john's arthole

fuzzy bits

2012-01-03T15:17:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure this'll work but I figured I might as well give it a go since I've been wondering about it for a while.

The theory is as follows..

a: make hair in max using the hair thing
b: convert to splines and make a mesh
c: bake normals off the spline/mesh/thing
d: combine with delightful alpha planes to make awesome looking hair

That's the paperwork dealt with

2011-12-30T13:17:00.000-08:00

And we're back in zbrush, seperated into appropriate subtools (after a bit of an argument with dynamesh) and prepped for the inevitable 3million hour sculpt.....

and some more stuff...

2011-12-28T17:02:00.000-08:00

and a grass skirt

2011-12-28T09:51:00.000-08:00

and a bag

2011-12-27T13:27:00.001-08:00

now with more hairy bits

2011-12-23T17:06:00.000-08:00

Now with Jugs

2011-12-22T17:23:00.000-08:00

and some more

2011-12-21T17:59:00.001-08:00

accessories - well, pass 1 at least

baaa!

2011-12-20T16:12:00.001-08:00

My new best friend Mr Clay Buildup has been helping out on the goat thing...

Waiting for the plumber

2011-12-12T14:45:00.000-08:00

Kind of a speedpaint I guess, I had 90 minutes or so spare waiting for the nice man to come and fix my boiler so i coloured in a sketch i did recently...

still not dead

2011-12-11T15:38:00.000-08:00

I've been very busy working on a secret project - I'm not going to reveal anything, it's just an excuse for not updating in frigging ages .

I did however managed to slot this in over a lunchbreak or two and will probably develop it further at some point when I'm not up to my nuts in other stuff.

I dub thee Doomgoat.ztl

battlechess ponderings

2011-06-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

further mech twiddling

2011-06-03T16:50:00.000-07:00

Rocky outcroppings

2011-05-10T15:17:00.000-07:00

The world needs rocks so I made some rocks.

These weigh in between 1400 and 1800 tris and all share the same texture. Renders from marmoset...

Remember this?

2011-05-07T15:36:00.001-07:00

I appear to be back on it - for better or for worse.

also - give me a job :D

2010-05-05T14:20:00.000-07:00

more painting....

updates

2010-03-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, I got a bit (read heartily) sick of 3d work so I've been mucking around sketching and stuff. The above are some random musings, the last one is old but I just ran across it again and i stil like it.

2010-01-29T18:49:00.000-08:00

low poly....

2010-01-27T09:04:00.000-08:00

Time's a wasting so I'm going to have to call it a day on the high-poly.

the joys of retopology and unwrapping await...

yay

2010-01-22T01:15:00.000-08:00

new scarf and goggles...

I still havent taken this to big computer, the sofa is so much more comfortable..

and some more.....

2010-01-20T17:52:00.001-08:00

The laptop can't take it anymore :( must move to big computer

bit more....

2010-01-18T17:28:00.000-08:00

I really ought to move this onto my big computer, it's getting a bit heavy for my lappytop.

yaaaawwwwn

2010-01-17T16:18:00.000-08:00

Im tired

no more words for you...

I'm not dead

2010-01-14T01:14:00.000-08:00

sooo, another competition begins and I've entered it.

knees

2009-04-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

Somebody asked if I was going to complete my flying monkey despite dropping out of the war.

I might, I'm back on the mech now and I've got an mx5 in the works for when i need to do something mindless.

I did something different with the knee thigh area. I think I know where I'm going with this now and it's definitely better because there's more cables than there were before.

Look who's back....

2009-04-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so I quit dominance war.

One of my main reasons is the decision to remove rendering restrictions, but generally I'm not feeling the war this time round.

After a week or so off I got bored and decided to pick up my mech again.

Even more war

2009-03-30T15:50:00.001-07:00

Lazy, so no words today either

More war

2009-03-29T16:27:00.001-07:00

tired, no words today

War party

2009-03-29T00:41:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again.

