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.

Got interested recently in a FB group called Spitpaint. Similar to lunchcrunch it gives a rough topic to choose from then you have 30 minutes to create an image from scratch (no photos/phototextures allowed).

Thought I'd brave it, it is incredibly challenging, particularly as I don't put too much time in to painting. I think it's very important though as it helps immensely with colour blending and image composition. For saying my most knowledgeable area is photography I tend to find colour tone and composition my weakest area in painting/sculpting.

Here are my first few goes at it anyway;

Above: No particular theme for this one. I was just trying out new brushes in PS. Kind of imagined a rocky canyon/shipwreck. This one took about an hour after getting new brushes recommended by a friend (they are Peleng's brushes, made available on his blog).

Below: This was the first entry I put in to the spitpaint group. Taking about 27 minutes. The theme was 'tunnel entrance' although ended up making it more like the exit!






Above: just some very rough landscape thumbnails. 1hr in total for all 4 trying to work with brushes and composition
Right: very rough portrait, topic 'Apache' 25 mins. Very tricky to do portraits (for me anyway) in 30 minutes.



By doing this it also improves my sculpting workflow for concepting. Here is a quick sculpt knocked together and then a rough colour/texture test taking roughly 1 hr;


I'm making progress on my clothing modelling, slowly chipping away at the model side. I've also started re-learning some vfx, this time for use in realtime engines. The tutorials are from the great ImbueFX. Bill Kladis is an excellent teacher for UDK/Unreal engine particle effects and has worked on titles like Mortal Kombat and Injustice: Gods Among Us. I'll try and get some stills up in my next post as my current rig probably isn't great for capturing realtime effects!

Here are a few sketches/paintings I've done with the Wacom in the past few days. I still need to work on proportions a lot but I'm trying to get a feel more for the lighting and colouring currently.

I should be going to the coast again tomorrow to try some more landscape photography as well as get a little more use out of my 50mm and shooting some portraits.