Heads up

Sorry, no image this time. Just wanted to let you know that I'm starting to get back to sculpting on my spare time, which there unfortunately does not exist much of these days, and I'm actually recording a time lapse video of the whole sculpt session for your future viewing pleasure.

Other than that I'm real busy at work these days. A lot of projects, no time in which to actually do them, and a pipeline that is all but straight and organized at the moment. Nothing we cant handle of course, but it still means we'll be getting our asses kicked for the next couple of months.

And happy thanksgiving for those who give a crap.

Peace
L

Internal Company Competition

Whatup, hebrews and shebrews.

Just figured I'd post this, its a retouch of the old warrior priest model I did almost 2 years ago now. The reason for this is that we're having a small competition at the office, where the 5 best entries gets framed and hung on the office walls. And I was told there would be prizes... Anyways, here's one of my 3 total entries.

Peace out

Qucik Sculpt

Tallyho! What brings a fine fella like yerself to a raggety inn like this here blog? Uhh.. Sorry about that. I just came back from London. A day at the British Museums Greek sculpture section put some of the fire back in me to get back on the horse. The real reason we went, though, was all but cultural. The British currency went down the drain compared to the norwegian krone, so I went down there to buy all of their shit and get the fuck out before the pound sterling had time to recoup. Like a friend and colleague of mine once said : "hah, your currency is weak and feeble".
More specifically, I went to get myself a new axe (cool kids speak for a guitar). But it seems like London still spends most of its time in the wayback machine, longing back to the days when the Beatles were cool. Which in turn means that trying to find a newer Ibanez guitar in that town is as hopeless as trying to find a a female Russian shot putter who actually looks like a broad.

I guess I will have to throw my handful of strong, manly currency at the interwebs then.

Tonight's sculpt was about an hour or so, further refining a head I started the last time I sat down with pen in hand. Probably 2 hours total, or somewhere around there anyways.

Peace out,
Lars

Quick sculpt

Got some time left over tonight, and decided to just do a quick head sculpt to start carving some of the rust off of the old tablet. It aint really that good, but what the hell, its not like anyone reads this anyways. This took about 45 minutes to throw together, with some minor PS work at the end to cover up some of the suck with some fancy nicknacks and whatchamacallits.

I'll try to get more regular with this thing, but I'm not making any promises. I mean fuck, its not like you're paying for this or anything.

Peace out

Retouch

Just did a 10 minute overhaul and some dicking around with 3 render passes in Photoshop for the last sculpt I posted. Here is where I finished off (aka my food was ready).

Quick sculpt

Blahblah been too long blahblah getting back on track blahblah.

Fuck it, here's something I did tonight, about an hour or so of sculpting from a sphere. Didn't turn out too bad considering how long its been since the last time I picked up that pen.

God damn it...

Fuck, this blog is turning into a monthly apology e-zine. Well, I'm done apologizing. You just have to accept the fact that sometimes life bends you over its kitchen table and gives it to you. I started writing a long, tedious apologetic post a couple of days ago, but I had to leave it as a draft and ended up not returning to it.
But on a lighter note, the kind we like around here (but seem to never use), summer is coming up and I might even get some time off. The good news is that will probably lead to some pieces of work getting uploaded on this here blog. The bad news (for you suckers at least), is that I'll be on a Greek island for the first 2 weeks of July. Well, what are ya gon' do.

I'm going to try to keep this thing art-focused, so I'll keep most of my crackpot opinions and keyboard cat links out of here. Follow me on twitter for that (twitter.com/spoiLars).

Here's a little something I did tonight, about an hour and a half. It's obvious that my tablet isn't the only thing that has been collecting dust over the last 6 months, but my sculpting skills as well. Nothing else to do than get a bottle of Drain-O to clean off my rusty skills, so to speak, and get back on the horse.

Peace and love and good happiness stuff,
L.

Shafted

Well, this is starting to get real fucking repetitive. As you can probably tell from the insane abundance of posts lately, I have been really swamped at work the past weeks. Lets just say that there's a big oil industry conference coming up, and that all the dudes in the aforementioned line of business wants something for their stand during this convention. But now, a 3.5 minute pure CG video, a print resolution poster and a real-time simulation later, I'm back. Kind of.

It might be too late for me as far as the DW goes, but I'll keep on truckin' until the time runs out anyways. I am still going for the same kind of concept, I just scrapped the sculpt I had done. It was simply lacking some things. Like quality. So I've made a new base mesh, hoping this one makes it a little easier to keep the proportions in line. I hope I'll get to sculpt some on it tomorrow, but I do have a CG asset that needs to get done before I head home from work tomorrow, so that might fuck that plan up in all ways. I have long ago ceased to make any definite plans or promises before deadlines, to my significant others frustration, I'm sure.

