Sketchbook: Martin "VertexBee" Punchev
polycounter lvl 15
Hi, great people from the polycount community ! 
I've decided to open a sketchbook here, so you are probably going to see characters, creatures and sketches from me as I journalize my studies in this thread.
Crits are welcome, guys !
I've decided to open a sketchbook here, so you are probably going to see characters, creatures and sketches from me as I journalize my studies in this thread.
Crits are welcome, guys !
Replies
It was a great practice! I've learned some things about the bear and the warthog skulls from images I found on this great site www.skullsunlimited.com I have a question, though, does anybody knows why the eyesocket of these animals appears to be open from the backside ? In humans the protrusions of the frontal bone and the zygomatic arch forms a complete cavity , but in these animals it looks like they can poke an eye ball if something hit them from behind. (that piece of information could be life saving if you found yourself surrounded with wild warthogs from hell that want to beat the crap out of you and you have no other weapons than your bare hands and a needle !
Actually lets first start with the zombies.
Below are the two speed sculpts I used as base for the thumbnails. I used a ref for the young man from 3dsk and then tryed to make his older version. My objective was to explore ways to make wrinkles very fast, and basically what I discovered is a technique where first you need to polypaint and plan the wrinkles with a PenA brush ,then convert this to a mask and simply inflate it.
Here is an animation showing the transition and effects of age on this poor fellow:
Finally here is a sketch of a sci-fi mutant miner. I didn't have any particular idea when doodling it , but at some point a colleague of mine pass over and said it looks as a miner, so ...a mutant miner I call it
Happy Holidays everybody !
@Kot_Leopold, 10x a lot mate, the cool thing about polypainting the wrinkles first is that is very easy to paint and erase till you are satisfied with the design of the wrinkles.
The new thing learned today is a method of creating basic layer of skin pores - first you need to apply default small scale surface noise to the mesh and then blur it out using a special smooth brush called the "smooth peaks" brush. For this tip I have to give the credit to the guy that made this video: [ame="
Ive recently attended Bryan Wynias course and if you have seen mine gallery page lately there is one new portfolio piece called Deep One. It is a creature design based on the description of what H.P. Lovecraft calls a deep one in his novel Shadow over Innsmouth.
The course was a blast ! Bryan definitely have a unique lay of working and did put a lot of effort in his course. The three weeks of creature creation , following his instructions and videos were amazing experience and the best thing is that I heard he will update it soon with ZB4 R2 stuff and more. I recommend it to everyone that have interest in designing creatures and wants to bring their game to a higher level. Although I think to take as most as you can from the course, one must have a basic understanding of human anatomy first.
What follows are some images showing my progress on the deep one throughout the course. First are the three speed sculpts that I started with.
Than I had to use them as a base for the next stage the thumbnailing. Using the liquify , puppet warp and a simple round brush, the aim was to generate different ideas and push the design as far as possible. Initially I really liked number 10 from the image below, but decided to go with 8 because it fit the character description better.
Using thumbnail number 8 as mine design choice, I refined one of the speed sculpts to resemble better the concept. Details and alphas came after that:
The next step was to polypaint the creature. Here is a diffuse only shot to show you the patterning After I finished the coloring job I step back from the computer and realized that this character with fit ridiculously well in environment where it is surrounded by watermelons he will have the perfect camouflage.
And finally the rendering stage. It involved lots of render passes, experimenting with blending modes and photoshop manipulation.
Here is something else I did to chill out while doing these In the book Shadow over Innsmouth these creatures live in abandoned human houses after a while of trying to think how a typical innsmouth fellows look like , I began to imagine what these guys do in their normal day by day live. After all they dont chase foreigners every day, so what do they in their houses away from the visitors eyes ? Below is a typical innsmouth family , the father, his wife and son (obsessed with his favourite cartoon hero).
Cheers!
Your work btw, is pro. So is your sense of humor!
The thumbnailing process I had to thank Bryan Wynia for. It is really good and fun way to make variations and a quick too. Definitely try it out!
This practice was very helpful. I tried to remember where the peak points and the valleys in the silhouette are located as well as some important angles like those of the ankles, the calf muscles , the forearm and so on. Notice the forward trust of the figure in profile view.The rhythm in the cranial, thoracic and pelvis masses. Also if you cast vertical lines you will see how the individual features align with each other.
so creative
friends of mine did to test out unity engine. Stay tuned for a bigger and better presentation of it soon !
are more of a jungle - monkey - birdish types of dragon, and yes, as you expected , the majority of them don't brief fire, sorry if I disappointed you.
