M4A1 3D Model

Good Afternoon,

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last couple of days, but its been with good reason. I've been finishing the M4A1 high poly model. So here it is! took some doing to finish, the upper and lower receiver were pretty difficult to make as there's a lot of shapes and transitions from round curved surfaces to flat harder shapes. I've modelled all the visible moving parts and plan to rig them up so its a completely functional and animation ready model. It was all made in Maya and rendered in Marmoset tool bag, great program for setting up nice renders quickly, if you dont have it I highly recommend it.

Next I'll be on to the slightly more boring task of re-topologising the highpoly down to a low poly model and then Uving. Once that's ready I'll make another update post and then be moving on to the fun part of Normal mapping and texturing. Like I said before I will be releasing this model for free with all the texture work and hopefully rigged, so If your making a game and in need of some guns stay tuned as I'll be uploading it in the near future.

As for other work I've been working on a Orc head sculpt too, I like to switch my personal work up to keep things fresh, I find sculpting is far more pleasant and less taxing on your mind to do, modelling can be very technical and frustrating at times but I still enjoy it. I also have some more sketch work to post, character ideas and some other project in mind for after this M4A1 is complete. 

Anyway hope you like it, if your interested leave a comment, follow me for more CG related work and all that good stuff, and if you want a Free M4A1 model complete with textures then stay tuned, its on it's way. :)

Jamie

Scarlet Concept Art

So like I said here's the concept work that followed the sketches for this character I designed called Scarlet. Looking back there's things I'd change about the design, mainly the materials in the design. I'd use less bronze/brass like materials, and where I did use them I'd really desaturate it, giving it a much darker and worn feel. I'd also try to make the armour look slightly more advanced/form fitting/lighter to emphasise that this character is skilled at crafting weapons, armour and tech. As you can see in the concept image I was thinking about the environment as well. I had this idea for a outpost/town that had built up in a collapsed cave, safe from the sandstorms and extreme weather of the outside world, with a few holes in the cave roof for some shafts of light to break through.

I may pick this design up again in the near future and improve on it so stay tuned for that.

Jamie

Scarlet Sketches

Good Evening

I've just noticed that I never posted the artwork for this character, so here's some of the sketches. Her name is Scarlet and she's a bounty hunter and partner in crime with Duke, Artwork can be seen here -http://jamie-stubbscgartist.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/duke-extra-concept-artwork.html

The idea behind the two was inspired by Hansel and Gretel although they have no family relationship. They live in a Western wasteland doing what they must to survive. I tried to base there look and style around how I imagined they'd play in a game so, Duke is the hard hitting Tank like character that likes to get up close and personal. Scarlet is a hotheaded emo kid that has a keen eye for engineering. she would play a more tactical and supportive role laying down her teddy bear backpack that has a Gatling gun mounted inside, before moving up with twin barrel revolvers. Originally she was going to have modified cowboy repeaters that folded up and out over her shoulders, (you can see them in the bottom sketches) but I liked the idea of a teddy bear with a deadly surprise waiting inside more :)

Anyway hope you like them, sorry for the slight tangent. I should have posted these a while ago but completely forgot about them. I'll post the model sheet and concept piece for this character tomorrow.

Jamie

Uni Character sketches

Someone asked me the other day why don't I show my sketches, and its a valid point so I thought I'd start uploading them. Here's a collection of the sketches for the character Duke. Before the sketching process I always do research and brainstorms which you can see in some of the sketches to break down the ideas I have in mind, materials, style etc. I don't particularly like my sketches as there quick and rough. There more like basic visual notes to me, which I refine later on into a model sheet and then I'm prepared to go into 3D. Generally I sketch in pen as it keeps things quick, if you make mistakes you have to work with them or start again, pencil you can rub out which I find distracting. If your looking to get ideas down fast or play with shapes I'd suggest trying this method as you can fill a page very quickly.

For the extra concept work that I made for this character click the link below :)

http://jamie-stubbscgartist.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/duke-extra-concept-artwork.html

Jamie

M4 AR Highpoly Progress

Good afternoon! Sorry for the lack of posts in the last couple of days I've been away from my PC, but I'm back now :) So the M4 project, The high poly is still in progress, I want it to be as accurate as possible so I'm building every piece. Luckily I don't have to use to many references from Google, images on funny perspectives as I have some primary research of my own. I have a M4 airsoft CQB rifle which is to scale, this makes modelling far more relaxing, If I'm unsure on the flow or shape of a certain piece then I can look at my G&G rifle.  

