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