Sept-Oct 2015 Comics and a New Website

I've been drawing loads of comic pages for the last couple of months and it's been great fun.

I started playing around with recording the production. Below is a playlist of me creating layouts for the 8 page sequence.

Here are the final layouts. I'll be pencilling inking and lettering some of them in the next week or so. I've enjoyed the process of editing and uploading these and think I will make some video tutorials in the near future where I'll go into what I am thinking about when doing this sort of thing.

I also finished up the sci fi comic pages I was working on for a pitch. Here's a few of the pages. I love how the grayscale rendering turned out.

Lastly, I got a new website setup. I still need to get a domain for it but I am holding off since I am considering including Character Design and 3D work. Also, it's a bit wonky on mobile devices. I've not quite figured that out yet.

http://gwelsh2000.wix.com/story-artist

Dare 2014 End of Week 2

Having a blast at Dare. I can't tell you how much I enjoy going into "work" and sitting drawing and painting and modelling characters all day. It doesn't feel like work in the slightest.

I'm loving the constant work with low poly characters and have been working out some more tricks in mudbox for texturing them efficiently.

This week I've done our main characters who is now rigged and being animated by Gary, and just about got the first enemy character done. Just have to do the armour for his various levels.

I'm hoping to get to some environment stuff early to mid next week so we can get that loaded into the game and see how it all works.

Here are some extra renders from the second part of this week. 

A week of matte painting

Fun change of pace from all the maya and file management stuff but was still pretty grueling to get through them all.

All of them have some renders for ground and various models for environments that were heavily painted over in photoshop

Some purely by me:

Some by Rebecca Horner that I finished up:

And one by Lauren McLaughlin that I heavily changed:

February Already :S

Ugh rotten week. Got Monday all to myself for workshop texturing then rest of the week was spent dealing with problems. Thankfully, the problems are solved or at least have a plan for dealing with them.

Some renders of the workshop. Just panels on the back wall, roof , tools and monitor displays to do. Maybe another 5-6 hours to go. I really wanted to be done with it on Wednesday. Just noticed that chair looks a bit to clean. Need to sort that tomorrow...

I've a couple of matte paintings to do next so that'll be a change of pace then it's onto the creator. After about an hours work. Here's what I've got so far...

Very much reminding me of 60s Star Trek backgrounds :D

I've got a render sitting for shot 17.3 for a background that's entirely matte painting. Must admit that's a bit intimidating!

More Saltire 3D updates. Got displacement maps working out of zbrush but there are still some major sculpting issues to be addressed, his face is desperately on need of some more detail too. I think the base mesh might also be too low for some of the displacement. May try taking out level 2 from zbrush and working on that going forward.

I'm using UDIM and multi tile uv space for the textures in MARI. The displacement maps were set up using a layered shader in Maya for this.

Got the wee Macho background finished this weekend bar the wee photo of him with Mr Tiddles in the back left. Here's the comp. Macho himself was done by Gary in Flash while the background was done by me in Photoshop.

I also got a bunch of storyboard stuff for various projects formatted but I'll post them next week.

Saltire

I've been dying to post some of this stuff all summer. In the last few months Tone Julskjaer and I have been working like mad on a comic we were commisioned to create about a timeless scotish superhero, Saltire. It's one of the toughest projects I've worked on so far. 

It's very nearly complete! It'll be printed and available of comic shows around Scotland towards the end of October.

Here are some of the character concept pieces I did. I'll post more work as soon as I am able.

Heisenberg

Finished up some freelance work last night late on and couldn't sleep so sketched this . Can't wait for the last season to air!

I'm a bit frustrated that I can't get to any 3d work. All my time at the moment is spent freelancing. 1 Month of it left. Hopefully once we are back for the new semester I can just get stuck in and have no distractions.

BoNp1 colours

Got so tired of not being able to get to my personal work. Powered through a bunch of uni work then sat up all night finishing Book of Nemus page 001. Woohoo! On my way to having it online like I planned at the beginning of the year! Another 10-20 years and I'll have the whole saga finished.

Not sure about the painting over pencils method. I'll give it a few more pages and see if I want to stick with it. I might try and get the first scene done like this and online by the end of summer.

Anyway, here's the page. Need to go collapse into a heap now.

Last post before end of semester.

Almost there! Spent last night putting together half of our production bible for The Divided with Scott. It's looking tasty! Really pleased with it so far. Should get the rest done tonight and be ready to print it as soon as we get the last of our updated storyboards in.

Was a pretty tough job wading through all the concept work we have on the blog. I think we managed to get most of it in.

I kind of got Nuria's Matte painting done and I am pleased with it but I really struggled getting it to the level of finish I wanted. I got to a certain point and started feeling like it wasn't getting better in anymore and I was just adding more and more paint.

Anyway, here it is. I need to see it comped with the 3D animation to see if any other areas need changed. Saw a rough comp with an earlier version yesterday and it looked fine perspective wise, which was a bit of a concern before. The colours might need a little tweaking but are fairly close. What I am concerned about is that the large stormy area in the sky will be the only bit visible when the camera hits street level. Know idea how that will affect the scene. Should find out tonight.

Gary and I had another couple of freelance jobs on as well. One for game art and one character design. It's nice to get these wee jobs for the $$$ but they always appear at the least beneficial times :D

1 week left before hand in. I've still got to fix the storyboards for Papa. They will need some quite extensive changes. I also want to finish blocking out my animation of Riku and Taro for the Maya class and finish painting Book of Nemus page 1. It's getting there slowly but surely. Panel 1 and Panel 3 are more refined from last time. 

I managed to get the paint effects trees concept done for Papa last week. Fairly pleased with how it looks. I reckon with some proper lighting and some good compositing work this method will work nicely for populating the backgrounds of the forest in the film. They are ridiculously fast to render too.

 This one has a bit of photoshop work for the background.

So yeah, hopefully I can get through the tasks I have left before hand in next week. Some long days ahead hehe.

Loads of different stuff!

Easter break. Last 3 weeks before the hand in. Still way behind on my lit review but I think I've got an idea I like and a focus.

I did some fast texture work for the Krokodi animation. Just a few props that were modeled by Gary Spiers. It was fun to see how realistic I could make them look with just textures as they are super low poly models.

I discovered specular maps and think I may have gone a little over board hehe. They took about an hour each if that painting them in Mudbox and Photoshop. These shots are rendered in mental ray but with default lights,

  

  

  

I'm kind of expecting Lilly to come back and tell me they are too detailed for the style they have done their film in but it hasn't happened yet :> 

Texturing is probably going to be one of my specialisms next year still not sure about number two. I am growing to like painting in Mudbox a lot more but i still find it a bit lacking compared to photoshop with respect to adjusting things. 

Actually, I've not looked into whether Mudbox has any of those capabilities so I'll have a look for that but I saw an awesome video for Mari 2.0 which basically looks like photoshop for 3d models. Desperately want a copy to play around with.

I'm also working on a matte painting for the keeper. First time I've done a painting that will need to be really finished in years. I usually just do speed painty stuff as production paintings. Going fairly well so far. The colours are OKed. Need to find a day soon to really go at it and get it to a quite final state. Here's a WIP.

Lastly,  a paint effects tree I made for Pauls film Papa. This is just a test to see if it will look ok doing some trees like this for the background.

I really want Lightbox back on Blogger. Please fix it google!