Ben and Ham Soup

Check it out! Ben and Ham Soup poster!

Ben and Ham Soup is a podcast I'm doing with a friend of mine, Ben. It's a comedy podcast where we talk about all sorts of dumb things we think about. It's available on iTunes (just search for Ben and Ham Soup) or go to www.benandhamsoup.com to be directed there.

This is a poster I made that we will put up around the streets of Melbourne. Keep an eye out!

Well, the Scribe is done. I made a rig (something I was never very good at) and it seems to work just fine. I made a couple of poses using a tree trunk I made from a while ago (the Wizard's House.)

These renders are using the smaller 512x512 texture for submission. I think it turned out quite well. I definitely enjoyed this project and will likely create a few more characters in the future.

Until then :)

Scribe textures

Even though I have to submit this thing with a 512x512 texture, I decided to paint it at 2048x2048 so I could have a high res render for myself. This image is 1024x1024. So I painted it twice as big as this, and I'll submit it half as big. It was all painted with one brush in Photoshop, and I only used a faint texture on the book cover, parchment and leather belt to save some time and trouble. Also I wouldn't be able to paint those very well.

And here are some close ups. I'm particularly proud of the face, beard and chest.







The text is an excerpt from Magician that I threw into google translate and translated it into Latin. The cover is Latin for Magician.

And here is the render with the 512x512 texture. I still have to rig and position the scribe to submit it. That'll be next time!

Mini Challenge!

Gee it's been a while. My absence can be put down to a few things, primarily moving house and working on art that I'm not allowed to reveal to the world. Also laziness. But even though I'm super busy I'm going to try and get this thing going again. And I'll be starting with a Mini 3D Art Challenge!

Here's the info.

The guys over at gameartisans.org have some cool contests every now and then and this one seemed like fun. Having such strict guidelines makes it all the more enjoyable for me. My model can only consist of 1,250 triangles and I can only use a single 512x512 texture. This is around about on par with Nintendo DS graphics. The other guideline is you have to choose between one of six paths. These are Knight, Spy, Bard, Scribe, Wizard and Cleric. Obviously these are all fantasy characters and for whatever reason I was immediately drawn to the scribe.

I quickly found a character I liked and settled on the guy with a belt and a piece of parchment as a loin cloth. Another option was the dude with a paper skirt thing that is similar to those ads you sometimes see on billboards that have piano lessons and you rip of a piece of paper at the bottom with the phone number.

When I started modelling I noticed I had drawn the scribe with a slight curve. I knew I couldn't have him curve left of right and I definitely didn't want him to have parallel sides so I would have to decide if I wanted him to be fat or thin. Even though the fat guy would take up more real estate on the texture, I chose him because I imagine a scribe would be a well fed individual back in the day.

Here we have the initial model sitting at exactly 1,250 triangles. Problem is, the beard looks like crap and it makes the head look like its sitting upside down with the beard as the hair. I knew it couldn't stay like this.

At least this one didn't look like an upside down head, and because those spikes were triangular I was able to get a lot of them without taking up much detail. But it still looks bad.

Bam. Much better! I could have given the beard more detail if I kept it 2D, but I felt it was important to have depth so it is rather sharp edged. I could erase some triangles from the back of the beard and render my final image only from the front but I'd like to do this properly, as if it were going in a game.

Next post will be the texture work. I have to fit it all inside the 512x512 image so it will be quite low resolution. Hopefully it turns out well!

iPhone wallpaper

This took a surprisingly long time for such a small and simple project. I get bored of looking at the same wallpaper very quickly and I had run out of pictures to use in my Pictures folder (there are 9,948 images in there, but I didn't try them all of course) so I decided to try making my own. Three days later I was finished.

As usual I sketched out a simple design and started making it Illustrator. The sketch was almost the same as the above image. The main idea was there would be different levels for each row of apps - an underground cavern for the bottom four, some grassy hills for the next row up, then some clouds, then the rocket, then a planet. The planet looked too realistic and it didn't seem to suit so I got rid of it. Once I was done I transferred it over to my phone and used it for about a day before I started to get annoyed by some things.