A time when relationships become strained, eyesockets become dark, cheeks become hollow and hard drives become full.

By this I mean Dom war 4 started (roughly on time) and the world of the 3d nerd is alight.

Here's my effort so far - I can't remember the details of the brief but I'm confident I'll be able to shoehorn this into the "abomination" category without too much effort.

Abandoned

2009-02-16T17:34:00.001-08:00

The missus is on holiday...

I got bored so I made a body to attach this head I'd been doodling to. I'm trying to do it quick. Theres a bunch of details to add and the only textures that have any work in them so far are the head ones.

anyway...

Something a bit clever

2009-02-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

I won with the witch !!

and..

My colleague Ian Wilson has posted these example videos on Vimeo to demonstrate how clever his Emotion AI engine is - I won't go into details here since you can find out more at http://www.emotionai.com/ but he's written a little brain that you can plug into a character to give him actual, genuine feelings and reactions to stimulus.

The reason I've posted this here is that I built the head and the 50 odd morphs required to support all the emotions. I also ran the custom head through Facegen which allowed us to generate a (theoretically) vast range of different faces without having to redo the facial morphs.

Anyway, here we go

Emotion channel mixing from Emotion AI on Vimeo.

Push button facial animation from Emotion AI on Vimeo.

100 Smiles from Emotion AI on Vimeo.

Wee! She's finished

2008-11-25T03:46:00.000-08:00

The witch is done.

This is a happy time for me since it was 80% zbrush work and I now feel like I've learned to use it well enough for it to be a commercially viable skill.

I don't want to jynx it but I'm pretty confident this is another low-poly comp win ;)

Here's some of the submitted images...

Aaargh! Deadline Looming!!

2008-11-21T17:05:00.001-08:00

Just as well I'm nearly finished really.

I did a quick pose test on the witch now that the mesh and maps are sorted.

I'm not 100% on the bonsai pot yet, I may just replace it with a standard plinth and put the dirt/tree on top of that.

Please don't laugh at the deformation - I've not made any edits to the skin modifier's default weighting.

Why do I write as if somebody's actually going to read this?

I need tea and sleep

Further Progress

2008-11-16T15:11:00.000-08:00

I've been beavering away at farcry2, assassins creed and now fallout3 so understandably things have been a little sparse on the modelling front.

Despite this I have made a large dent in the remaining work on the little witch character

sculpt:

low-poly:

It's been a while

2008-11-05T15:33:00.000-08:00

Yeah - I almost forgot I had a blog but somebody from 3dtotal mentioned it.
this is likely to be an image heavy post since I have actually been fairly constructive outside of work.

Don't get the wrong idea, I've been constructive there too but I'm sure there's some sort of NDA attached to it - wonder if it'll go away inlight of the closure and subsequent reopening under a new name...

Also - I done bought myself a new computing device from the dell outlet centre. I can categorically state that a Dell precision t5400 is a very powerful computer - even after you've crippled it with Vista.
The best part? a quadcore xeon, 4gb of quad channel memory and a gtx260 cost me less than 800 notes.

anyway - to what I loosely define as "the art"....

First up, I finally won something. Something being the low-poly comp on 3dtotal. You can probably tell it's not actually finished if you look closely and as ever I don't think I quite captured the charm of my concept..

I did a little more work on the scary naked lady robot too. She's not been getting my full attention due to these competitions, Stalker:clear sky and far cry 2 but work has commenced on the high-poly, I have a strategy for normal map generation and I think I know what I'm going to have to do with the rig.

I started this for a bit of sculpting practice - I'm hoping to get a nice render or something out for my son Ted since he's quite keen on dinosaurs.

And finally - the 3dtotal halloween comp. This is the first full zbrush focused workflow I've tried. I'm intending on doing the bare minimum in max and photoshop on this one cos I want to teach myself to use zbrush properly. I've also decided to pop out of my comfort zone a bit and create something that doesn't have it's tits out
There's still a couple of weeks or so to go so I'm hopeful about finishing in time...

