Need to tone down the grain. But then it's on to the cannon!

Cannon Color

Here's a progress update to the cannon!

Did a paintover where I pushed the shapes of the cannon.

Started at high contrast, then I zoomed out to view it at a distanced. Noticed that the lines were competing too much. So I toned it down.

And this is where I am now. :)

At the same time as the cannon, I am also creating island pieces! Tip to everybody: Be careful when googling "Beach Bush".

What I learned...

* These settings work the best for me in 3D Coat! (image was spliced to show the important settings)

* UV Layouts don't NEED to be connected at the edges, especially when working in 3D Coat.
* If you have flipped normals in 3D Coat, make sure the model isn't negative in scale!
* And, doing this workflow (shown below) really helps when trying to work on the model like a painting! Watching Kelvin Tan's tutorial on painting in 3D Coat has really helped me on this!

And I've been staring at this reference:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/draenei-small-props

Changed things up! 3D Coat and more!

So quite a few things have happened since my last post. I am now working with an amazing mentor, Kelvin Tan! I was very fortunate to notice that his Gumroad account was updated and that he was offering a month of mentorship. All because I kept the same 30 tabs open for the last month, and was finally going through them to close them out. Oh yeaaaaa....!!

So because of that, I've made some changes to my cannon model. Modified the body to make it less balanced. Which now that I think about it... When I animate the cannon shooting cannonballs, it will look alot more interesting since I can play with the weight of the cannon's rotation.

Updated the UVs since I realized that stacking the cannon's UVs was not very clever. I lost the ability to have Cannon belly shadows. Which I think would really contribute to the model's cohesion. So, I gave them their own unique spaces in the UV.

Also, I've moved out of working exclusively in Photoshop. I am back in 3D Coat per the suggestion of Kelvin and other 3D artists in the program! I had a rough start (cuz I was spoiled with Photoshop), but I am starting to get the hang of it. I am working on the value part of the cannon. I'm getting my muscle memory trained and re-learning the capabilities of 3D Coat. I can't wait to see this thing in Maya and make that giggle-worthy comparison to my previous texture blockout. :D

On the side of this, I will be creating blockout island models to help start populating the Unity scene for the ships to sail past! 

Last but not leeks...  

I've been studying these images:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/wod-garrison-alliance-soilder
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/wod-dungeon-plate
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/warcraft-weapons
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/fallen-angel-97b038e8-33ec-46bb-9dbb-f19322925838

Finished the practice painting!

This was fun to finish! I'd say I gained a little bit more muscle memory on how to create large shapes and work detail off of it.

I stared at these artworks to help me:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/wow-weapon-fan-art
http://murph3.deviantart.com/art/pre-Dwar-texture-263634643
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ice-crown-citadel-inspired-dagger

My last progress was on the cannon itself. Just a quick blocking out of color and testing a theory I had on how to apply paint quick. Pretty much used the gradient tool to cover the major value changes.

What I would say I learned after this... I need to break "MY" rules more often. Don't only do what you've seen people do. For example, Tyson Murphy painted his gradient into his texture. But since I wanted to cover space really fast (10 minutes before playing Monster Hunter 4!), I used the gradient tool. I think it work for a blocking pass.

Texture Painting Lesson

Worked on this over my lunch time at work, and I learned a really important thing:

Do all the general details first, like dark splotches, height changed, and lighting gradation before putting on prominent details like highlights and accentuation (accents for the general detail). Helps save time during painting and give me ideas on what kind of final details to add.

Another lesson I learned is, once you get the painting close to done, do some post process work to enhance the picture. No shame in that.

:)

Texture Painting - A lesson in modeling and style

So since my last post, I acted on changing up the shapes on the cart, I updated the UVs on the cart, and I began painting the cart.

What I learned from this session was that I really need less uniform strokes and more contrast/saturation. I was watching a tutorial by Tyson Murphy (ArtStation link) @ Udemy (link to tut), and I pretty much tried to loosely follow his technique. I immediately recognize that it doesn't resemble his style, and I don't like my result.

This texture was something that I made during a short break at work. And I already like what I see here. Alot more saturation, more contrast, and clean (ish)! I want to lean more towards this style again.

I also learned a lesson in UVing. How do I prevent stretching in my texture? I've noticed that some artist would separate the edge of the wood (inside grain), so that they could just focus on the largest part of the asst, and have more UV space for the exterior wood. Atleast, thats my observation. I also noticed that some Blizzard artists would create only one side and spread that detail around. So in my next session I will be removing the edge of the planks.

Here are some useful links to the inspiration I had while work on this:

http://jessicadinh.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_18.html
http://fafart.blogspot.com/p/warlords-of-draenor.html

That's it for now!