art!
Adventures in the 3rd Dimension!
For the past three days I’ve been having a go with Blender. My earlier attempts to get into 3D modeling were extremely short-lived, due to its complicated nature and my relatively short attention span for things I don’t understand. A few years ago I started using Google SketchUp, a program which proved to be easy and even fun to use but limited in the types of shapes that it can create.
So let’s take a look at what I’ve been up to! In the first set of tutorials, I made a man (complete with ridiculous hat) and then I made a mountain.
Then I put him on top of the mountain and even gave him a nice little sky in the background.
I made a volcano but don’t worry, I didn’t put the man inside of it.
Next I moved on to a tutorial to make a set of dice which are, without a doubt, the coolest looking things so far and I definitely plan to reuse them as often as possible in future scenes, no matter how little they fit in.
I also fiddled with trying to make some glass-type things which, while slick, I don’t fully under how I made them. The intricacies of multi-source lighting and various levels of refraction and reflection are still beyond me.
My last experiment was trying to create an insect-like leg. It was actually inspired by some of the creatures in the game Borderlands. I wanted to see if it was easier to create a more complex and interesting model or to simply texture something to look cool (thus far they both seem equally difficult, for the record). I didn’t get too far because I’m still having difficulty sculpting the shapes as I please but, at the insistence of my room mate, I have turned it into something far more… insidious.
Fear the Barrel Monster! (And stay tuned for more 3D adventures.)
ArtRage 2
I’ve been messing around with the demo of ArtRage for the past week. It seems to be the perfect amount of natural media simulation without the inherent complexity of Corel Painter. The way the paints and other materials blend and layer is quite satisfying. At $25 for the full version, I think it’s a pretty wonderful deal.
Here are some of my latest doodles:
An adventurer is me!
I added a Kingdom of Loathing gallery to the Artwork page. I spent quite a few years as an undergrad playing and became very involved in their fanart community, which is supported through their forums and encouraged through a number of fan-made contests. If you’ve never heard of it, I suggest you check it out. KoL is sort of a text-based RPG, except that it has has pictures too (if you count stick figures). Though it primarily is a game that makes fun of all roleplaying games of the past, it also makes fun of just about everything else. It doesn’t take much time to get into and is great fun.
Bar doodles
Just getting back from the Darkhorse with some new scribbles. Tonight I was very much influenced by the pen drawings of Ty Dunitz that were posted over at the Sketch Tavern. He’s got some incredible skill and is quite an inspiration.
Just added the Artwork page
I’ve finally added in a gallery plugin so I can start uploading my artwork. For now, I created galleries for doodles and some of the 3D stuff that I have been getting into recently. Now I just need to dig into my old archives of scanned documents and pull out the rest of the pieces… This ought to be fun.
Bar doodles…
Some doodles done last night at the Darkhorse… As you can see, I’m on a bit of a robot kick lately.
Ham Friends
I’ve decided to start doodling some of the random things I hear everyday. This is one of them, spawned from a conversation about ham (obviously).
