Lee Greatorex Photo/3D blog

I had the weekend free to do some sculpting but ended up getting not far with it. Sometimes clay or Zbrush doesn't want to play. I didn't want to waste the complete weekend though so tried my hand at some quick concepts/ portraits.

2D/painting is not my forte but I've grown further understanding in it based on my own inspirations. Traditional skills are very important so always good to practice them even if it's not your particular strong suit.

Above: after watching an incredible video based on Dune concept art creation I was inspired to make my own 'industrial planet' concept design. High in the smoggy clouds overlooking a neighbouring moon. 45 min doodle and ended up using part of 1 of my photos for the moon in the background. The emphasis was on blending colours and providing some depth in the composition.


Above: Monk: tried to be subtle with this one on the colouring/shading. Using photos as reference on the other screen just for lighting the face. I'm happy with this but liquify saved me a number of times!

Below: Noir: Tried a different style as I wanted the contrasting tones from the rim and shadows to shine through. It didn't work great due to out of practice scaling/sketching but for the bold style I just worked with a duplicated later which I then cut out, overlaying the painted layer on top for a stylised look.


Overall I'm happy with these, each one not taking too long (all under 1hr each, the industrial concept being under 45 mins!). Each of these I tried to make an emphasis to try something new but add colour balance and blending along the way. Liquify is a great tool if you're not too comfortable/not that well practised in drawing facial proportions and I think over I'll need to use it less and less.

This week I've done a bit of everything. Drawing in photoshop, sculpting in Zbrush and working in Super Sculpey polymer clay.


 Clay: I spent about 3-4 hours on this guy so far. It's my second go with super sculpey and it's great fun! For the eyes I used cheap pearl beads from a craft shop. I am still working on the shape the aluminium gives me underneath when I build the armature.

 Photoshop/2D: These were both done in photoshop.  I added a filter using snapseed on the ipad for the demon.


Above: 'High Demon' based on the sculpture by the Shiflett Brothers (minus the wings!)
Below: Still going through Casey Love's design and sculpting video on Stan Winston school. It's improving my concepting a lot and I'm enjoying just sketching in Photoshop now. 






Finally this wasn't done this week but I completely forgot to upload it on here. This is a torso based on Scott Eaton's anatomy course. It's a course I'm really interested in taking in the future so wanted to see if I could get to some level of anatomical understanding before.



The timelapse of it can be seen here;

I did these in the lead up week to Pacific Rim (after watching it I can't recommend it enough, go see it!). They were all done within about an hour and a half. I even tried some 2d monster sketches in photoshop (I haven't done 2d stuff for literally years!). It was great fun and will do a few more themes like this in future:

Tools used: Zbrush+Photoshop - Wacom Intous 3

Above: This was the first one. Like an evil dinosaur-tortoise head. I tried basing the first 3 kaiju on animals loosely.

Below: This one is kind of a rat-shark. I didn't really know where to go with this one but wanted something with huge teeth! The timelapse and turntable is also below



Above: A bird based one. Wanted to make a beak. This ended up looking like a smaller monster due to the humanoid proportions. The making of is below (minus the beak as they are separate subtools). The video shows more of a dinosaur looking base for the model (kind of looks cooler now I look at it without the beak)


Below: This was the last of the Zbrush sculpts. This was the only one done pretty much directly after watching the movie. I tried going for the smaller eyes closer together and the huge jaw. The parts aren't fully defined and I think the over the nose jaw gives it a bit more comic/cartoony look.


Below are 2 sketches done in photoshop, still under an hour. These were done while going through one of the Stan Winston school courses based on digital to practical design. Explaining very basic and simple techniques just to get some characters roughed out for sculpting in clay.

You can check the full course here. I can't recommend those courses enough



I hope these are enough to get others doing some monster drawing/sculpting, go watch Pacific Rim if you haven't already! Next post I'll review some of the books I got in a recent art book haul!

I've been busy with building and launching my new website. It is now up and you can check it here!

It will just have my photography work on there but I still have a keen interest in sculpting. Over the past few weeks and months I've been doing some 1-2 hr crunches taking inspiration from the Lunch Crunch group created by Danny Williams. It has really picked up there with nearly 1000 users now.

Here are some of the recent crunches done by me. These aren't great but I find restricting time down to 1-2 hrs I get more productive work done than if I spend hours on it.


