Captain's Cabin

My night classes at Boston University CDIA are coming to a close in just a couple months now. I'll be revisiting some old work in order to polish them up for my portfolio. I'll be going back to the zbrush sculpt of Ian McKellen, finishing another sculpt I haven't even posted here before, focusing on a new environment I'm designing at the moment, and revisiting Commander Shephard's living quarters on the Normandy. I did this over the winter and never posted anything because it wasn't living up to the potential I thought it had. Really what it needs is just some more time invested in it to add the finer details to the scene, clean up the lighting and add some smaller objects to make it feel more lived in. It's so sterile at the moment that I think you can tell it's not done. This was all done for our interior/environment modeling module. 

Porsche Turntable

This is a car model I worked on almost a year ago now, but I finally got around to rendering out a fully lit turntable. Rendered with mental ray and then composited in After Effects. It was a good refresher on render passes and using depth of field. Enjoy!

Tree Guardian

Hey everyone, just thought to drop this here. Most of my time right now is being spent on contract work which I can't post anything from right now, but this doodle is just some loose conceptual work for some tree guardians for Loaded. As you know from my last post, I'm working with RatDog Games at the moment on a game called "Loaded". That name is going to change soon and I'll be sure to mention that when it does! Most of the other stuff I've been doing for the game the past week or so involves level layout for the demo we're putting together right now so I thought I'd hold off on sharing more of that stuff until I've got some nice pretty backgrounds to show everyone. 

I also wanted to just take a second to mention someone who's youtube channel has been a lot of fun to watch lately. I've been spending a lot of time drawing and working in photoshop and I'm always looking for something informational but fun to listen to while I work. Kienan Lafferty is an artist that worked as a splash artist for Riot for quite some time and now he's off working on his own comic series. He's got a great series of fun conversational tutorials on his channel so if you're an artist looking for something to listen/watch to you should check them out here http://www.youtube.com/user/KienanLafferty.

PAX East

I realize this update is super late in the game and I need to vastly improve my art/blog posting abilities but hey, I'm working on it. 

I had the amazing opportunity to be a part of the RatDog Games booth at PAX East a few weeks ago and things went incredibly well. RatDog Games was started a couple years ago by a friend of mine from college and some of his buddies and a while back now they approached me to come on and help out with a new concept that was still in the early stages of development. I'm happy to say that I can show you a few samples of early artwork that I've been doing for the game. The game's working title is "Loaded" and is a 2D side scrolling beat em up RPG. I know, it's a mouthful, but it's a mouthful of awesomeness you gotta admit. As of right now we're planning on publishing to Steam for mac and PC, the Wii U, and PlayStation. We'll be doing a Kickstarter in the next 2 months so keep your eyes open!

A couple things before I give a brief rundown of the few images below. 

1. I'd like to say thank you to everyone that visited the RatDog Games booth at PAX and all the people I met there walking the floor and hanging out after. It was a great experience and it was a ton of fun being surrounded by so many passionate developers and fans. 

2. After being there and meeting so many great people there was one big thing I realized from our conversations that I had been seriously missing out on, Twitter. So, I have now successfully opened and been expertly utilizing a Twitter account. Please feel free to follow me @w_pitzer

The first image is the poster we showed off at PAX East. Again, the title will be evolving as we go.

 This is a screenshot test I did to make sure that the art style is headed in a cohesive direction and that the characters and backgrounds will be different enough that the characters will "pop". Please feel free to comment and critique.

Simple BG sketch from a while back

We actually had a slide show of sketch's and concept stuff but I gotta save some for down the road

Ian Mckellen or Bust

We had some free time to experiment with zbrush so I took a base mesh I had made a while ago in Maya and popped it into zbrush to see what would happen. I've always enjoyed detail work so I had a great time carving out the wrinkles and folds. The next thing I intend to do is paint him up and try out fiber mesh for his hair. The helmet you see here was really just a place holder so I could check myself as I worked to see if the overall shape was working ok.

Barbarian Base Mesh

This is the base mesh for an original character I've been working on in class right now. The body was built in Maya and the head I sculpted in zbrush and then retopologized. Next I'll bring the whole character into zbrush and do all the detail work including adding the his accessories and weapons! I've used Maya quite a bit before but this was my first real attempt at any zbrush work, and it is an amazing application. I found I was able to relax and forget about the engineering aspect of building a character and let myself just sink into the art.

This is the sculpt from zbrush. There's a lot of detail in this first pass that you can't see in the retopologized version up top so I thought I'd include this as well. 

Finished Sci Fi Gun Model

Here is the finished video presentation for the design challenge! The model is 750 quads and all the maps used on it are 512 x 512.