Sketchbook: Davey Hintzen

DragonGuard

Hello everyone,

My name is Davey Hintzen. I'm a 3d artist from the Netherlands, currently studying Digital Arts and Entertainment at Howest in Belgium.

The second year recently started and I already got swamped by the workload a bit, so I figured I start a sketchbook to have a place to post/keep track of my progress on both assignments and personal work. My most difficult struggle is keeping up my motivation at times, which ends with me starting a lot of things but never really finishing them, especially when school deadlines come around the corner. I want to change that, so I'm going to approach anything I post here as a promise that I'll finish it to the best of my abilities, and hopefully improve along the way.

DragonGuard

Ok, so I had wanted to post this earlier, but my desk got taken over by cats. Here are some of my work from last year, to indicate the level I'm currently at. Critique is always welcome.

2D:
The assignment was to combine a abandoned church and metro.


3D:

Loren Broach

Both your 2D and 3D work is solid! Keep up the good work

DragonGuard

Loren Broach said:

Both your 2D and 3D work is solid! Keep up the good work

Thank you for the reply, and my apologies for my inactivity, last week was pretty stressful with deadlines.
I have not forgotten my own commitment to this post so I'll be posting some more work I just finished and some WIP. Still need to build the habit of posting in my own and others topics when I have the chance.

Just finished an assignment where we had to analyse Limbos artstyle and design a creature for it. So these are some of my sketches and finals that I handed in. I'm not sure if I really nailed it, my creature is pretty fantastical so I'm not sure how well it fits, but we were free to do what we wanted, so I tried to just make something cool.

Sketches (not very inspired, I know):


My creatures ended up being fairly bulky in silhouette, which didn't read to well. I ended up taking inspiration from seahorse skeletons and the translucency of deep-sea fish.

Final creature design:

Gameplay:

Final presentation:

DragonGuard

Just finished my PBR practice. CnC very much welcome as this is my first time doing something like this (other than making some individual materials).
Tools allowed were Photoshop, Xnormal and Unreal4. The initial clean normalmap was provited.

The text on the screen blinks and scrolls and is done with a single tga which includes the different texts in the RGB channels and the alpha for the emission map. I tried to go a bit DOOMy with it.

maps:

sketchfab link:
https://sketchfab.com/models/7b986fafd58547daaf438bf3a8bee3d1

Tomiajayi

Hey tha'ts a famicom not a snes!! :P (just kidding, nice model!)

DragonGuard

Thanks

I Just finished the inking of one of my drawings, based on the Vigilant Hearts: The Great War. It's a WW1 game with a pretty distinct art style, where everything has this handdrawn, slightly crooked style. Still need to do the shading, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. I still need to put some work into my UT4 level.


Also finished the highpoly for a c206 25pounder case crate. Will be doing the lowpoly for it somewhere next week. Will post some images of that later, since my max2017 keeps crashing and is overall buggy for unknown reasons.
EDIT:
Finished my shading of the drawing. It's not 100% how I would like it, but it was all I had time for. Had a bit of a hard time with the shadows, since the game only uses a flatbase color with a single shadowvalue and no light.

DragonGuard

Ok. So I'm working on the lowpoly for my British WW2 25pounder C206 shellcase box. However I'm having difficulties deciding what to model in vs baking to the normalmap on the lid of the box. It has these stamped rounded shapes that break up the silhouette, but are fairly complex. I'm not sure if I should just bake it to a flat plane of somehow reduce the detail, but keep the shape. If so, how to best approach this.

The round protrusions can be baked to the normal, but the other shape is what is causing me issues (see green lines).

DragonGuard

Ok, I decided to just go for a flat top. First pass at the Lowpoly with normalmap in Unreal. There's still some issues i need to figure out how to solve, like the shading  on the clip part. I used symmetry on that and it shades wrong.

Edit:

Ok, so I have this shading issue in model somewhere and I'm not sure what's causing it (the wire).
It used symmetry but is welded with the UV's offset. No inverted faces. It's a single smoothing group.


Edit2:
I got it fixed by using an Xform reset.

DragonGuard

Currently also working on a portrait. Still very much wip on every front, so CnC is very welcome. Still pretty new to painting.

DragonGuard

Update on my portrait.
guy got a lot fatter, but i think my perspective is more accurate. Not sure if I overdid his bulk.

dodeqaa

Nice, diggin that golden age illustrator stylin!  Bulk looks good to me, shadows could be closer to reds I feel. Also, you might  consider tapering shape of beard to the front, checking design against the shape of the helmet. 

Lyno

Good job Davey!
For the last character I would suggest to put smaller areas of focus on the beard again. Little strands of hair to break the overall soft and very generic feeling (a bit like you had in the previous update).
I'm also not sure where the light is coming from? Maybe you can put his eyes in half light / half shadow because of the hat (I'm not sure if that's allowed).
The cap on the hat is going more downwards on the reference as well.

DragonGuard

dodeqaa said:

Nice, diggin that golden age illustrator stylin!  Bulk looks good to me, shadows could be closer to reds I feel. Also, you might  consider tapering shape of beard to the front, checking design against the shape of the helmet. 

Hey, thanks for the CnC. Really appreciate it. I've gotten feedback about my shadows from multiple people so I tried to do something with it. It's supposed to be semi-realistic, inspired by the golden age illustrations, so that's a pretty large complement although compared to the real deal it's still a long way off.

