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Arts & Farts

Prax

Member
Here are a few things I did for Valentine's day.. of my characters trolling one other that is. And pay no mind to the cruddy "shadow" That was uhm.. very sloppily and hastily done. More so than the rest of the picture!

valentine_27_by_meibatsu-d4pqqss.png


valentine_28_by_meibatsu-d4pqqto.png

^ NOT SO FUNNY story about this one..
I ACCIDENTALLY OVERWROTE THE ORIGINAL, BETTER-RENDERED IMAGE FILE with this:

valentine_34_by_meibatsu-d4pqr60.png


SO then I had to redo it! But took half the time because I wanted to rage-quit so hard... >___< I basically got trolled by "Johnny Keith"'s stupid troll Valentine!

That's what I get for not naming my files immediately, but leaving it as "new_canvas.png" or whatever the default SAI uses is. BWAGH.

Anyone ever have that happen to them? Accidentally overwrite their CG files with a blank or something equally defeating? Did you go and redo the image or just gave up altogether? The worst part is there's almost NO WAY to recover the file. If a restore point had been created inbetween the two file versions, it might have been possible.. but ALAS!
 

Sofo

Member
The weaboo in me couldn't resist making a Vocaloid piece, and it happened to be inspired by the song "Shinkai Shoujo"! I'm learning a lot with SAI, and even if I'm still just starting, it's a really enjoyable challenge!

shinkai_shoujo_by_ietes-d4pu7jv.jpg


Pd. Nice, Chumps! That's a big deal!
 

Phandy

Member
If you wanna do it just for paintovers. Use Google Sketchup, its very easy to use. You cant really make good renders, but you can make very easy quick simple geometry which helps you get all the stuff like shape sizes, lighting and perspective down. Its easily the quickest/easiest, looks like ass but it dont matter because youll paint over it.
 

daedalius

Member
If you wanna do it just for paintovers. Use Google Sketchup, its very easy to use. You cant really make good renders, but you can make very easy quick simple geometry which helps you get all the stuff like shape sizes, lighting and perspective down. Its easily the quickest/easiest, looks like ass but it dont matter because youll paint over it.

I've done some 3d modeling before with old ass 3dsmax (I was never very good, but I can make low poly models pretty well... maybe with the advent of sculpting tools I wouldn't be absolute garbage anymore), and I thought sketchup was great... until I tried to actually model my ship in it.

I was raging so hard I thought I was going to break something. Not being able to move vertices totally imploded my brain, I couldn't figure out how to do anything.

Using Maya instead, feels just like old 3dsmax, except better I think. I want to at least have this level of detail in my model (also a great example of a model paintover).

@Xun, thanks ;)

Painting/rendering #4 enviro now.

So holy crap, finally a pressure sensitive stylus for Ipad? http://www.macworld.com/article/164...s_with_new_pressure_sensitive_ios_stylus.html
I MIGHT actually want to get one now. (there is also another one coming out that supposedly has 1024 levels of sensitivity)
 
Hey guys so i'm working on a packaging project, and I need to change the color of a basketball to purple, and I thought you guys would be the best to ask what type of paint/ink i could use that would be best and nonintrusive on the texture of the basketball? I don't know much about paints so any help would be appreciated.
 

Sofo

Member
So I apologize in advance because this post will be weird. It's the result of the Monster Girl/Boy Generator meme. Basically you draw whichever result you get! Mine? Self-explanatory.

monster_girl_boy_generator_meme_by_ietes-d4qenzg.jpg


"Half hydra boy who wears gloves and loves Babies" .___. Technically I like it, but damn if it isn't weird.

@Burli, I love your style too much!
 

Sofo

Member
I am a sucker for sketches, and those are great! Btw, if anyone wants to give a spin to the Monster Girl/Boy Generator meme, here's the link. Give it a try and show the results? It'd be cool. :)
 

daedalius

Member
So 3d friends...

I am modeling my ship that i have posted above, and I ran into a slight issue, it might not even be an issue because I'm probably doing it wrong.

I have the ship roughed out, but made of a few separate meshes (ship fuselage, wing, engines, etc). Now, when I mirror it, Maya is mirroring each object individually on its X axis, rather than mirroring the collection of objects as a whole (which is what I need it to do).

