Vector Art - Old Style Brick Building

Here's what I did at work today. I made a new building for a current project that we can also to add to our isometric vector art library. A turn-of-the-century 3 story brick building with a business at ground level and apartments above.

Diablo III Wizard - WIP #4

Getting closer still. I just need to paint in the detail for the background and populate the scene with a couple more beasts and it'll be done. I might adjust the levels on the carrion bat (one-eyed winged monster) to bring it out more, but it might be fine. I'll look at it later.

Diablo III Wizard - WIPs #2 & #3

I'm happy with the progress I've made on the wizard so far this week, with what little free time I've had. I decided that I didn't like her floor lamp staff; it looked too inadequate and unimpressive. Not "Blizzard" enough. So I made it into a dragon (or wyvern, depending on how much of a geek you are). I like how the staff gets cropped out of frame. Early critiques of this one commented that she was too close to the wall, and I think that's a fair point at this stage, but I think the following WIP fixes that quite a bit.

 Here I've just about finished the shading and texturing on the wizard and started to fill in tone and lighting detail in the background. It's still a long way off, but I think it's a lot closer. I added a foreground creature to balance the composition, and I'll add shading details and rim lighting to it, which will help draw the viewer's eye back to the bottom half of the composition. I also brought her left foot back, which makes the pose more energetic and dynamic.

My Flats channel.

I'm still ambivalent about the process of flatting. It's a common technique with coloring comic books. The idea is to separate areas of color using the lasso tool (anti-alias turned off) and paint bucket. It's a time consuming process but when it's done you have a channel or layer with which you can use the magic wand tool to make selections. This way, if you don't like the color of the pants or something, you can repaint it quickly using broad strokes that won't disturb adjacent areas. However, it does take time and I think it's probably better to not be so careful and just paint over stuff. if you have to repaint areas it makes it more interesting.

Diablo III Wizard - WIP #1

I went away from this one for a while but now it's back. I've worked out the full composition and background. I'll figure out what sort of beasts with which to populate it later. I've worked out a basic color palette and am ready to start painting for real, although I'm still not satisfied with her staff. It reminds me too much of a floor lamp. I'll probably change it to a dragon or something more impressive.

What I Did Today: Micron Scale

We needed an illustration to show how small a micron (1/1000 mm) is. I made this using 3ds max and Photoshop. I painted the hair scale texture in Photoshop and rendered a bent cylinder and rounded box in 3ds max with VRay global illumination. I used a variation of the scale texture as a displacement map, and for the salt crystal I used a bitmap texture as a bump map. The box has a slight refraction. After the render I brought it back into Photoshop and did some paint-over to enhance the highlights, occlusion, and the outer cross-section.

Landscape Speedpainting 1

A one-hour speedpainting, using a freeze frame from the movie Brotherhood of the Wolf as a reference.

Computer Cable Icons

Holy crap, was August 28 my last update?! Jesus Christ, I need to get better at this. I've been drawing and making stuff, but I've been horrible at updating this. Anyway, here are some more isometric vector icons I made today, for a project.