Sketchbook: Tony Sladky

tonysladky

Evening all,

Starting a new project (well, starting to document it at least). Thought it might be handy to post progress here as well as all my other usual places. Critique is welcome.

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So, what I'm working on right now is an Italian Deli in UDK. For now, I'm focusing all of my short attention span on generating the props, the idea being that, worst-case scenario, if I don't finish by the time I'm done with school, I can at least have a page of props in my portfolio if I don't manage to get the actual level looking good by then.

Reference of sorta what I'm going for: http://www.tonysladky.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ItalianFoodDeli1.jpg

First round of props as of 4/9/11:


Focusing on more of the hard surface stuff right now, partly because the big props I'll need to start blocking in the space are all the hard surface ones, partly because I love hard surface, but also because I just haven't been brave enough yet to start trying to learn zBrush to do all the delicious organic surfaces.

Looking forward to getting more stuff up here, probably showing off older stuff as I fix it up to try and get them good enough for my portfolio.

snow

Hi tonysladky,

Shapes are looking solid. I however feel you have many areas you can cut down pollies on- thats if these are supposed to be the game ready versions. If they're not, add a lot of supporting edges and starting smoothing these guys!!

tonysladky

Ooops, forgot to mention that these were WIP hi-res versions. Thanks for the feedback.

tonysladky

Been working on prettying up some older stuff for my portfolio in anticipation of recruiter season. Feedback is appreciated.

tonysladky

While I'm at it, an update on the deli project (been a bit slow with trying to deal with portfolio stuff). Once again, everything's sort of mid-res block-in. I fully intend to take the detail passes even higher res and bake that down to meshes far lower-res.





This is also my first attempt at using Zbrush, so, if there's any newbie mistakes that are so glaringly obvious that you can find them just from this one screenshot, by all means, point them out.

tonysladky

Not really sure where else to ask this, but I figure I can't go wrong, though it may not reach all of the audience I'm looking for, with asking in my own thread.

So, I'm on the verge of graduating, and since I know, late bloomer that I am and even later to figure out what I really do and don't like doing, I've probably got a lot of work to do before I have a hire-able portfolio. Now, since I'll be leaving behind the resources of my school, I won't have access to Renderman anymore for those nice AO renders of my Hi-Poly work, and, unless I misread something, MentalRay would appear to be less free and included with my copy of Maya than I was led to believe.

What do other modelers around here use (ideally free or very cheap) to show off your Hi-Res versions, or do you just tend to count on it showing up in the baked down maps and not even bother showing off the Hi-Res models except as WIP screenshots?

wake

I'm afraid I don't have a good answer for you (I'm a 2d guy primarily), but you'll be better off posting about this in one of the higher traffic areas like Technical Talk or General Discussion, though first I'd just do a search about this kind of stuff seeing as how there are a lot of people going through similar issues to this. Good luck.

tonysladky

After a summer of shameful procrastination and projects started without being finished, I feel like I should at least post some of what I've been working on:

First, an old LeMat Revolver WIP. My first attempt at modeling a weapon:
http://www.tonysladky.com/2011/05/23/lemat-revolver-process/

Next, the progress I've made on the Deli over the summer:
http://www.tonysladky.com/2011/08/25/deli-process-reducing-uving-and-baking/

Finally, I was contacted for an art test in response to my looking for work post in the freelance forum. I was tasked with the creation of a robot arm like you might find in a factory, based off a concept sketch from the Company (they asked that I not mention them by name, so they will henceforth be treated with mysterious, slightly paranoid awe like the Weyland-Yutani corporation from the Alien movies). In 3 days, I went from never having opened Max to creating a pretty decent model. After I ran out of time on the art test, my enthusiasm for finishing the project steeply dropped off. This is the result:
http://www.tonysladky.com/2011/08/19/crane-arm/

tonysladky

Trying to make more use out of this thread and get into quick exercises to get a better sense for things that I'm still painfully new at, like Sculpting:



About a half-hour of Sculpting (and another 15 minutes trying to find the solution) based on Philipk's Wood Sculpting tutorial. I'm at a bit of a brick wall in that he takes advantage of Zbrush's Projection Master feature to start building up the wood grain, and I don't have Zbrush access, so I'm hoping to find some help figuring out how a Sculptris user would go about adding in that wood grain and getting those nice sharp cracks and relatively smooth surfaces like he does.

Shmaba

I'd say that you can easily turn a photograph of old wood into a normal map, but if it's that hand crafted texture feel you want then getting the feeling of old wood comes out of those splits in wood that looks almost like a knife was cut deep into it. Those markings always follow the grain of the wood and it's probably best to make sure you get good variation in the thickness of the marks while still keeping them fairly crisp.

tonysladky

Yeah, I'm going for the actual sculpting experience as A) sculpting is something I've been avoiding for a long time and would like to finally get decent at and I just tried sculpting up a chunk of wood and it didn't turn out very good, so I figured I'd go back to the basics and start hitting the tutorials, but I haven't seen many Sculptris-based tutorials, so I'm stuck trying to translate Zbrush tips into "Zbrush lite".

I was really shooting for the "how", tips from more experienced sculptors and the like. I know what I'll be going for (the look you just described), but I don't know how to efficiently achieve that look...

tonysladky

Couple other quick sculpts done while following Sascha Henrichs' Mudbox Techniques for Props series of tutorials.