Monday, April 27, 2009

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


Sunday, April 5, 2009

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