Lawless Hardy 2.0 - Update 1

A BIG Hello to you!

It has been a while... 

Actually, it has been more than a year since my last post.

To get this up and running again, I thought I would start by sharing a few semi-old and fairly new work-in-progress screenshots of my current personal project. I am updating and redoing 90% of a Tom Hardy model I created for my character modeling demo reel while at Full Sail University. I am currently revising and sculpting the head in Zbrush. Will move on to 3D software, Maya later on where I will pick up on the rest of the body model that I made already.

"LOOK MA, NO HANDS!"

I often refer back to these stills from the movie, Lawless for art direction. After all, this is a likeness, not just of Tom Hardy, but of the particular Forrest Bondurant character he portrayed in the film.

 More progress on the sculpt and cleaning up the paint job. Nothing is final at this point. Just playing around with the colors, adding in pore detail, making face tweaks, and rendering out different lighting situations-- Having fun!

Highest resolution models compare: New (left),Old (right)

For those who have not pursued a likeness project, you need to gather a bunch of reference of the person you are trying to replicate. This helps make things easier down the line. 

Using a profile photo, I try to match up silhouettes and shapes in Zbrush's Spotlight.

Most recently through spotlight, I lined up and painted a nice hi-res photo right onto the sculpture. Sort of like shrink wrapping it to the surface. And it lined up almost PERFECTLY!
However, it is still going to require a lot of tweaking, but it's another good base texture to start with.

In the image below, it is apparent to see the impact a texture has on a model.

Same model- different texture.

That is it for now! Thanks for reading!

Practice iPad Digital Paintings

I'm learning more how to handle drawing on my iPad because being as forgetful as I've been, I packed my Wacom tablet and sketchbook in one of the moving boxes for my move to New York without thinking that they wouldn't be unpacked until I have a place to move them into. But while staying at a hotel apartment hunting, I've been working on my digital skills and taking advantage of the absence of my usual tools. Of course I could buy another sketchbook, use notebook paper, or draw with a mouse... but this is more fun! 

The clown face painting guy I did started out as a simple colored head study to apply techniques I learned from various art courses I took last year. It looked pretty boring just as a plain head, no hair, so I added in hair and vibrant colors to his face to explore different results I'd get with different blending modes. I also wanted to pay my respects to clowns...cause I love clowns :)

I present Clown Guy! or Why So Serious?

I saw a hella creepy creature art piece done by Ian Joyner on CGHUB and it gave me inspiration to do my own glowing eyed creepy alien critter which is also my very first post on CGHUB. Wooh!

 New creature concept inspired by Syfy's Face Off's Cosmic Conspiracy spotlight challenge. The challenge was to create an alien creature that reflected a certain decoded planetary distress signal.

Polluted and Toxic Environment sounded interesting. I wrote down a list of brainstorming terms that I wanted to show in my concept. Without taking the "Low hanging fruit" (a phrase I learned on the show), which might have been to go toxic green in my thoughts, I looked up pictures depicting real toxic and oil spills to get other ideas. Orange brown was a color that showed up a lot along with black-ish brown for oil spills. 

There is another historical event that I referenced from and that was Agent Orange from the Vietnam War between 1962 and 1971. It was claimed to be a pesticide to be sprayed over the jungles to get rid of unwanted plants and insects, but a contaminated batch ended up doing more damage than intended to the soldiers and residents living in the area causing deaths and children born with birth defects. Agent Orange still affects lives today with the future generations also becoming victims. Vietnam Veterans have dealt and are dealing with the affects as well. It's a really brazen event that shows what toxins can do. This key point drove most of my design choices from here on out. Sad images of victims and the environment helped me see how this creature would be affected if it were living in a toxic environment. A lot of it was really depressing to see, but I wanted to ground my creature in reality as much as I could without solely going off of my imagination.

Most of what I referenced: Gas masks/ half masked respirators, chemical burns, peeling skin, forest fires, oil spills, Agent Orange, pollution, toxins, pollutants, animals dealing with oil spills, polluted environments.

All these were done using the ArtStudio App by Lucky Clan for iPad and a stylus. Please feel free to ask me any questions. Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for reading!

Caveman Work In Progress!

He will be one of my assets going on my first ever Demo Reel. I'll post more pictures of him before he was as detailed. He is based off the concept by Sarah Mensinga. Cool lookin character if I do say so myself :)