At least I'm getting paid for all that fucking overtime. Oh, wait...

L

Message from the front lines

So, its been somewhat quiet on these parts lately. If you thought it was because I hadn't managed to actually get my ass moving on the contest, well, you would be exactly right. Between getting stressed out at work by the team being buried under more projects than we have the manpower for, and more illness in the family, I just haven't been able to find the energy to get started. Today, though, I managed to at least start doing the base mesh and try out some different stuff.

Problem one : not doing full figure sculpts for months really fucks your skills up, bad. When I started today, I couldn't tell the guys head from his ass. Luckily, a quick half hour with one of Zack Petrock's awesome anatomy lessons got me somewhat back on track, at least enough to get me started.

Problem 2 : did you know that dwarves don't look exactly like humans and that their body doesn't have the same exact proportions? Well, turns out they don't.

After much trial and error, I think I'm getting close to the basic form of the torso, at least proportion-wise.

And I decided to drop the machine gun, and I'll be swapping it with the classic axe. The reason is the new twist I think I'm going to go for on this one, to kind of make it stand out a little; I am going to wait until I can see what the best Demon character from Polycount's team is going to look like, then chop the top of its head off and make my guy drag it behind him. Neat, huh? Yeah I figured you'd like that. Don't tell anyone though, this is just between me and you. So If someone steals my idea, well, then I know who's front door to bring my 9 Iron to.

Here is the initial rough-in of the torso, still very, very w.i.p. The sculpt itself didn't take too long (as you can probably tell), but the overall shape and proportions are taking me way too long to figure out.

Until the next post,

L

DW4 - Weapon concept 1

You might think that I've just been to busy with the Dominance Wars to post anything lately, but honestly, I really haven't gotten much done on it at all. I really struggled with deciding on what kind of character to go for, but after a couple of days wasted I ended up going for a dwarf warlord character. I thought about doing a demon type dude, but I'm sure there'll be a shitload of those this time around, and I think I'll be able to get more character into a human(ish) character than some demon abomination with skulls and titties (you would be surprised by how many there are already ) flappin' about.

So, I kinda said to myself that I was going to wait until tomorrow with doing any more on this, to when I got back to the concepts I forgot at work on Friday (smart-ass). But as I got some left over time tonight after all, I ended up redoing the weapon concept.

The spherical watchamacallit in the middle was supposed to be a kind of window into the fusion reactor like process going on inside the weapon, taking the magic sucked from the surroundings into the characters backpack apparatus thingy and concentrating it into a beam of raw magic. But atm I'm really hating the looks of the thing, so I'll either turn it into more of a canister shaped deal or remove it all together and place it on the apparatus on his back.

The ornament pattern is just a placeholder, figured I'd try to give it some dwarfish ornamentation to make it seem like its more of an unique relic than just a run of the mill sentry gun. Might make those transparent to show what the sphere thingy is doing right now and to break up the mechanical shapes a little with some glowing bits.

Well, I'm off to study the anatomical proportions of dwarves. That shit is a google search made in hell, some things you just cant un-see...

War is 'ere, so get to da stompin' boyz! Waaaagh!

Nerdyness aside, I just received an email from the Dominance War crew. First, they say that it will start on March 12th, then it gets delayed until the 15th. This morning I received this email telling me that it started this morning. 10 points for the awesome contest, none for the organization of it this far. This is just nit-picking though. The contest is looking great and they've managed to secure some awesome sponsor deals for it; Wacom, Gnomon and Blizzard to mention a few of them.

You can read all about the theme and contest requirements on the DW main page

Me on the other hand, I'll be scowering the interwebs over the next couple of days to find some great concept that I can steal. Err, I mean "to be inspired by", of course.

This is where I would normally say "Peace", but keeping in spirit of the competition, I have something thats a little more appropriate:

War! Waaaagh!

An unfortunate series of events

As you might have guessed by the lack of updates, I didn't get the chance to finish the mini-challenge. A sudden illness in my girlfriend's close family quickly had me changing my priorities for the last 2 days of the compo, and in the end there just werent enough time to finish a decent diffuse and specular map for the model. I'll try to get it done at a later date, but at the moment I think I'm just going to take a chill pill and prepare for the main event, which is starting in just 4 days. My inexperience with the whole texturing and baking deal became obvious during this project, so there are some things I definitely have to brush up on before the main event starts. I'll check back with you guys as soon as the details for the main event surfaces.