Suggestions? Do I need to use Mirror Special (which i am going to anyway, but only found out about it after I had stepped away from my computer I was working on)

Also, once I finish modeling it, is there an easy way to smooth it out a bit? (I know there is a smoothing tool up in the polygon bar, haven't really messed with it much yet though)

And what is a good forum to troll about 3d stuff, CGhub's 3d area is pretty deserted.
 

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
So 3d friends...

I am modeling my ship that i have posted above, and I ran into a slight issue, it might not even be an issue because I'm probably doing it wrong.

I have the ship roughed out, but made of a few separate meshes (ship fuselage, wing, engines, etc). Now, when I mirror it, Maya is mirroring each object individually on its X axis, rather than mirroring the collection of objects as a whole (which is what I need it to do).

Suggestions? Do I need to use Mirror Special (which i am going to anyway, but only found out about it after I had stepped away from my computer I was working on)

Also, once I finish modeling it, is there an easy way to smooth it out a bit? (I know there is a smoothing tool up in the polygon bar, haven't really messed with it much yet though)

And what is a good forum to troll about 3d stuff, CGhub's 3d area is pretty deserted.

Select all your objects, group them (control+g), move the pivot to the center of the grid (select group, press "home" to bring up the pivot, move it to the center while keeping "x" pressed so that it snaps to grid, press "home" again to set the pivot there). Then you duplicate it as an instance but duplicate it on the negative x axis,, that way you only have to keep modeling one side and the other side will keep up with it in real time.

Hope it helps!
 

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
Dang, Maya sounds hardcore. Is it worth getting into as a 32 year old who has never touched it?

Depends if you have the talent for it or not, Ive seen people older than 32 pick it up and be awesome at it, it depends if youre a little tech savvy or not.

Modeling wise it depends on what kind of artist you are, people who have done well with clay sculpting tend to have little trouble once they figure out the interface.

Environment modeling is also a thousand times easier than characters, you get to cheat a lot more. Something important to consider is that Maya allows you to do a bout a million things and theres like 4 ways to do all of them, so a new user sees the UI and freaks out eventhough they only need to use about 10 percent of it (you dont need to learn how to model, animate, rig, lit, texture and handle cameras, in order to have a career you only need to be good at one of those things, freaks of the industry know a but of everything though)
 
Depends if you have the talent for it or not, Ive seen people older than 32 pick it up and be awesome at it, it depends if youre a little tech savvy or not.

Modeling wise it depends on what kind of artist you are, people who have done well with clay sculpting tend to have little trouble once they figure out the interface.

Environment modeling is also a thousand times easier than characters, you get to cheat a lot more. Something important to consider is that Maya allows you to do a bout a million things and theres like 4 ways to do all of them, so a new user sees the UI and freaks out eventhough they only need to use about 10 percent of it (you dont need to learn how to model, animate, rig, lit, texture and handle cameras, in order to have a career you only need to be good at one of those things, freaks of the industry know a but of everything though)
Cool, thanks for the insight, I am a designer/illustrator/animator... skill set is pretty much like Photoshop > Flash > Illustrator > Swift 3D > After Effects... those are my main tools I guess. I am wondering about rendering options with Maya -- like can I, say, model something and export it as video with alpha channel if I want to composite in After Effects?
 

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
can I, say, model something and export it as video with alpha channel if I want to composite in After Effects?

Yeah, thats really standard. You can also render everything separately and have unique alpha channels for every object if you want.
 

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
Excellent. Def will be checking into this.

edit: Think I may have told you before but yeah, your work is really amazing. Cheers!

Thanks man! Rendering is tricky and you will definitely need to look up some YouTube tutorials, but remember as far as Maya goes, its aaall about Mental Ray.

Heres some more MySims art, I got lots of this shit:

house_interests_01_compiled.jpg


misc_buildings_01.jpg


flower_shop_nature_01.jpg


Oh also, I need a favor, my wife is also an artist and is trying to get some votes for her t-shirt design in a DA contest. You can find it here:

http://shellypants.deviantart.com/art/Jelly-donut-286251879

And if you like her work, you can find her twitter and tumblr blogs here:

https://twitter.com/#!/inkijinx

http://inki-jinx.tumblr.com/

Thanks!
 

daedalius

Member
So use Mental Ray for renders rather than like, Maya Software or whatever?

I just rendered out a front and back 3/4 of my ship, looks fine, but I obviously don't have a lot of texture work or anything on it since I was planning from the beginning to paint over it. Will probably finish it up tonight.