 Above: a head sculpted in abut an hour. Got the basic form in a sphere and worked on a non symmetrical sculpt. Insert multimesh curves used for easy cables
Below: A torso sculpt done by adding major muscle forms as dynameshed spheres and cylinders. It bulked it up quite a bit so maybe a good technique for a comic style action figure.




Above: An alien sculpted originally from a broken mannequin. I added arms and the thighs with insert cylinder. As it was a dynamesh with project on a lot of detail could be kept.
Below: Here was the forward history of it to show the original error and carrying on from there (just in case other people find they have times they feel nothing is going right, it is always worth carrying on to see what you get!)




The above was a frogman alien concept, a simple sphere. My goal here was to make something simple to test my own alphas I had made. It worked pretty well!!

I'll continue to sculpt. I have just been looking at the new zbrushworkshops.com and signed up there (although just a free account currently). It seems great and has some great starting points which I'm going to look at and test!

This was the first time I've limited myself timewise for a sculpt. I set aside 1 hour of my day to just focus on sculpting. I initially didn't like the idea of doing speed sculpts or similar (after always seeing the end result from artists it's very easy to feel you mayswell not try with some of the talent out there).

But after watching a webinar by Danny Williams regarding the reasons behind doing a limited time study (He uses the term Lunch Crunch and there is now a community based around this study ethos found here http://www.facebook.com/groups/lunchcrunch/). It really does allow you to focus on the task. I could prepare my references and for that hour just get something done.

Here are my results. This was done in Sculptris (see the image below).

  I used 3 spheres, 1 for the abdomen, chest and shoulders. To add new objects in sculptris just go to Add Sphere > Add object. It will automatically mask out the other objects in the scene so you can get a basic shape. After getting the basic shape just using grab I remove all masks in the scene by ctrl+click dragging anywhere outside of the object. Originally I used to just make everything from 1 model in sculptris thinking blending wouldn't really work as you might get with a dynamesh but the results aren't terrible.

Using a clay brush you can go around the visible seams and it will give the effect of blending the object. The great news is though that your individual objects can still be hidden (h+click on the object you want to hide). Also if you want to mask individual objects again just add another sphere to the scene. It will let you seperate them again for more detail if needed.

For rendering the sidebysides and turntable I just used GoZ to take it in to Zbrush. From here I added a custom material (I like the cavities to be visible in best and regular movement). To make it one object I just used Dynamesh and set the res to about 500 (Really not needed for this low detail model but it was just for a quick render). I also used claypolish>Edge 5 then re dynameshed just to get rid of a little artifacting which will happen when moving stuff from sculptris to zbrush.

Just bought procreate a few days ago on the itunes store (3.99 Euros currently).

Here are a few sketches I did on it (finger painted, not got a stylus yet).



It's a really good art tool. I'd recommend it if those are looking for something other than Sketchbook pro. This and artrage provide more of a painter/traditional style workflow. I picked this over artrage as it was cheaper! (Also I have Artrage pro on the pc so was just interested in seeing the differences).

Some more painting in Artrage. This is still WIP but I'm happy with it so far. Just darkened it a bit in an online editing program (Picnik) - I usually paint with mid range grays then add a little more contrast after, hopefully after more confidence with my drawing/painting skills I'll be able to apply it directly to work during production.

My girlfriend recently bought me Artrage . Great and affordable art package based around emulating traditional brushes/pens. I'm having lots of fun with it so far. It's simpler to use than photoshop if doing straight artwork so my plan is to use it in a general workflow, doing the main design, shading, colouring in artrage then taking over to PS to add any more final touches (textures, level adjustment etc).

Here's a sketch anyway done in Artrage. (first quick sketch but I'm happy enough with it!)

Edit: Just tweaked a in PS for a little more contrast and gave it a subtle tone. (see below)

Just been trying Autodesk Sketchbook here's a quick zombie sketch/concept with it, put a few textures in via PS. It seems like a good tool for fast concept work. It's also great fun for just doodling, very simple interface but great for tablets.

I've not posted in a long time, been doing a lot of photography work, ranging from Wildlife photography to shots in Lisbon (will upload a few of them on here shortly) as well as working on a new portfolio website - progress can be found here .

3D wise I'm currently using the program Sculptris and will do a couple of tutorials/ show some of my work since using it later this week.

