Dagger - Finally Done!

So I finally took the time to complete the dagger I started on a long while back before being interrupted by christmas and the artwar contest among other things. Anyway here it is!

Blade of Eternal hemorrage by cobrabird on Sketchfab

I do think that my colour skills are improving, as well as my skills in the handpainted style, but I could still use a lot of practice. Should probably keep making many more of these weapons so I can really nail the style, fortunately I really like working with it. :)

Model in 3DCoat left, concept right.

I am not sure if I am completely happy with how the blade turned out as I think the concept actually looks much better, especially the colours. But compared to the textures I made around this time of year 2 years ago I would say that it is a significant improvement, in design, modeling and texturing.

Hearing the Call

This is something that I have been working on in my spare time for a while now, and I think I am about ready to call it done. With this I mostly wanted to work on my colour skills and apply some of the ideas and techniques that I learnt while working on my sword and dagger that I made previously. (Finished pics of the dagger will be coming up in a near future)

What I wanted to portray was the moment where Tamarrion decides to leave her life as she knew it behind her to hear the call of the gods and accept the challenge to become their champion.

I have all these half-finished stuff laying around, so it feels good to getting things done again as I have finally finished both my dagger and this painting. Now I am trying to figure out what I want to do next. Perhaps I will create the character that the dagger belongs to, or maybe something else, not quite sure yet (should probably make a plan, plans are good). :)

Centaur Animation test

I have been playing around with animations on my centaur a bit, it turns out to be every bit as tricky as I thought it would (perhaps more). The hair is not skinned. the rest has only default skin and only half the body has a control rig, but I am messing around trying to figure out how to go about this. At the moment it is looking truly beautiful, but at least it is going more in the right direction than it did when I started out.

The difficulty does not only lie in the fact that it is a horse (which are very difficult to animate) but also in that it has double spines, four arms and a number of tails, including the hair. I need to figure out a way to either create a control rig where I can have 6 limbs and double spines or perhaps a way to animate without a control rig.

Might be a good idea to take inspiration from Pacman for my next character... But then again, what's the point if you don't try to challenge yourself? (Do not know how I manage to find a way to make everything as difficult as possible for myself).

3DS Max Tutorial - Setting up Reference Planes

So my programmer friend asked me if I could make another tutorial on how I would model something more complex than a box, combining different types of geometry, and sent me a picture of a lamp. So here is part 1 in lamp modeling: setting up reference planes.

Here is the lamp in question:

3DS Max Tutorial

A programmer friend was trying to make a 3D box and asked me to do a tutorial, so I made a short introduction to 3DS Max for beginners. Hopefully even programmer friendly! :)

#Artwar Character Contest: Briannon | Final

This morning was the deadline for the #Artwar character contest which I am participating in. Was going to post my final entry last night, but then their forum went down. :S
Now it is posted and the deadline passed, so I just wanted to share the final result (although it is getting ahead of retopology and texturing parts.

This is the very first art contest that I am participating in and it was definitely a challenge. I am not sure it was the best idea to try and learn so many new things when working on something like this as it did take me a lot of time that could have been spent to make the model even better. But I did learn a great deal of new things, and why not push yourself? It is definitely not perfect and would not have minded one or two more weeks of just texturing, but I did finish the character and within the deadline.

Although I would like to continue working on it, I am going to do the hard thing and let her go. I am just going to accept that this is what I could do at this point, with this amount of time and resources at hand, and move on to other things. I do want to brush up my animation skills and learn more about rigging creatures, so I will probably use this character to experiment with that however. But the rest is done. (Trying to convince myself)

Briannon - Centaur Druid by cobrabird on Sketchfab

Three Years Gone By - Speed Painting

I got a notification saying it is three years ago today that I posted my speed painting exercise from class in which we had to paint grayscale mountains in 15 minutes. When looking at the images I painted I felt that I can definitely do better now, and was curious to test my improvements over the past three years. So I picked three (a bit more complicated and detailed I realised) images and set the timer at 15 minutes.

Old Pics:

I was right last time about time just flying by and still need to get better at using different brushes for speed painting. In my defense, speed painting is something that I hardly ever do. :P
Although they are far from masterpieces I still do think that there is a slight improvement (fortunately).