Lava Monster

The homework task this week was simple: design a lava-monster-thing.As with anything I began searching for anything lavay which could help me with the task at hand. The moodboard itself:

With all this to help me I scribbled down a few thumbnails hoping to develop a good idea or two.

I wanted to do something with concentric circles. Why? Because they look cool.

I was quite partial to my final two designs, number 4 and number 5. Although I was very fond its ethereal and almost angelesque (if that's a word at all) nature I forsook number 4 for 5 as I was in favour of 5's monolithic structure, especially the huge megalithic block which sat on its shoulders and from which its head was also attached.

The upper torso features a more prominent red hazy-glow from the lava to help separate it's head and shoulder-block-thing from the rest of the body. 

 The finished piece, the monster seen here standing in a pool of its own leakage.

In all the process of painting the finished piece took about three hours. I chose to stick with a deep red for the lava for stylistic reasons with some yellow-orangeyness going on near his eyes and mouth to draw the views eyes. 

Mudbox Workshop

A few weeks ago we had an Autodesk Mudbox tutorial by Tony Mayor, a man with expertise in the area of  3-D sculpting.

The first thing given to us was to experiment with the different different tools that Mudbox offers on a poor, unsuspecting cube. This was the result:

The "Eldritch Cube".

We were also encouraged to experiment with the texture stamps Mudbox offered.

Textures seen here on another poor, unsuspecting cube.

We were then shown how to make are own stencil textures in Photoshop and were encouraged to play around with that function.

A simple black and white stencil made in Photoshop.

The stamp being used to decorate (I use the term loosely) a poor, unsuspecting sphere.

We were also shown the painting functions contained within Mudbox. It's fairly basic even primitive when compared with the likes of  Photoshop but useful for throwing colours or even textures onto an object.

Seen here is the UV channel of a poor, unsuspecting sphere with textures and a smattering of colour thrown on.

With the basics down it was now time to model something proper, or at least decorate something with the skills we learned. To do this we were to work on a poor, unsuspecting T-Rex.

The work in progress.

The finished article, sporting a somewhat rhubarb and custard inspired colour scheme. Perhaps not much in the grand scheme of things but I was quite happy with how my "Fabulousaur" (yes that is what I named it) turned out.

Just a picture of wrinkles I used as a stencil to work on the above.

Overall I was quite impressed how easy to grasp the Mudbox system is and how natural and intuitive it is to use. In many ways it can be seen as the yin to Maya's yang.

 

Lizard Dude

At the beginning of the term we were given the task of painting and finishing a sketch of some lizard-warrior-guy-thing from an online tutorial by Feng Zhu of FZDSCHOOL on YouTube. The task was fairly straight forward: paint the lizard guy using skills and hints taken from the videos and finish him off with lizard skin textures.

There he stands in all his glory. Perhaps not my most inspired work but I was fairly happy with the outcome. Using photo-textures like the scales seen on his head and shoulders are a cheap and easy way to quickly add detail to a piece.