Also, the mysims stuff looks great ;) my wife was asking me the other day if I am even capable of cutesy/toon stuff, I'd probably look at some of the stuff you did for this if I actually needed to do it.
 

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
Maya owns Mental Ray and it comes with the software, just select it as your renderer and go from there. Theres a really easy way to make it look good, Ill put up a tutorial for it sometime :)
 

daedalius

Member
Maya owns Mental Ray and it comes with the software, just select it as your renderer and go from there. Theres a really easy way to make it look good, Ill put up a tutorial for it sometime :)

I will subscribe to your newsletter if you do that ;)

I literally have no idea how to do anything in the renderer, lol. I guess I did figure out how to increase the resolution its rendering at though, at least. I will change it back to mental-ray though when I do another render.

I want to do one of my environments in Maya for a paintover soon as well, have it all concept'd out already, and its strong geometrics would definitely lend doing it in 3d. Probably will be the next one I do after I finish the 2 things I am working on (ship paintover, wrecked city enviro).

Wow, that Wacom Cintiq HD ad on gaf now... its like, taunting me.
 
Maya owns Mental Ray and it comes with the software, just select it as your renderer and go from there. Theres a really easy way to make it look good, Ill put up a tutorial for it sometime :)
Tutorial? Hellz yeah, I'll take that :)

Man those MySims shots are awesome, the last one with the tree reminds me of Mary Blair
 

chumps

Member
I'm by no means a 3d geek but I really really disliked Maya when I used it. The jankiest interface ever. Things breaking all the time.

I don't think it'd be a bad idea to master Cinema4d instead, and then once you have a feeling for what "3d" means, learning whatever 3d package you need. That's my 2 cents.

And a new painting:

tumblr_lzrtq1lTmQ1qccgmso1_r1_500.jpg
 

Xun

Member
I'm by no means a 3d geek but I really really disliked Maya when I used it. The jankiest interface ever. Things breaking all the time.

I don't think it'd be a bad idea to master Cinema4d instead, and then once you have a feeling for what "3d" means, learning whatever 3d package you need. That's my 2 cents.

And a new painting:

tumblr_lzrtq1lTmQ1qccgmso1_r1_500.jpg
You get used to the little quirks.

I mainly animate in Maya, but I do know bits and bobs of everything.

Also great work guys!
 

daedalius

Member
Maya is working for me alright I suppose, although I am still learning my way around modeling inside of it.

Not bad for a first try, but I am not pleased with the design of this vehicle now after working on it a bit more. This isn't the Gladius, Aerial Assault Vehicle.

This is an air-car (or something).


Going back to the drawing board to do some more sketches/comps/silhouettes for the Gladius.

Also a render in progress of my environment I posted earlier, haven't touched the background or character yet, been mostly rendering the foreground/midground elements.

 

Phandy

Member
Finally got to finish up this portfolio piece I started a little while ago.
And by 'finish' I mean, I should probably stop, but still wanna do a few things more.

This kind of stuff definitely feels like my best work. I feel like I need 3-4 more of these in my folio if want to be considered for proper studio work.

14.jpg
 

daedalius

Member
That enviro looks great, Phandy. I'd be interested in a sort of process piece if you ever make one.

Looking forward to seeing more.
 

cbox

Member
Finally got to finish up this portfolio piece I started a little while ago.
And by 'finish' I mean, I should probably stop, but still wanna do a few things more.

This kind of stuff definitely feels like my best work. I feel like I need 3-4 more of these in my folio if want to be considered for proper studio work.

14.jpg

Man I'd hire you in a second if I had a studio... maybe one day.
 

Phandy

Member
That enviro looks great, Phandy. I'd be interested in a sort of process piece if you ever make one.

Looking forward to seeing more.

Someone else asked for this on conceptart.org so here ya go. Its not great because I do a lot of flatting of layers and paint over older layers and so on. But its the basic outline. 3d model > Line art > colour under line art (some photos in here for filling big spaces) > colour on the top and slowly remove the line art.

Awesome, Convenient Box, hook me when you get that studio going! haha,thanks.

attachment.php
 

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
Hey Phandy, that looks sweet! I think youre mostly done, but it needs a bit of polish

To illustrate what I mean, I played around with Gradient maps for a sec and gave the co[pter some reflective lighting, hope this helps

phandy_fix.jpg
 

daedalius

Member
Someone else asked for this on conceptart.org so here ya go. Its not great because I do a lot of flatting of layers and paint over older layers and so on. But its the basic outline. 3d model > Line art > colour under line art (some photos in here for filling big spaces) > colour on the top and slowly remove the line art.

