Merry Boxing Day!

As per tradition, I was responsible for the family Christmas Card this year. This was the first year I used off-site printing, and while the results were good, I didn't end up with the usual stock of spares to give out. So, day late, dollar short, basically. (Sorry guys! I'll do better next year.) Anyway, you can still check out the card image above.

Spitpaint Series 2

A bunch of speed painting attempts from the Daily Spitpaint group. Mostly terrible, but, hey, you gotta push yourself.

Speed Racer

Umbrella

Soul Eater

Water Lion

Bottom Feeder

Ornate Headdress

Micro Pet

Female Druid

Lonely Rhino

Destruction of Statue

God of Winter

Concentrated Sunlight (Well, kind of)

Cool Shades

Dead Aim

Frozen Beach

Spitpaint Series I

A bunch of thirty minute studies from the Facebook Daily Spitpaint Group this past fortnight. Arranged roughly newest to oldest.

'Bionic Eyes'

'Tripod'

'Homeless Man and His Friend'

'Many Armed Robot'

 'Mutant Mermaid'

'Red Lantern'

'Skyboxing'

'Void Creature (Take III)'

 'Void Creature'

 'War Ghost'

 'Weather Demons'

'Viking Marksman'

'Chimera'

Not Alexander Graham Bell

1.5 hours or so. Not a bad way to wrap up a Sunday evening, but I should go to sleep now because I am an old, old man.

OH ****!

Target Practice - Regulus (Almost There!)

Finally getting close to the finish line on this baby. Revamped the color scheme, updated lighting, posed the the various moving parts, and rehashed the material qualities again, not to mention rebaking a couple of problem normals and tweaking some geometry. Mostly just texturing left to go at this point, which is the easy bit.

'Daily' Self Portrait

Silly Brian. You don't that.

Target Practice is Back-tice and Everybody Loves Grabby Claw.

Finally got some time to get back to my gun project - hopefully be back to posting more regularly soon. Materials are pretty close, textures obviously only part way. Comments/critiques welcome.

I also made this mechanical claw for the Polycount Escape Challenge my team is still totally doing. I could have only one pet, it would be a giant robot claw with needless glowy bits.

Target Practice - AO and Normals

Low Poly! In UDK! With 16 million pixels of uncompressed normals and ambient occlusion! And lovely clouds (didn't make those)!

Couple of minor issues to sort through (and rebake at the speed of something that moves slowly), but purty much ready to texture. May be taking a slight break from this project to participate in Polycount's 'The Escape' Challenge. So look for a change of pace here soon.

Target Practice - Unwrap and Low Poly

Meant to show the low poly last week. Totally spaced it. I'm not too worried about sticking to an exact tri count for this one. It's a little over 12K, but for a personal project that's just fine. 

Anyway, unwrap's (finally) ready. This probably isn't the most exciting step to show (especially for anyone just hoping for pretty pictures), but it is important. Next up, projections!

Target Practice (WIP)

So I started 2013 off with the farcical idea of having a finished piece to show every week. I've made this resolution five of the past six years and kept it zero of the past ever. Obviously, I have not succeeded so far this year.

Recent experience has taught me some important lessons. I've always known that there is virtue in pushing oneself to the point of failure - it's about the surest way to make sure you're actually gaining ground, and not simply rehashing the most comfortable aspects of techniques you already know. However, unrealistic goals aren't only demotivating - they're disorganizing. Taking on a project 110% greater than you can reasonably achieve seems to lead to good results; insisting on 200% overscope tends to lead to a lot of fractured, half formed materials.

Basically, what I'm saying is putting out the volume of work I used to insist on isn't as useful to me as I'd like it to be. It encourages half solutions that don't really improve on the existing skill base in a really useful way. As such, I'm revising my idea to give myself a little more breathing room, and hopefully find a way to to really improve my work in the process.

What I will try to do is show _something_ once a week, generally a work in progress or a series of thoughts and sketches on a particular subject. As a bonus, this pacing makes me more accountable to an intelligent, structured working process, which, at this point, is actually more interesting to me than the results. And maybe it's more interesting for you to see to see how I'm thinking as well.

Anyway! Here goes:

I do a lot of different things at Hi-Rez, and recently I've been concentrating more on organic sculpting and concept work, which is awesome, but I miss hard surface a mite from time to time, so I built this'n to keep the ol' skills sharp. High poly is basically ready - next up comes the low, uv, and bakes.

Oh, and P.S.: I'm working on migrating to a Wordpress site integrated with my main site. This should give me a little more flexibility in terms of presentation and ease of use. Also, only three people on earth (max) have any idea who 'Makanops' actually is, which makes it a dumb name for a blog. I'll let you all know when it switches over.