Peace

The Home Stretch

I think I'll have to settle with what I have right now as far as the sculpt goes. Deadline is tomorrow and I haven't even started on the texture, so I'm pretty much fucked. I'll try to get it done though, seven though the chance of actually winning this mini-challenge is next to none; a couple of the entries are freakin' awesome looking. My money is on Ced from 3Dtotal, his final entry looks insanely nice, and I cant say I've seen any others on 3dtotal or GameArtisans that comes close. I someone else takes it, it would have to be because they managed to get the theme through better, as that might be Ced's only weakness on this one.

Ok, so here is where I'm at right now, just gonna stick some eyeballs in that head of his and get on to the baking and texturing. Dont mind the intersection on the shoulder there, it fits in the low poly version.

Peace

DW4 - minichallenge 1 Day 3

Just a quick update tonight, did some tweaks on the sculpt I started yesterday. Tomorrow I think I'll try to figure out what to do with the gear in order to "War General" him up a bit.

G'nite

DW4 - minichallenge 1 Day 2

Fuck.. That pretty much sums up what just went through my mind. Turns out my concepts ended up veering to far from the original base mesh, so I had to scrap 1.5 hours of sculpting and start over fresh. That applied to both concepts, but after speaking to an old friend of mine, who it turns out is also doing DW4, I ended up doing as he did. After struggling to make concepts that would fit the provided form, he just said "fuck it" and started sculpting straight onto the base mesh, just watching things unfold as he went. So I did, and even though I wanted to keep away from the generic GoW alien everyone is doing, I ended up with a compromise. Who knows if this is where I'll end up though, but time is running and I cant keep on restarting forever.
Here are 2 images, one is of the original concept and the piece I scrapped. The other is what I managed to throw together in the past 25 mins. Work tomorrow, must sleep.

Peace

Mini-challenge sketches

I just did a couple of really rough concept sketches for the first of the preliminary mini-challenges, some 5 minute scribbles on top of the provided base mesh to try to find a concept that doesn't look like something straight outta Gears of War (which there are A LOT of already in the progress threads, you know who you are). The first one is a Russian general gone cyborg type character. The second one is in a more fantasy setting, a kind of humanoid frog character. Here I turned the army officer hat into a crown-like piece of gear instead, just sort of seemed to make more sense. Not quite sure yet which I'll end up going with, if you've got any suggestions, just leave them in the the comment section.
Remember, these are just rough, quick concepts, so no sending me emails going "omg lols ur drawn suxor". For one, I already know, second, I'd hate it for something to happen to you, if you hypothetically should end up tied to a chair in, say, my garage, getting both knees smashed in by a golf club. Hypothetically, of course.

Peace

Dominance War IV, bitches

OK, so today is the day when the preliminary mini-challenges in the Dominance Wars begins. Mini challenge #1 is a bust model, and the theme is "War General". We have been provided a choice between 3 different base meshes to use (in game type resolutions), and a texture resolution limit of 1024 x 1024 for each of the texture passes (normal map, specular map, diffuse map etc).
The time limit is 9 days, so I gots to get crackin' today already if I'm to finish on time. Just like the previous 3 DW's, you have to pick a forum to represent throughout all 3 challenges, and my choice fell on 3dtotal.com. I'm not much of a forum poster type, but when it comes down to it, 3dtotal is the one I've been at the most.

Check out the contest details at the 3dtotal forum thread and www.dominancewar.com, and wish me luck. I'm sure as hell going to need it.

Off to war, L.

Sketch of the day

Just figured I'd post today's quick sketch, this one took me about 30 minutes to sculpt and render out, then a few minutes for the photoshop composition. Base mesh was, as you can probably tell, a plane.

On another note, as I mentioned in the last post, I have decided to throw myself into the fray that is the Dominance War IV contest. The pre-contest mini-challenges starts now on the 20th of February, followed by the main event that starts in the middle of march sometime. Judging from what I've heard, it'll be pretty intense while its going on. But should you be awesomezorz enough to actually take home the first price, there will be plenty fame, money and blowjobs to go around. Even though, as all in this biz can attest to, the groupies you get in the game art community are usually not the ones you want to have waiting for you back stage. Its fascinating how someone can manage to get a size 50 ass into a size 2 Chun Lee Streetfighter costume. Some things you just cant un-see.
More updates on what I'll end up doing in DW as I figure it out.

For the time being, just throw Cypress Hills "Black Sunday" album in the CD player and wish you were still young and cool enough to have a 2.5 lbs blunt hanging out of the corner of your mouth. Ah, the memories..