I don't know why but the jungle theme couldn't go out of my head so many of them are dragons that don't fly but just glide from tree to tree, hang from
trees like monkeys and so on. For the gliding idea I was particularly inspired from an episode of BBC's "Planet Dinosaur" (great documentary
From the bunch below I really like the balloon dragon idea (thumbnail number 5). I imagine it when the air sack on his back is full and he lift off the ground, by strongly swinging his tail up and down he can gain height. The other favourites of mine are number 3 , 7 (the flying squirrel dragon
I had some real fun doing these, but I enjoyed the sketched ones more than the pure black silhouettes. The abstract method of thumbnail generation also didn't feel very comfortable for me.
Here is a further exploration in 3d based on the thumbnail number 8, done for a bit more than an hour.
mostly just posting in here so i dont lose track of this thread though, very informative !
Due to some poor job on gathering good reference I couldn't pull off the skeletons with good understanding as I wish I could.
Actually I found only two crappy photos of rhino's skeletons and combined what I saw on them with the information from two anatomy plates
of cows and bulls. I should definitely spend more time on animal anatomy and revisit those studies once I have a better grasp on it.
If someone can recommend good resource or have a link or two where I can find better reference, please, share it! Crits are welcome too,
if you see something terribly wrong don't hesitate to comment it.
(click the images to see high-res)
Apart from that I did few render practices following Matt Kohr (ctrlpaint.com) tutorials. I want to thank him for creating this particular video tutorial <a "Basic Photoshop Rendering", it is nicely explained, don't require lots of your time and it is reasonably priced!
Here are my studies( click for larger ):
I started them from the thumbnails that I've posted not so long ago.
This guy came from thumbnail number 9. Except the wings it doesn't feel very dragonish, but anyway, I had lots of fun sketching it out:
OMG, what is this poor creature below supposed to be ?!
What to say...if you didn't guess by now, this is a monkey dragon. Wow, that was a suprice:D He doesn't fly, nor he briefs fire, but instead has an array of horns sticking out from his head .They are actually pipes, which helps him to make really loud noises ( similarly to the parasaurolophus ). He has some remaining of feathers on his sides, which are far from enough for flying, but they gives us a clue that his predecessors (the flying monkey dragon:D) could actually fly. I started it from thumbnail number 15.
Here are another two weird fellows.The top one was intended to be a water creature, but except the fins at the end of the tail it doesn't feel like it is supposed to live in water. The bottom one is a quick overpaint to test and idea that came from a good buddy of mine, Soulsurvivor. Now it matches better the water theme and it does look capable of swimming , but still I don't like it, especially with those enormous arms. Maybe I'll give it another try , starting from scratch. Thumbnail number 8.
And lastly what I called the flying squirrel dragon. Looks more birdish, but it was inspired by looking some photos of a flying squirrels, at least part of the pose came from there.Thumbnail number 7.
Cheers!
This below is a butterfly dragon (but probably "bat" suits him better). It came out as an experiment. I wanted to explore a new technique involving 3d modeling for generating interesting shapes. You can see example of this process at the bottom of this post. About the dragon, the long transparent extrusions that looks like butterfly wings are just for peecocking, only the males have them at extreme size to increase their chance of attracting a female. This species has extremely well developed ears that helps them to track their pray using echolocation.
The guy below is some sort of insect looking dragon. I started it from a squashed version of the 3d model of the balloon dragon that you can see at the bottom of this post. I'll get to this technique later.
I'm not happy at all how the balloon dragon sketch turned out. I really like the thumbnail and the initial idea of how the dragon will fly by inhaling a lot of air and filling up his back sack with hot air and gas. Maybe I'll do another take on him. Here it is how it looks right now, not very cool.
Now, here are two images showing the process I told you about. In the first image you can see how the butterfly dragon started. I've take one abstract thumbnail that I did not so long ago and mapped it onto a flat 3d plane. Then I cut out some shapes and extruded them and finally deformed the whole plane using FFD box and soft selection. The interesting thing about this is that by moving the camera around the object you can get with new and interesting shapes and they will be in correct perspective which is a nice bonus.
To wrap up this post here is a turnround animation showing a similar experiment, this time using the balloon dragon thumbnail as a base, fleshing it out in 3d as quickly as possible and posing it. The insect dragon above came from this 3d model with a little bit of squashing and deforming.
I would love to hear your opinion and critiques
Cheers!