More progress will follow soon, I also have a couple of other projects in the pipeline which I'll be posting very shortly, so if your interested in CG art then follow my blog for more updates!

Jamie

Free 3D M4 attachments, Gun models (Progress)

Good evening,

Just a quick update on the M4 models that I'll soon be uploading. So far I've made Magpul style mags standard 30 round and extended version, 5.56 rounds broken into bullet and jacket, 2 silencers and magpul assists. More pieces will follow soon, hopefully I'll add texture variations/different camos (woodland, desert tan etc). I think I'll also break the files up for easy download (Mags and bullets in one, silencers in another and so forth so people can pick and choose.)

Not sure where I'll put the files for download yet, possibly my deviant art but I'll update you with that when the models are complete. If your interested in the files then keep an eye on my blog and I'll have them available soon, also if you have any requests then leave a comment I'd be happy to help :)

Free 3d Gun models and attachments!

Hello!


Just a quick update today as I've been busy the last couple of days but I'm working on making a M4A1 and various attachments that could be swapped through many gun models, silencers, magpul flip up sights, Eotech holographic, flash lights, magazines and fore grips. So if your interested I'll be uploading them as free downloads if people are interested! So stay tuned more more updates over the next couple of days for free 3d models.

Jamie

AO CON artwork

I made this a couple of years ago now but I thought it would be cool to post it as it was artwork I made that made it into a massive scifi MMO called Anarchy Online. This is one of my favourite if not the best MMO I've played, I loved this game even though the graphics weren't the best back when I was playing it. But the character progression and "twinking" was fantastic and I still compare many games and MMOs character build designs to this game. Anyway the artwork, So above is the piece I made that was featured on the billboards throughout Rubi-ka. I was approached on Deviantart as I had done a similar image for my self as a desktop background when I was still learning Photoshop. So they asked me to re create the Anarchy Online logo for there AO con event, so I did, added some energy beams and nano-bots as that's the games equivalent to magic/powers and that was the final piece.

I wasn't actually playing the game at the time it was put in as I had stopped playing for a couple of years, but the person that contacted me sent me a in game screenshot and there it is, my AO inspired logo design for Gridstream productions in game. This was a really cool project, I really enjoyed making it and still cant believe it was beamed throughout the AO world for all the other players to see.

SWAT Lowpoly M84 Flash Bang

So here's one of my more recent pieces of work, an M84 Flashbang. As I had done a lot of concept work recently I thought it was time I got back to making some game props and continue to practise my texturing and the general pipeline to keep it fresh in my mind. I wanted to make something interesting rather than say a barrel or a crate etc. So with the recent releases of games like COD Advanced Warfare and in particular the Beta for Battlefield Hardline (this is where the SWAT idea came from) I decided to make a first person prop. I went with the Flash bang because its got a really interesting shape with the holes punched out in the body of the grenade. So first things first always get plenty of reference before you start, so I looked at plenty of images to understand how the grenade works and how its all put together as well as the texturing which was important later on. With that sorted I was ready to start modelling.

Low and Highpoly Mesh

Here's both the low and high poly models I made, I didn't actually do any sculpting on this one. First I modelled the High poly version in Maya as it's really easy to reverse engineer it into a low poly model as you can see on the left. As I said at the start I wasn't going to decimate the low poly to far as the idea is this is a first person mesh, although it could be decimated further for the 3rd person model, but the poly count isn't to bad especially with all those holes in the body. 

A little Tip

If your new to Maya then here's how to start removing your loops to make a clean low poly. You cant just select a ring and hit delete as you still leave all the verts, in the end you'll be left with a mesh full of 5 sides and Ngons everywhere as well as a high poly count still. So to remove the loop and all the verts on the loop, double click to select the loop, hold control and right click then go to "edge loop utilities" then "to edge loop delete"

When I finished the Lowpoly it was on to Uv unwrapping the model and then moving onto setting up the normal maps.

With the High and Low poly meshes ready its time to make a base normal map.