Peace

Sketch of the day

So, this is just a small sketch I did today, probably a combined time of an hour or so of sculpting. As a part of my new and better life, so to speak, living by the aforementioned new years resolution. Which also entails me playing a lot more guitar these days as well, which is something I've wanted to up the ante on for years. The fact that I found out yesterday that there will be a 10 year reunion for my junior high graduation in the beginning of 2011 also kind of lit a fire under my ass. Since I left there as this scrawny, half-nerdy little dude (though, with the hottest chick in our class as my girlfriend for some reason. She probably doesn't have the best eye sight), I guess I have to consist of 250 lbs of muscle and disgusting success at the reunion. It sez so in the bible, dunnit?

There is a lot of work and art related stuff that I'll talk about in a later post, but its getting way too fucking late, and some of us have to go to work tomorrow. Make-a the world, spin-a around.
One thing I will mention though, is that I've decided to join this year's Dominance War Art Competition. The neck beard wearing artist types amongst you know what this competition is, for the rest I'll go into more detail in a future post.

Peace

Regularity ftw

Oh my freakin' god! 2 posts in 2 days?! Ok, so the story is that the missus needed the car today, so as a result of that I am stuck at work waiting for her to come back from her parents to pick me up. So hungry.. Well, at least these hours of hanging around at work after everyone else have gone home meant I got to do me some z-brushing. I am doing some deep sea rocks for a subsea environment right now (awesome, right? No?), which means I had to bring my beloved Intous 3 a5 wide tablet to work, since the stamp sized one provided by my employer is a complete and utter piece of crap. This one took me about 30 minutes, give or take. Basemesh was a sphere as usual.

Peace

Daily update, you say?

Ok, so that "a post a day" thing worked out just fuckin' awesome, didn't it? Wow, 3 months have gone by since my last entry. I guess time flyes when you're working your ass off without getting paid overtime. One of my new years resolutions is to cram in at least an hour each day to "hone my crafting skills", so to speak. Well, New Years Resolution, say hi to 90 hours overtime in 2 weeks. Hopefully, things are going to slow down a little now that the project from hell is delivered and done with, and I'll be able to get to some sculptin' again.
Just saying it gives me a strange sense of deja vu. Cant see why.

This past week, a quite lively discussion about overtime and the paying of such at my current gig, plus a bunch of awesome guys from 1Up.com being told to pack their shit and get out of their office as well (more on that coming further down this post), gave me a real wake up call. This industry is so fluxing and fleeting, and with an economy like we are blessed with these days, you cant afford to start slacking off, thinking that your job is always going to be there. One day you might be on top of the world, all is good and the biggest concern you'll have during your workday is what to choose from the vending machine or whether or not you should be allowed to watch porn at work as long as you're on break. Then, the next day, it turns out that the company's financial liquidity has gone to shit and that they won't be able to get the loans they need to keep the company going at its current rate. Then, all of the sudden, you're being escorted out of the office building with nothing but your dick in your hand (or hands as in my case).
You might get a severance, but if you cant get a new job quick enough, even that wont do you much good.
And that, I have come to understand, is why you must always, always, be on your A game. Resting on your laurels will not lead to anything other than some kid living in mom's basement getting the job you sorely need to pay your bills and feed your family/dogs/morbidly obese baby mama, just because you stopped working to improve yourself.


As far as the 1Up.com/EGM magazine story I mentioned, you can get the full story on most gaming forums. The lowdown is that 1Up.com and EGM magazine got sold by Ziff Davis to UGO over the cristmas break. In their initial press release, the helmeted-in-a-wheelchair-retarded CEO of UGO, a cesspool of shallow and uninspiring gaming journalism and whoring oneself out to the highest advertisement bidder, spoke at length about how they were so excited about this acquisition, and that they loved 1Up and knew that the site and the magazine, with its video shows and audio podcasts, were great simply because of its personalities. The next day, 75% of those "amazing personalities" were called in to a meeting room, where they were told to pack their shit and get the fuck out.
Luckily, because of the fans and supporters of their work and of themselves personally helping out and donating some of their hard-earned money, they all got their own projects up and running within the first week. Check them out and support their effort to keep providing us with great content and some of the most entertaining podcasts around, at eat-sleep-game.com, area5.tv and geekbox.net.

Now, to close out this way-too-long post, here is a quick 15min sculpt I did today, and a prime example of how fast your skills go down the fucking tube if you don't keep it up and keep practicing.

Peace and love and good happiness stuff to all.