Awesome, Convenient Box, hook me when you get that studio going! haha,thanks.

images

Huh weird, that's exactly how I work. (well, just the line, flat, under-paint, over-paint part for the one above, didn't do any 3d for it)

Weird how our stuff looks so much different, lol.

Doing a more intricate 3d model for my next enviro is something I want to do, as I want to get some more practice actually building environments in 3d, but I imagine it will still mostly be lines and painting. Might mess with lighting and stuff. I want to try and pull in more 3d in general to my work, just so I can be more experienced with it overall.

Blocking out like you have it here would save me a lot of time though, haha. How are you rendering that out? just using one light source, or an ambient or something? Do you mess with textures/materials ever, or just render out flat blocks to draw/paint over?
 

srenity

Neo Member
Everyone's work is amazing, keep it up!
Here's mine. Something I drew while waiting to respawn:
022312.jpg



Oh also, I need a favor, my wife is also an artist and is trying to get some votes for her t-shirt design in a DA contest. You can find it here:

http://shellypants.deviantart.com/art/Jelly-donut-286251879

And if you like her work, you can find her twitter and tumblr blogs here:

https://twitter.com/#!/inkijinx

http://inki-jinx.tumblr.com/

Thanks!
It requires a DA account to vote, booo. You two look so cute together as Tetra and Link though!!
 

SovanJedi

provides useful feedback
Aha, I knew there'd be an art thread here! Full of awesome artists as I expected too. :D Thought I'd post something I've been working on for the last year or so (not explicitly this picture; I started this earlier in the week).

Trying an olde style dinosaur Encyclopaedia look for it.

Veggiesaurs.jpg
 

Sofo

Member
Oh also, I need a favor, my wife is also an artist and is trying to get some votes for her t-shirt design in a DA contest. You can find it here:

http://shellypants.deviantart.com/art/Jelly-donut-286251879

And if you like her work, you can find her twitter and tumblr blogs here:

https://twitter.com/#!/inkijinx

http://inki-jinx.tumblr.com/

Thanks!
Voted! Not because you asked, but because it's pretty damn adorable, haha. Felt lazy when you posted it, days ago, but just went and saw how easy it is, I could not vote!

I just got an Intuos 4! So excited. I've never worked with a tablet before, though, any tips?
I've been meaning to get one, I currently use a 2008 Wacom Bamboo fun (really small) and getting an Intuos 4 (and I'm looking at you L-sized one) would be awesome. The first thing is it takes a bit to get used to not see what you're drawing "on the paper", but pretty soon you start getting the hang of it, you'll see!
 

Xun

Member
Pretty sweet sculpting stream from an artist at Vigil: http://www.livestream.com/vigilnigh..._campaign=vigilnights&utm_content=vigilnights

I definitely need to check out this sculpting stuff, it didn't even exist when I was seriously into 3d the last time (years ago). This is way closer to how I would want to work with 3d rather than trying to split poly edges, etc.
It's advisable to make a low poly model in Maya or whatever first and then take that over into ZBrush and Mudbox.

Making stuff completely from scratch in either of the 2 sculpting programs is not worth the hassle.

Also once again great work from everyone!
 

daedalius

Member
It's advisable to make a low poly model in Maya or whatever first and then take that over into ZBrush and Mudbox.

Making stuff completely from scratch in either of the 2 sculpting programs is not worth the hassle.

Also once again great work from everyone!

Yea, I figured that was the best way to go about it.

I remember a few screens of people making a rough form out of spheres in Zbrush, but that was forever ago.
 

Prax

Member
Aha, I knew there'd be an art thread here! Full of awesome artists as I expected too. :D Thought I'd post something I've been working on for the last year or so (not explicitly this picture; I started this earlier in the week).

Trying an olde style dinosaur Encyclopaedia look for it.

Veggiesaurs.jpg
^
Aaaghh.. I love it. I love dinosaurs and I love vegetables and I love old-style book illustrations and references.. Such a perfect combination!


I just made this today because I owed someone a halloween picture prize of their characters! ~4ish hours:
sgpa_halloween_grand_prize___ezra_and_vincent_by_meibatsu-d4qvad5.jpg


They are "dressed up" as a TV dinner and a sub.. >__>
 
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