Enter the Dragon (or, insert your own, more clever phrase here)

So, as promised, here's some renders of a piece I did for Casting House. It's basically a dragon design meant to go on the side of a ring. It's all shiny and stuff. In the future, I'll probably be posting more stuff from work if it's something I think looks good. I'm sure there will be others that won't. Ha.

Credit to Steven Howell for the actual ring that the design sits on.

Details, details, details.

I must say, I really put my foot on the gas for this one. It went WAY faster then I thought it would. The detail pass for zbrushing the motorcycle is complete.

Rust, scratches, dents, welding, fading, it's all here. It's nice to know that's one major step is out of the way. I think that it was a lot easier for me to do this then adding the clean structural detail, because it's what I'm more used to doing. But, both passes come together to form a pretty solid whole, i must say. A fair warning: there's a lot of pics this time. Also, if you have a phobia of tires, I wouldn't scroll down. You've been warned.



















I tried to have certain elements that repeated throughout all the pieces to help unify it all. Bolts, a lot of scratching, and welded parts are examples of this. I tried to make each object feel like it's own thing, but I also wanted all the pieces to fit nicely together. I also tried to lean away from making every single piece beat up all to hell. You won't see most of these cleaner parts, mainly because I felt they wouldn't be interesting to put up here. Nevertheless, they help out the bike as a whole.

Next up:

1) UV layout
2) normal map baking
3) setup in unreal
4) texturing
5) screen capturing, rendering, assembling for portfolio page

The UV layout and normal baking will take some time, so you might not hear from me too soon. I might post my UV layouts just for kicks, but it's German to most people. So we'll see i guess.


Also, some random stuff in my life:

I'm proud to say that I was promoted at work! I will now no longer be supporting jewelry models. I'll be helping to actually make them from now on. The best part of it is that I'll be using Maya, Photoshop, and Zbrush to do so. So that'll be awesome. I might post up a particular piece I did. So look out for that.

I beat Portal 2. It's awesome. You should play it. Like, NOW. Valve also published a digital "book" that shows what went into making it. It's pretty rad.

My parents are coming up to see me next weekend, and they're bringing me some awesome stuff. A couch, my two cats Sam and Jake, my Nintendo 64, and an air conditioner.

:)

Milestones are nice.

Yes they are. Whenever I hit one, my motivation level goes through the roof. Hopefully, I'll have enough to get me through the rest of this project. Definitely feeling some proper project fatigue with this one.

My friend Eric was kind enough to let me use his beefy ass computer so that I could actually access the sidecar file. I was able to get in and separate it into multiple, smaller sized files. Props to him for saving me the trouble of having to redo the damn thing. :)

So, just as promised, here are the remaining pics of the sidecar.

Rough detail pass, here I come.