Sketchbook: NKonstantino

nkonstantino

Hey there! I've been lurking for a while now, posting here and there, and decided I'd finally start posting things as I start to work on them.

I'm going into my senior year of college at WPI and spending the summer teaching the basics of 3d Modeling and Animation to high schoolers, so this thread will be filled with mostly my summer practice stuff on the computer until I find a scanner for my sketch pad.

I'm also doing a lot of study out of Bridgman's anatomy book that I'll eventually get around to uploading pictures of as well.

So yeah, I'll start with some early concept work I have for a female fighter.
Kinda making her a little "punk" style. Her weapon of choice is a chain, which I'll make sure to include in the next batch of drawings. :P



Critiques, suggestions, comments, questions, ANYTHING is welcome!

oskarreftel

The image is kinda small, so it's a little hard to really get into things, but I think her right arm is too long. The muscles on her shoulder go way too far down and in combination with how her hand is turned it kinda looks like the shoulder is dislocated. :P

You've got some good posing and curves going on with the legs, although I get the feeling her left foot has been pushed too far back in the perspective. I like the top versions the most. The lower one has lost some of those nice curves on the legs, mostly around the right knee.

I think you should do a version of her holding the chain, to give us a feeling of how she might use it. Since it's her weapon of choice it will probably be a big part of her character in a game. Some cool action pose wouldn't hurt either!

Lastly, work some more with the shading and get some values and colors in there. Since you don't have a lot of line art to compensate for the lack of values (light and shadow), it's kinda hard to interpret some of the shapes. A quick way just to try color schemes out in photoshop is to use overlay layers, selective color and so on. Jason Chan has made some videos about rendering concepts for characters in photoshop that I found very useful.

I hope I'm not coming off as a douche!

nkonstantino

oskarreftel wrote: »

The image is kinda small, so it's a little hard to really get into things, but I think her right arm is too long. The muscles on her shoulder go way too far down and in combination with how her hand is turned it kinda looks like the shoulder is dislocated. :P

You've got some good posing and curves going on with the legs, although I get the feeling her left foot has been pushed too far back in the perspective. I like the top versions the most. The lower one has lost some of those nice curves on the legs, mostly around the right knee.

I think you should do a version of her holding the chain, to give us a feeling of how she might use it. Since it's her weapon of choice it will probably be a big part of her character in a game. Some cool action pose wouldn't hurt either!

Lastly, work some more with the shading and get some values and colors in there. Since you don't have a lot of line art to compensate for the lack of values (light and shadow), it's kinda hard to interpret some of the shapes. A quick way just to try color schemes out in photoshop is to use overlay layers, selective color and so on. Jason Chan has made some videos about rendering concepts for characters in photoshop that I found very useful.

I hope I'm not coming off as a douche!

Not at all! I'd go as far as to even thank you for your comments and suggestions!
This is exactly the kind of direction I was looking for.

I'm doing a second pass over the ideas in these concepts right now and using a different pose. I'll put more effort into getting that shading in there since I don't think I'm capable of strong line art.

I'll break from that and look over Jason's videos.

nkonstantino

Okay! This is what I've come up with for a more or less finalized concept for the character. I started working on an action shot of her too.

Her weapon is an over sized locket that she throws around and can be used to anchor her into a spot. Her other option is to wrap the chains around her wrist(s) along the grooves of her gauntlet and use them to increase the weight behind her punches.

I'm going to be dumping old art, sketches, and animations I've done since I have the time now, so yeah. Lots of content that I hope I can switch out with better quality work.

oskarreftel

Her hips are too far up in relation to her crotch. Here's a paintover of what I mean (more like lasso-tool-over :P).

Shoulders and torso look good!

nkonstantino

Oh, you're completely right on that. I knew something looked off.
Thanks for the paint lasso over! :P
I'm starting her model soon, I just need to get back into the swing of things.
-Nick

nkonstantino

Made a quick concept front/side view of this fish/leech/creature that is in Sparr's "Evolution" Collab topic.

I'll have it eating my Betta fish from Jacque's Bootcamp Week 1 topic:


I'm still trying to fix the scanner to upload my physical sketchbook too, I'm just getting distracted as I work more on the computer.

Maybe I'll just break and photograph those things instead.

nkonstantino

I'm not moving too quick on these things, huh?
I'll probably be doing a lot of low poly work in the coming weeks as I'll be stuck on my laptop. So probably lots of animals and animations. For now, though, I want to finish up the "evolution" thing I've affectionately named "scaryfish", which is resembles less of a fish and more of a headcrab/giant leech with claws and fins. In ZBrush and all that stuff. This is just a screengrab after I clicked the BPR button.

nkonstantino

Heyo! Haven't posted in... much longer than I would have liked. But I'm back at school now, so I have time to concentrate and study, and lots of work will be done soon, as well as [semi?]daily practice things.

I did actually "finish" that fish-thing a while ago. Although it really just means I didn't want to work with it anymore. X_X I get too impatient.


And tonight I start my daily practice sculpts/drawing/studies/whatever.
This was 30 minutes, and I finally made an eye I didn't hate.
Small victories, I guess? I'll definitely be doing face studies for a little while at least.

nkonstantino

Okay guys, here is where things are starting to get serious.







I have a little basemesh done for the character I have in the 3rd post, and I'm going to be spending all of my time in the next week or so getting her nice a feminine and sexy and cool looking, hopefully with some helpful input from you guys and/or my professors because I have serious doubts that I'll be able to do this(at least very well) on my own. @_@

(The hair and armbands were just temp pieces because my programmers wanted a temporary model for the character for them to use for testing purposes, I plan to sculpt all that out while rigorously studying Hazz's little process.)

All this on top of more studies in both 3d and 2d though. So hopefully it all clicks for me sometime soon.

nkonstantino

I put a good amount of work into studying some female figure and toiling away at my model and I guess it is starting to take shape.



Then I started putting the clothes on and gave it a little poly-paint to see how it looked.

...It could be worse.

I'm hoping once I get proper textures, eyes, hair, and accessories on her I won't hate it as much.



Ugh. Gotta keep pushing through though, I can only go up from here.
Feel free to throw anything my way that might help me.

Note: Hands are going to have to be built separately, because at some point the symmetry on the model was displaced (No idea how it happened, but it did.) and it ended up making half the model slightly off from the other half. So yeah. I dunno.

nkonstantino

I made a Jupiter Djinn for funsies. Really pushed it to get the tris as low as possible, ended up somewhere around 950 or so.

With any luck, it'll make it into a Super Smash Brothers Brawl Mod, which is when I'll apply proper alpha channels to it, since I forget how Brawl has theirs set up.