Day 6

Today was another concept themed day. My friend and I discussed ship classes for our little unity project, and decided along with fighters, would be cruisers and capital ships. Today I was looking at cruisers. As the game's perspective is top down, silhouette is obviously incredibly important. That not only means making each ship recognizable but making the various (at this point 2 ) factions ships recognizable. During my time working on the Sony Mentorship Program, shape and style became very important in discerning factions. To match that I started with 3 basic shapes. A cube, a pyramid, and a sphere, and took each shape through a trial of stages, developing each one more with another pass. While this is no substitute for thumbnails it was a great way to keep individual shapes recognizable, and to help me and my friend (Mike Horton, a programmer and game designer) decide what stands out, and what is pleasing to the eye.

Day 5

Today was just me playing around with the noise feature in Zbrush. Checking out the different ways you can make noise affect your mesh, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of the alpha options in Zbrush, and what good ones do, and what bad ones do. Final result was me trying to make a weird asteroid thingy, but it turned into me playing with noise.

Day 4

I recently started a small unity project with a friend of mine (Huzzah, new engine, true shader access). Today was just some silhouette studies for some small fighter class ships (space, not sea). Probably a few more of these will come, though not tonight as we are working on mechanics at the moment. It was a nice change from zbrush though. Tomorrow may be some painting. Who knows?

Day 3

Today I worked on learning Zsketch. Inspired by this video http://vimeo.com/15590786 this mesh was made entirely in Zbrush. Worked alot on using clay tubes to get a semi stylized tree bark texture. Turned out looking a bit like a tentacle but I had fun in the process and the learning was there. Also found out there is a blur function for alphas. Might revisit that stone arch sometime soon.

Day 2

Ok so today, I wanted to scare myself, so I just spent an hour researching and looking at the top environment art of this generation. Freaky good. Sooooo I debated and decided that included in the list of digital area's I plan to dabble in, was Zbrush 4.0. This time I brushed up on my Zphere modeling and make a rough attempt at a sandstone arch. Not bad, but not awesome. I will probably revisit this another day to tweak, and learn pro-optimizer so I can officially create an asset in Zbrush, and take it all the way through to a finished low poly without modeling in Max or Maya.

Day 1

Yesterday I started what I hope will be a massive learning and exciting project. Yesterday I worked on a very simple digital painting. It started abstract, but slowly turned into me just practicing blending.