I had a great time with the kids on their fourth grade field trip to Sutter’s Mill this week. After a hard day of panning for gold, I was able to break away at dinner for a quick river painting.
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Gold Country
Tag: rocks
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Misty Ring Mountain Rocks
I woke before the sun so I hiked up to the top of the Ring Mountain Preserve hoping for a dramatic sunrise. Instead I got thick misty clouds and drizzly wet conditions. You play the hand you are dealt so I set up in the light rain and did my best make oil stick to a water soaked panel.
My panel was soaked and dripping with rain water 
Artist’s View
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Down in the Mine
The old miner escapes into his mine, confident Dick and Don will be unable to track him in the dark labyrinth.
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Out Come the Wolves
I’ve sat on this painting for a few months, it wasn’t concept art for the show, just a fan painting I made while on my lunch break. The wolves are one of my favorite elements of season four. The more I worked with them the more they bored their way into my imagination. I understand Dave’s obsession with them now.
Really looking forward to the second half of the season airing. I’m so happy with how it came out.
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Chipped tooth
After the long fall.
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Upper Sacramento River
Found twenty minutes to paint while passing though Dunsmuir on my way north to see the great American eclipse in Oregon. Forgot to bring ink so I’ll clean this up a bit later. Can’t complain, after six hours in the car with three boys just sitting by a river is bliss.
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Rocky Shoal
A quick beach painting I made while my boys got ready for bed. Kids are jumping all over the place, time to eject. This is as far as I got.
Playing with some new photoshop brushes.
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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.