The first thing I noticed were the trees. I didn't like the round design and the small fruit was too small a detail for the simple style of everything else. They were also too well hidden and/or too evenly spaced, even though I wanted them to show between the apps. The other thing that annoyed me was that you couldn't really see any of the underground cavern, and the grassy hills were slightly too far down.

Aah, much better. Square trees are much nicer than round ones, and with the fruit gone they suit the rest of the image. I originally intended to have the clouds white or something and the red was just a placeholder so it would show up against the blue as I drew them, but they give off a nice early-morning vibe which I like (even though the sun isn't rising). There's a much nicer blend between the grass, dirt (originally a lame line that looked out of place) and rock. The cavern was still just slightly too low though, so I tweaked it a tad more.

Not a whole lot has changed since the first design, but I like it much more. The little textures in the grass, dirt and rock were drawn in Photoshop, as was the waterfall and the faint diagonal lines.

And here we have it. It's a pity that you can't see the bottom of the waterfall, because I quite like how that turned out. I'll probably get bored of looking at this after a while and make another one. I also have another 3D project in the works, but it's rather a tough one.

Cube Land

Here's another project I challenged myself to do in a small amount of time. This time I was looking through an old sketch book of mine and found what is essentially this, but I redrew it a few times to decide on what should be included and got to work.

I started by modelling the earth and water. I had to do the water a few times because I wasn't sure how I would get the white edges. What I ended up with was one mesh with two different materials assigned to it - one more transparent than the other. I used the same Toon Shading as my previous project, but this time instead of flat colour I used abstract painterly textures. Each surface has two textures created for it - one for being lit and the other for the shade.

The sketches I did had a few different ideas and I mixed and matched to get the final arrangement of things. The skeleton arm, pipe and tree were always there, and at one stage the sign had something written on it. Towards the end I added the lily pads, ladder, grass and rocks. I had a few other things, but didn't want to overcrowd it.

I was going to smooth out the jagged edges of the ground and water, but I liked the low poly look of it. It suits the simple style (even though the smoothed version would probably have worked too) and it kind of reminds me of Nintendo 64 graphics.

I knew I didn't want the outlines, but I thought I should try them just in case. I had them on the underwater grass, but they showed up far too much so I turned those ones off. I think because the water is transparent, it messes with the perspective a bit. The ladder looks like its underwater and out of the water at the same time. I think adding one too many things can really mess things up.

I have a few more ideas for mini projects. I wonder which one I'll do next...

a simple tower

Betteo (also here) is right up there as far as my favourite artists go. His work and style is so imaginative and inspiring. Everything he does is interesting to look at. Some things really make me want to create art, and betteo's a.simple.tower is one of them. Here it is:

I did not draw the above picture!

One night at 11pm I was looking at this picture and challenged myself to see how much of it I could recreate before I went to bed. I decided on the 3D medium and I think by 3 or 4 in the morning I had modeled everything and figured out the basics of Toon Shading and outlines in Maya so I went to sleep. The next day after lunch I began texturing and by 11pm that night I had finished all the small details. Below is the finished product.

The only things not done in Maya was the sky colour, the clouds, the border, the grungy texture and the small horizontal hand drawn line under the castle window (an important detail from the original). Lighting it in Maya was a pain in the butt because I wanted each object to look at least somewhat similar to the original. I had a separate light for the castle, the ground and the smaller objects - each only affecting what I intended. You'll notice that the moon couldn't light the far end of the ground and the near side of the castle simultaneously. I have to say for 24 hours work I am very pleased with the result.

Here is a zoomed out image of the scene rendered in Maya without any of the Photoshop additions (with the exception of the sky colour). It's quite a simple scene really which is what I love about the original.

These small projects are fun and manageable around work, so expect more of them!