Finally!!!1|1|11

    So it's been a long time since i've made a substantial posting, and it probably be longer still ttill there's anything really worth it on here - but i figure since i've got the shit to put on here...why not do it anyway?

     So this is the concept i came up with for the wall that goes around the main/initial town in my story (it would be the equivalent to Traverse or Twilight Town from Kingdom Hearts I/II). I was heavily influenced by the Great Walls of Ba Sing Se (from Avatar: The Last Airbender), but there were a few times where the wall just seemed...funny and whimsicle because of how it rose/fell and weaved along the mountain crest.




     I can understand why a wall built like this would have an ever-changing 'levelness', but since there's elemental manipulation in my story, i don't want to be limited to "real world" mechanics...which is kind of why i find some of these pictures i captured so funny.








     This is a pretty good kind of "middle ground" between the rise/fall of the terrain and the levelness of the wall. Again, i wanted mine to be a constant height, so this would only partially represent my idea.









     This is the kind of...aesthetic i'm going for in my wall design - grand, towering, impenetrable, almost as if it weren't man-made. I mean, the ground at the base of the wall isn't 100% level, but they maintain a constant height all around the inner-city. There's far less terrain near the city of Ba Sing Se than in my story, but the constant height thing is almost a must for me.







    This was a concept sketch i came up with for for my main town (after the post below this one, but before my design for the wall) and it might not make much sense to the viewer without any insight into my story/worl, but i'll eventually have some 3D mock-ups going on to illustrate the train routes and underlying terrain (i was kind of aiming for a small mountain/hill range encircling one larger mountain/hill that would have the Archives library sitting atop it)

More sketches and designs to come soon now that i've dusted off my Wacom tablet and found it far easier to sketch "layered" ideas in photoshop than on paper and then transfer.

Raise The Rufus

          So this morning i started messing around with sketchbookpr (continuing from last night) and i just wasn't feeling it, so i decided to go through my vast collection of images from the net and DJ to see what i thought might be fun coloring and getting used to my tablet, and i came across a few chibi versions of notorious FFVII characters. I knew i wasn't going to be able to color all of them, so i picked the one with the simplest outfit and printed out a hard copy. I scaled it down and layed the paper over my wacom tablet and traced over it, transfering it to photoshop. The image to the left is what i got.


          I darkened it a little bit, because when i first traced it (and mind you, no line was gone over twice) i had the pencil's opacity on about 30% - so if i went over a curve a few times, the median of them would be darker than the rest. But i realized that without taking more time to go over and refine it in PS, it would be faster to ink the printed copy, and scan it into PS to then color.




     So the left is the inked version of the drawing DJ did so long ago. It's of Rufus Shinra from FFVII. And the right is what i ended up with after...an hour or so? I'm not sure exactly when i started, but i know i first got on my computer around 10 am and i finished this around Noon (and there was time spent in sketchbook pro, looking for images, printing, inking, and scanning....so an hour is a good guess). It still has that 'sketch' look to it - because of all the little specks and stuff around the lines, but when i'm done coloring it, i'll go in and use the smudge tool to get rid of em.

Stroke Of Luck

          So i got my Wacom Intuos 4 (Lg) digital tablet today, as well as the 2010 version of Sketchbook Pro, and was taking it for a spin to get used to using a pen instead of a mouse and all the 'sensetivity' behind it, and the only thing i really got out of it was this sketch dejon did of Cloud as a hedgehog. Now, granted it's not the best work, i was just getting used to changing brush szes, using the opposite end of the pen as an eraser (which i thought was incredibly intuitive), the only part of the picture i like myself is the gloves.

          So since i've got sketchbook pro now, and it allows for extremely acurate arcs and lines and various other aspects of drawing my free had is always void of, i should, though i'm not sure what they'll be of, be able to post some pretty detailed conceptual designs on here from now on (though probably as sporadic as everything else). My classes only really focus on techniques and concepts (like lighting and texture, rigging, and basically anatomy), so i won't really have any 'projects' that i'll be posting stuff done in sketchbook (though the things i do in ZBrush when i get into it will definitely be posted).

          So that's really all i've got for now, i'm off to read Stop Staring, one of the books i got this semester that i think will really o pen up the way i tackle projects and modeling things. So far i'm onyl a few pages into the book and it's already changed the way i think about lip synching and the way most people go about it (with dozens of various blend shapes for each phoneme, each pose of the mouth keyed on a timeline).

          I've got a couple of other books (one focus entirely on particle systems - maya only - that i'm going to attack in the summer if not earlier). So as i get into my books, if anything visually intriguing comes of them, i'll be sure to post it.