I’ve been digging thru old file folders and found this nice little ink drawing from my high school days. Circa 1996.
Tag: cartoon
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Signature cartoon
Here is a fun little optical illusion. I found that its possible to sign my name in such a way that it is also my self-portrait.
Took a break today from the watercolors and made a quick digital oil character sketch in ArtRage. The character is from my Wakefield project. He is sort of a darwinian-intellectual-mathematician-carpetbagger type who gets pulled along on Wakefield’s adventures. I’m still flushing him out at the moment so nothing is too solid. Even the name is temp but I thought I would give a nod to Rube Goldberg I’ve always been fond of his illogical logic. Those charming qualities will hopefully be present in this young scientist as well.
I recorded the event as a script so afterwords I was able to make a time-lapse recording. It plays back at four times speed.
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ZBrush Self-Portrait
I’m working on ZBrush self-Portrait at the moment. Nothing official just killing time while i’m up late watching the babies.
I just finished sculpting in the hair and thought I would share my render. I’m trying a different fibermesh technique this time for sculpting hair. I would like to get away from a real hair look so this time I’m using it to create large chunky sections that I dynamesh and add detail too. I’m going to build up a “hand painted” texture and see if I can get a nice 2.5d look going. Just playing around so no promises on where this will go.
Maybe I can use this thing to make some silly gif animations or something. That might be fun for the site.
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Long live the King
So here is the final render of “the King”. He was created entirely in zBrush and took about a weeks worth of late night sculpting sessions to complete. In case you have been out of the loop on this guy. He is a character I designed for the movie Space Chimps in collaboration with Dean Taylor and the rest of the art team while working on the film Space Chimps. Our designs were cut but I resurrected him here to appease my own curiosity.
Render Pains
It was a fun project but took more time than I was expecting as I ran into a bit of trouble towards the end. I like the sculpt but I must admit that I am disappointed with the render. I had all sorts of technical issues and have decided to call it quits.
The rendering of the king himself is ok, but the little Luzian aliens are not properly rendered. Their material is all wrong and should actually look like blown glass. Wouldn’t you know, one of the shortfalls of zBrush is that it can’t render caustics, so no glass. The best it can manage is a sudu-transparent material. It also turns out, you can’t have a transparent object behind another transparent object, to fake glass, as the first object will completely matte out the later. I didn’t know this when I began or else I would have changed my workflow to be able to render in MentalRay. Since I used dynamesh on all the characters they lack UV’s and have insanely high poly counts so Rendering in Maya was out of the question. So in the end rather than glass-like aliens I get waxy, oily looking ones. Sigh. Que Sera, Sera.
Still, render issues aside, everything looks ok and I am happy. I have my closure now and can move on to other things. I learned alot from this project and am glad I did it.
The Making of the king
Here are a few work in progress pictures.
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Don, Rough Zbrush Head Sculpt
This is a very old character of mine, I created him a life-time ago. I believe I was ten.
Recently, I have resurrected old characters like Don here to see what my adult self would do with them. In this case it was a zbrush sculpt. Start to finnish this project took me one night of work. The base mesh was made in Maya and then polished up and roughly painted in zbrush.
Don, Circa 1996
I found this animated gif of him, dated 1996, and put it up here for reference. At the time of this drawing he is already a few years old. There are boxes of better Don drawings sitting up in the attic that I really should scan.
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The man behind the curtain
I built a redirect page for the website today and to style it out a little bit drew this little cartoon. You can never fail with a good wizard of OZ reference!”
We bough the blueray remastered version of the movie a few weeks ago and ever since the songs have been playing in my head on repeat. What an awesome story. I’m happy to have flying monkeys running around my brain.