The Race Is Back On

Hey guys,

Here are some new images for the Race For The Globe project (remember that thing?):

I had fun doing these - more soon.

Cheers!

Petrol/Blood Work etc.

Hey there,

A bunch of random bits that don't fit into Bugtown or The Race project. Design ideas for the Petrol/Blood comp over @ Polycount:

Some blockout shots of an earlier version of the model:

This guy will be riding in the quadcopter if I ever
finish designing him:

 Here's the workflow of how I composited together the finished vehicle concept using various material renders and some custom brushes:

Some color keys I made using black and white compostions from Bone by Jeff Smith (Yay! Bone!). If you've never read the book I really recommend it. Particularly the first 4 volumes.











Hopefully I'll have some new Race stuff soonish! Cheers!

Bugtown Project on Tumblr

Just to let people know - if they still read this blog(!) - that I'm starting a new personal project called Bugtown and I'm putting it up over on Tumblr. Blogspot, it's been great, but I think it's time we see other people. I hope we can still be friends.

http://bugtown-project.tumblr.com/

I hope you guys will come check out what I'm working on over there. Cheers!

Blizzcon Sculpt and Spitpaints

Hey guys,

I did a Zbrush sculpting demo on the Artists Stage at Blizzcon this year.  Here are some shots of the bust I worked on taken in Keyshot:

 Also, these are some more speedpaints I did for the Spitpainting group on Facebook:

Undead Giant:

Halloween Mansion:

 Riot:

 Supernova:

Cheers,
Nick.

Costumes, Spitpaints etc.

Hey guys,

Long time no posty...

Here are some bits and pieces that I've squeezed in here and there.

Firstly, the Spit Painting group on Facebook just blew up and the standard of work on there is just crazy. I'm determined to try and do one a day and here are a couple of my first attempts.

Heavily Armored:

Extreme Racing:

This past week I've been working on a Halloween costume for my 2 year old son. Here's the concept:

And here's the costume in action:

Also, a couple of pictures inspired by real places:

Byeeeeee!

Bits n' Bobs n' Such

I've been super slack with personal work lately, mainly due to being very busy and engaged with my day job. No excuses though, I really need to get back into the swing of things. I'm planning to go back to basics and really try and improve my core skills, so these are a few things to fill the void before I get into that.

Studies for something:

A few doodles for Paul Richards' awesome collaborative book project, Substrata:

Early WIP for a piece for Gamers for Good:

More stuff soon - promise!

Dynameshes etc.

Hey there,

Here are some recent endeavours. First up, some sculpts of secondary characters. I roughed out all the faces from primitives using Dynamesh to try and get a better handle on working that way rather than bringing in a base mesh from Maya. Still finding my way with it, but I can definitely see the benefits.

This guy's a cad:

Femme fatale from a concept a while ago:

Blockheaded goon:

Our princess is in another castle:

Playing with colours - wheeeee!!!

 

I'm going to be doing some lectures and demos at the Digipen school in Seattle next week so I'm currently prepping for that. I'm going to put the materials I create into a tutorials/step by step section in the book. Which is coming. Honest.

Cheers!

Recent Race Stuff

Hey guys,

Here are some recent pieces for the project. First, a location study for an amusement pier, inspired by a recent trip to Catalina:

I started this piece by making a little construction set of building pieces, which I then combined and modified using the distort and perspective tools. I then used those shapes as selection masks to paint on top of. It was an interesting way to work!

   

A Cossack-type artillery unit with a silly gun.

Silly gun on its own:

A rocky place for Avery and his big buddy to explore:

 I've been trying to knuckle down in some layout software so that I can get some actual pages designed before I get the Kickstarter going. But it's close!

Cheers,

Nick.

More Race Doodads

Hey there, Here's a bunch of bits for the project from the last week or two: Trying a new look for one of the villains. Colours and tonal tweaks in Photoshop over quick Zbrush render.

I was trying to get a kind of Sargent-esque oil paint finish with this. You can see some steps from it here:




I did this one for the weekly Art Jam over at Polycount. The subject was Studio Ghibli so I tried to get that same kind of palette going on in this landscape shot, although the shape design is a bit more graphic than you tend to see in their work:



Being chased through a frozen forest

 

Some studies for a creature design:

 

More stuff on the go. Check back soon. Cheers!

The Race is Back on!

Hi there,

I took a break from personal work over the past month or so, but I'm back to the task of trying to finish up my project in the near future and I'm really looking forward to completing all the pieces I have in mind for the book. Here's the first batch of stuff from the past week or so:

Here's some wippage on this sculpt. I need to sort out the modeling on the equipment, which is pretty rough right now, as well as add details and some homing pigeons (YES!).

 

I should have the Race for the Globe artbook project up on Kickstarter pretty soon. Watch this space for news on that!

Cheers,

Nick.

Skate Graphics

Hello there,

Here are a couple of studies/stylization experiments I did this week. I'm experimenting with painting in a more graphic style using textured brushes within simple selections. It was fun to work this way and because I make all the selection masks first it's really quick to get a composition going and find out whether it's working straight away. You can paint expressively within the masks too without damaging the silhouettes. I chose skateboarding as the subject because I used to skate a lot in my yoot and skate photography is full of interesting and dynamic compositions.

 More stuff soon!

Hawken Made Me Do It...

Hey there,

I decided to take a bit of a break from my ongoing project to work on a few different ideas for a bit. Firstly, I've been playing Hawken a bunch lately and I'm really impressed by how much fun the game already is. I really think the guys at Adhesive are doing a great job of making the combat feel weighty yet maneuverable. The game looks fantastic too. So I decided to design a mech that hopefully wouldn't look out of place in the Hawken world. I wanted to go for a support/medic class with extinguishing/welding capabilities so I tried to get some fire truck design elements in there with all the other greebles. I also borrowed copiously from a bunch of ref I got from mech maestro Fausto De Martini (cheers Fausto!). Photobashing the details in there was really fun.

Here's the 3d base I started with. You can see a bunch of areas changed after I took it into Photoshop:

 

And this is my original thumbnail:

More soon,

Cheers!