Also as part of 3D work I'm currently going through the Maya Studio Projects: Dynamics book as a kind of top up to the degree (been a while since doing more detailed particles and since university moved to Maya) - you can find the book here

I'm currently working through the flames section (previously done the cloud of dust/ volcano project). I will be working through the whole book, hopefully then will link a couple of effects together to get a little test reel done.

Finally today I've been sketching today, Just thought I'd upload it as is (just changed the contrast/ colours slightly not going to colour or digital ink it yet).

Rough Sketch from my sketchbook.


Update: Here's after some neatening up and messing around in Photoshop. Looks like he'd fit in more in Deadwood now mind but I still like it.

Recently after scanning in some of my sketches I've been using the liquify tool in Photoshop to modify and test concepts for characters. While this technique may not be art 101 or considered as 'cheating' for traditional artists it's a great way to get quick character ideas from 1 basic sketch. I see it as a similar thing to using a basemesh or a Squirkle in Zbrush for some quick character concepts (sculpting and moving the original mesh).

I don't think Liquify needs much of a tutorial, the icons are self explanatory and you will find it under the filters menu (near the top). Alternatively if you want a shortcut for it --> Shift+Ctrl+x by default.

For this example I scanned in a sketch I did a while ago;


After doing some basic colouring for this an extremely rough blurred skin highlight and lowlight and a blue shadow layer, gaussian blurred and then flattened. I bulked the character out a bit and raised his nose, mouth and shrank his ear a little to help with the proportions.


Following on from this I tried a few more things, a bit more extreme but just to show the range of characters you can create. These were both done extremely quickly so things like the collar are still distorted but are just examples;




While I wouldn't recommend this for final work it's great to just get a few ideas going or work on expressions or proportions of characters. I'd personally recommend just sticking with the move brush for bulking out characters as the bloat or pucker tools can quickly get out of hand - use the reconstruct tool rather than the global reconstruct option to bring major distortions back. Worth giving a go anyway!

Just finally set up our printer/scanner. Scanned a couple of the most recent sketches I've done. Here they are;

Finally I did another little test before heading to the coast tomorrow (weather permitting) of the filters with the circular polariser. I am still getting quite a bit of lens flare which isn't too hard to take out of shot if needed but not really desired.

A quickly knocked up HDR is below, I've not taken any lens flare or screen marks out just to show the issues I am getting currently. They'll be sorted tomorrow though.

Finally got some of my shots taken last year printed (got a few from the year before printed as well). Mainly did this to check how they looked enlarged and I'm generally pleased with the outcome. I did have some ratio issues with my shots which caused some cropping issues (for the smaller prints I didn't mind as they were at a test size, unfortunately enlarged the one of Potsdamer Platz in 24x18 instead of 24x16 so there were some big cropping issues there (not shown on the photos taken of the prints).

By the way if anyone is interested in buying one of my prints feel free to contact me, drop me a message on here or similar.

The biggest challenge I encountered with the printing was looking for suitable frames. Most frames in retailers had only up to 10x8 or standard ratios, frames that required 12x10 or 24x16 were a little harder to find here although a local hardware store can provide them (as well as an Irish frame company online).

Also this week I bought a new filter for my Cokin Filter system, A ND8 (neutral gray). Using this along side the other ND8 Gradient as I'm wanting to get some long exposures near the coast over the next few months. Here is a test shot taken earlier with them (and a circular polariser attached).


Finally this week I looked back on an old digital painting I was working on (studying digital painting and faces) and worked a little on colours and balance with the image. Here's what I ended up with.

A little more face sketching.




Also been working on some Dynamics in Maya and will be buying 2 more books when I'm back from a short trip back home. Dynamics/particles is pretty much what I spent most of my final year doing and also enjoyed it the most throughout university.

While most of my work was done in XSI/pflow I spent a lot of time using realflow and Fumefx. I'm currently moving the skills learned from that to Maya/MEL scripting. I've set myself some pretty simple effects tasks to do for now (smoke,fire,explosion,snow) just as starting points while I get used to the expressions editor and such.

Just a quick post of some sketches I did this week as well as a few photos I finally got round to sorting out which have been on my camera (memory card) for about a year or so. Enjoy!




The sketchbook I use is an Earthbound Cachet sketchbook (think that's what it's called) so if the paper looks dirty that's why! (I just enjoy the extra textures on it really).