Was going to spend the saturday painting some fun stuff but my fingers where aching so much from the cold so there's a few sketches instead.

Quick tonal practise with Photoshop. Big hard-edged brush only, no fancy stuff. :P

Trying to get back to doing quick environment paintings. I lost all my custom brushes so I've been trying to make a bunch of new ones.

Piece is a bit of a polished turd but thought I'd post it anyway.

Happy holidays.

Now that I have some free time I jumped back on Blender Cookie and ended up doing some candy bars.

Sunday sketches.

Here's a stylised character drawging for a change.

Started as a combined particle and sculpting exercise. I was happy with the way it was progressing so I decided to finish it.

Modeled and rendered in Blender.

Fortune hunter Nathan Drake done in OpenCanvas. I might put up a time-lapse video of the painting later on.

edit: video is up

Quick Halloween painting.

Very traditional monster guy done in OpenCanvas 1.1. I also made a time-lapse video of it.

Thought I'd post some photography for a change.

Lake picture was shot at ISO200, f/3.5 and an exposure time of 30 seconds, car picture at ISO100, f/4.2 and 25 seconds, respectively.

The painting is featured on the september Finnish PlayStation community roundup post.

http://fi.playstation.com/home/news/articles/detail/item411549/PlayStation-yhteis%C3%B6-pureutuu-gamescom-2011-messuihin/

update: it was also posted on the European PlayStation blog

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/11/01/finnish-official-playstation-forums-now-open/

No, I'm not dead. I've had stuff to do but I've also been doing lots of experimenting with Blender. Just a bunch of quick one-offs which aren't very interesting at all, though. In addition to that I've been doing a lot of sketching again, which has been wonderful because I hadn't been able to draw anything worthwhile since late last year.

As with every extended break followed by and extended period of working hard, your brain feels recharged and brimming with ideas. Sketching anything/everything using pretty much anything you can get your hands on is liberating definitely helps to force you out of your comfort zone. I'm hoping to get my crappy old scanner working so I can properly start cataloguing my recent sketches and turning the better ones into finished pieces.

Finally done with school (at least for now) and here's my final thesis piece as well as some pictures from the group exhibition. My work consisted of a digital print (approx. 110x200cm) and a full color booklet detailing planning, sketching and modeling/composing/lighting. I thought the piece was received really well so that made me happy because I spent a lot of time on it.

It's been completely rendered with Blender internal so getting things the way I wanted them was a massive pain in the ass at times. It could've been cool to do it with Octane or even LuxRender (I did some quick render tests which I'll propably add to this post tomorrow) but I was starting to run out of time because I had to get stuff printed and framed. A little extra planning could've gone a long way but I'm happy with the way the piece turned out. Completely changing to a physically unbiased renderer would've changed the stylized look to something entirely different and it's not really what I was going after. Originally it was going to be a 3D composite+matte painting but Blender started to take more and more priority. It was an awesome learning experience and now I'm feeling really confident about using it.







update: LuxRender test.

Rendering and the UV texture for some batteries. About 5hr render time.

My pc could really use some more memory.

Some sketches with Artrage 3.

Making progress on my Carina and trying out stuff in Luxrender. The car is rendered with Cycles which is an alpha build of an upcoming internal rendering engine for Blender. It's physically accurate as far as I know and allows you interactively work on an image that's being constantly rendered. It's very, very cool. I think Octane works similarly as well as the new Nitrous viewport in 3D Studio Max.

Still a very work in progress model of a 1990 Toyota Carina II.

Quick test render of a car model that I've been working on for a few weeks. I did most of the modeling based on Jonathan Williamson's Porsche 977 GT3 RS modeling tutorial and quite frankly phoned in a lot of the detail because of the original reference material I was using. Also some of the proportions are a little bit off because the reference shots were foreshortened and a lot of compensation had to be done between them. That aside I'm very happy with the way it turned out and feeling pretty proud of it because it's the first car model I've managed to bring to a presentable state.



The model doesn't go into extreme detail, so there's no interior but stuff like the headlights are modeled inside out. Oh and I modeled the lug nuts too. ;) /throws egg at Dan Greenwalt.