Sketchbook: Pulponite

pulponite

Hey hey. Aspiring character artist / technical artist here. I come from a programming background, trying to make the switch in to the art department. My drawing has come a long way from where I started, and I can program just about anything. I have a lot of learning to do when it comes to 3d modeling, rigging, tool chain scripting, that kinda thing to have real technical artist chops.

Crits are more than welcome!

Starting stuff off with some character design work I did the other day:

pulponite

I'm still trying to figure out what a "Technical Artist" portfolio needs to look like. I decided to at least start brushing up on my windows dev while I figure that out so I put together a small tool today that I've wanted for ages, and might of interest to others. It formats images for posting them online, scaling them down, watermarking them, generates thumbnails, and saves as high quality jpegs. Only saves a minute or two at a time, but it's a minute or two of drudgery I hated.



I have a more detailed post about it here, with links to the program and the github repo if you'd rather build it yourself.

I'm thinking of putting together some kind of 3D asset builder next. Maybe a thing that can put together buildings based on some prefab components, and save out the generated meshes and textures? Is that the sort of thing people would like to see in a Tech Artist portfolio?

pulponite

Been learning Maya the last few days. I followed a few tutorial videos, and now I'm trying to put together a model of the dwarf hammer from the illustration I posted at the beginning of the sketchbook. I'm really glad I uploaded this Sketchfab, because I hit in to a lot of broken geometry that I had to figure out how to fix before I could post this.

Next up is to add the cloth wrap around the body of the hammer from the illustration, then textures/bump map. Then hopefully some really basic rigging and animation to have the sections at the sides of the hammer float about. I should probably also tuck in the ends of the wraps around the handles.

pulponite

I'm very much messing up embedding a sketchfab model. Just going to post it directly after this post. If there's a way to embed it when editing a post I can't figure it out

pulponite

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pulponite

Second WIP of that piece. Slowly getting my head around how Maya works. Took me a fair while to unwrap the UVs for this, the model wasn't put together properly I think - there are too many independent objects, with too many textures. Next one I do I'll be putting a lot more forethought in to making sure that things that are single pieces really are single pieces.

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