Lyno said:

Good job Davey!
For the last character I would suggest to put smaller areas of focus on the beard again. Little strands of hair to break the overall soft and very generic feeling (a bit like you had in the previous update).
I'm also not sure where the light is coming from? Maybe you can put his eyes in half light / half shadow because of the hat (I'm not sure if that's allowed).
The cap on the hat is going more downwards on the reference as well.

Hey Lyno, thanks for dropping by I've worked on the beard and the overall readability of the shapes some more. For the protrait I'm trying to base me ff of old paintings, with the light coming in at about a 30degree angle from our left and slightly from above. We were free to choose our own lighting, and honestly speaking, the one from my face reference would have probably worked better for highlighting the features, but then it would have been straight up copying. I wanted to challenge myself to better grasp the shapes the face is build up from by picking a different lighting setup.
As for the cap, you are right as well, but I choose to change that in favour of showing the eyebrows peaking out below them, since they add so much to the expression of the face.

This is what I currently have:


My deadline is Thursday, so I still have a day to work on it. I still need to detail the leather of the helmet and I dislike the way his left shoulder piece looks. Other than that I'm quite happy how it looks.
It's still a far cry from where I want to be, but it's progress.

This is the final version I handed in:

I didn't change much any more from the previous one, but added some details to the hat. Could still use some work, but this is what I have time for.

Winstone88

These look great! the bulky/fatter look works as it shows strength

DragonGuard

Winstone88 said:

These look great! the bulky/fatter look works as it shows strength

Thanks for the comment

This week has been extremely busy so I haven't really updated, so here's a small dump of everything I'm working on. As always, feedback much appriciated. Everything shown is still WIP.

Prop I'm working on. Finished the highpoly, lowpoly and my normal bake. today added my first base materials. Took quite some time to get them right. still need to add paint, grease, grime and other localisation like scratches and such. We are limited to using unreal and photoshop so progress is rather slow, since I'm also still making a lot of the materials first.


Alien character I'm drawing/painting. The idea is that it's some kind of charlatan/seer, set on Mos Eiley.


Also working on an UT4 level. We need to use a modular workflow and were tasked to start blocking ut one of our maps bsp rooms with meshes. I doubth (and hope) it won't look like this for long anymore. Not really happy with the colors/lighting yet, but it's still very, very much WIP.

DragonGuard

A lot has happened recently, so this will be a bit of a dump. Tons of deadlines and the exams just ahead. I want to keep track of my examwork progress, so I figured I post what I did up until now first.

Finished my Melee weapon assignment for Game Art Pipeline. I made a German ww2 Trench shovel. Screenshot from Unreal 4, also posted it on Sketchfab for anyone interested. Uses the metalness PBR workflow. Modelling and baking done in 3dsmax and textured in photoshop.


model

Finished a small assignment in which we had to analyse and emulate an art style, in our case we did creaturebox, so I did a little robot guy for that. There's some clunky stuff with it, since I went in back in and changed the scaling on some things (like his foot, which is awkwardly close to his torch now), also the perspective isn't 100% all the way through. First lineart I did in Photoshop, so struggled a bit with that.



Next finished an assignment for Character Design class. We had to design a humanoid creature that you could encounter in MosEisley from Star Wars. We had to do a load of thumbs of which our teacher would pick the one we had to do. His pick wasn't what I had initially hoped for, but I think it turned out ok in the end. Struggled quite badly with the back view.



Also worked some more on my UT level, Everything is modular and uses a single Trim texture. Ran a bit short on time for this milestone, since  I wasn't pleased with my previous results, so about a week before I went back in and remodelled most of it. Because of this some parts aren't unwrapped yet and I only have flat materials on it atm, no dirt/scratches or real material definition yet.  Also still lacking smaller detail, just have the big shapes in mainly, but overall I'm a lot happier with the result so far.


Lastly I'm working on a few new things. We got a new character design assignment for which we had to paint our zodiac as a goddess. In my case Aries. Only have the rough color block in and pose sketch yet, still a lot to do. Again, had to do thumbs based on our research of the subject and the teacher choose a thumb for us to finish. Again not my primary choice. Had hoped to do a more badgirl/badass kind of painting, but he ended up picking the youthful/flowergirl thumb.
Heavily WIP,  I bashed a number of photos together to get me started for the initial background.



Lastly I started working on the Highpoly for my GameArtPipeline assignment. Doing a Bolex H16 camera.


Not much to show yet for this, only been blocking in some of the main body shapes and started on the side panel.

As always CnC always welcome and appriciated. Busy times ahead so prob won't be too active for a while again until after my exam assignments are done. Will try and post some progress work every now and then though.

DragonGuard

Finished my character painting. Really struggled with this one and glad it's "done" (deadline tomorrow). A number of things could still use some improvement and I deff. need to practice and study more. Did learn a lot from it though.  Also had wanted to let the flowers return in the environment, but it was rejected and I was told to keep the environment as monochrome as possible and make the character stand out.

DragonGuard

Exams passed and the next semester started so I'm getting swamped with assignments again. I managed to finish my camera model and presentation during my break though. Finalized it today.

Also posted righter ress screenshots and additional images on my artstation.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Y6LPw

DragonGuard

Started working on a sword, textures will be handpainted diffuse only. Quite happy ho the model turned out, albeit maybe a bit highpoly.

DragonGuard

Finished up my Sword. Still would like to improve a for things and give it a nice small presentation scene, but the next assignments are always underway, so no time for that right now.

model