Flamethrowers

2008-09-08T03:42:00.000-07:00

I did some more.

We have flamethrowers

Wee! computer finally set up

2008-09-03T10:44:00.001-07:00

To honour the occasion I added large claws to my robot

No art yet

2008-08-08T01:25:00.000-07:00

But,

I do have a new bike and a new kitchen

Moving house is a pain in the scrotum,

bikecheck

2008-06-24T17:57:00.001-07:00

On a totally not art related note, heres some pictures of my bikes
in my soon to be ex-kitchen.

number one bmx:

fixie:

tentacles

2008-06-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

I spent some time recovering from some fairly substantial Max damage and I'm very pleased to announce that the scary porn mech is back on track and moving forward (to paraphrase management types everywhere)

She's also waving the beginnings of a handsome set of tentacles around which is an interesting change.

woop! finished

2008-06-17T01:24:00.000-07:00

That comp shouldn't have been so painful. I blame Autodesk :p

it's been a while

2008-06-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

Max 2009 did the dirty on me as well. I've spent a lot of time recovering broken work this last week or two

I've gotten this far on the superhero comp - deadline is midnight sunday which will give me time to tweak the rig and textures but not muich else. I should be ok to complete and I'm not disappointed in my model (I'm not all that pleased either though)

Too thin apparently

2008-05-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

Yeah, well.

The deadline for the speed sculpt came and went - it's alright, I had no chance at all of placing high given that there were some stupid good entries.

I managed to get some work done on wonderwoman - just the housecoat to add and then we go visit zbrush. Deadline is the 8th or the 4th so I should be alright as long as nothing goes completely tits up (eg. it all getting smashed up by max for no good reasonlike my scary porn mech has - not happy )

another competition entry (or two)

2008-05-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

In typical fashion I'm spreading myself thin this month

First we have the washed up superhero character competition - I'm going for a trailer trash style, smoking while pregnant wonderwoman (Orthos and first WIP below). The floral housecoat will come later and there's a distinct possiblity she'll end up wearing flip-flops.

We also have the speed sculpting competition. You have to learn z-brush these days and this is helping me force myself into it. I'm about two hours into the sculpt so far with two hours left.

yeah,

more mech progress

2008-05-07T16:47:00.001-07:00

I've done a bunch of tidying up under the hood, filled in some holes, stopped cables intersecting etc. so not much visible change apart the release of a hooter - I just couldn't stand to see it caged up like that..

Curses!

2008-05-07T13:36:00.000-07:00

Didn't make the top 50 in the Dominance War.

I'm not bitter - there were a lot of (at least 50) entries better than mine.

I hope the top 10 doesn't consist purely of anime/gears of war style models though, that sort of thing doesn't exactly push creative boundaries.

anyway, sulk over

Facegen head

2008-05-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

I don't suppose anyone will mind me posting these.

Over the last week at work I built a custom head for facegen with a full set of facial expression and lipsynch morphs - these are a few screengrabs from Facegen using my custom head.

mechpervert

2008-05-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

Gratuitous it may be but I've had it on good authority that this is art so bear with me.

This is pretty challenging for me - I dont do non-organics, I don't do high poly and I don't want to unwrap 60 odd individual cables - that said, I love her and I intend to see this through to the bitter end even if it kills me.

Dominance war 3 entry

2008-05-04T14:59:00.000-07:00

This is my entry to this years dominance war character modelling competition. It marks my second attempt at a "next-gen" character model and I'm feeling fairly pleased with how it turned out. There's a lot of things I'll do differently next time but it was a good learning experience and at last I'm catching up with the rest of the universe after 4 years working with a renderer that would have looked ropey in 1999.

First post

2008-05-04T14:39:00.000-07:00

Ever since I invented the internet in 1993 I've kept a fairly low profile but since I've been exposing my various creations on 3dtotal of late it seemed sensible to spread the love to those outside the 3d nerd community and this is probably the easiest way of going about it