For the Normal map I used Xnormal, it's a really awesome free program that's great for making maps. If you haven't used Xnormal before I suggest watching a video on the basics of how to use it but its fairly easy to use if you know your way around other 3d programs. For best normal map results its advised to make a cage as you can see above. I made my cage in Maya, and a Cage is basically a duplicate of your Lowpoly mesh that encompasses both your High and Lowpoly mesh but you want it to only just cover it. In some areas you may need to hand edit your cage for the best results. The cage helps to encapsulate and project the detail from the High to the Low, if you want to know more about how it works then this is a great video that really helped explain to me how it works. It can be frustrating when you first learn how to do it, but once it clicks its very satisfying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww

A good starting point for making your cage as shown above is to select all your verts, then go to the move tool on the left change your movement to Normal mode and then pull the verts out on the N axis. This will scale it out in a uniformed way.

Normal Map

Here's the finished normal maps, to create all the bumps and cracks with in the normal map I used the Nvidia normal map creator plug in for Photoshop. This is an awesome plugin for Photoshop as you can convert your diffuse map into a Normal map. So with the first Normal map I made in Xnormal which is your base, I then converted the diffuse using the plug in and put this on top, set it to Overlay mode and you have your finished normal map with all that nice bump detail from the scratches that you painted in. You can also Filter > Sharpen this if the bump detail isn't strong enough.

 Diffuse Map

This is where most of the time is spent, making the diffuse is a long process but rewarding when its complete. I'll briefly explain the process I used to make this but if you'd like to learn more and how to make really cool textures then here's an awesome tutorial series on next gen asset creation and texturing that really helped me out. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK0b2SUjhtU

So to start I made a lightmap. A light map is where you set some lights up in your Maya or 3s Max scene and then bake the lighting information into a flat image. In Maya I used the Transfer Maps in the rendering tab an then select the Shading map option. This is a great starting point as it makes your texture look less flat, its basically fake lighting information in your model but when its rendered in Marmoset or a games engine it just looks so much better as in real life even in really dark light items still catch some lighting bouncing around, this helps in those scenarios. I also masked off my UV islands and added a base colour for all the pieces in this case its mainly a very dark grey as I was going for a anodized finish. With this base layer it makes it easy to select areas of UV and edit the texture. I also made a brushed metal texture, dirt layer scratches etc, its a matter of building it up slowly. I try to build it up methodically so start with the metal, then overlay the base colour, then extra colour such as the blue paint, the graphics such as Swat etc, then the scratches and last the dirt. Duplicating parts of your texture and changing the blending modes can get you good unexpected results as well as editing the levels and brightness/contrast. 

Specular Map

Once I finished the Diffuse your on the home stretch, to make the Spec make it's very simple, I first flatten the Diffuse (Tip: save your diffuse.psd first with all the layers so you can edit them later if necessary) and dropped the saturation right down so your back to black and white. Then I adjusted the brightness and contrast to make a much stronger contrast in the darks and light.

I also made a cold to warm gradient from left to right as well as a multicolour gradient. both these layers were very low in intensity but it makes for some really nice lighting in the Spec as you revolve around the object. The blue to red gradient is very subtle, but the multicolour is slightly more visible, it adds a really nice finish to the texture when it passes through different light.

 Gloss Map

Finally the Gloss map is very simple, I just took the Spec map and in the curves adjustment increased it by 20%. 

With all that completed this was the final result. I was really happy with how this turned out especially the Spec map when lit in marmoset it rendered really nicely, I didn't want to just make a generic Flash bang as the standard army green is just a bit boring. So I went for a little more of a Sci-fi feel with the typeface although kept the original Flash bang design and I think it works, I think it would fit well in a modern SWAT FPS, COD SWAT edition perhaps instead of all this jet pack nonsense, but that's my opinion :).

If you like my work, CG art or want to learn more about it and how it's done then follow me fore new posts everyday ;)

Jamie

Lord of Bones Head Sculpt

So here it is, the lord of bones head sculpt I promised that would follow the concept piece. I wanted to keep this a sculpt and let it do the talking material wise, which I think has worked pretty well. I was surprised at how intense the sculpt had to be to be effective when you zoom away from your model. I'll talk a little more about this and any tips I have picked up at the end.

First I'll break down how I made this, its quite simple really once you know the basic Zbrush tools and how Dynamesh works, I don't have any custom alphas, I think it's best to keep it simple when learning a new program and custom brushes aren't everything.

So to get a good head start, if you didn't already know in the Lightbox section of Zbrush under tools there is a full anatomy model complete with muscles and skeleton. Obviously all I needed for this was the skull and some of the spine, so with this as the base I simple used the move brush to pull the eye sockets of the skull around to make it a little more menacing, as well as break up some of the symmetry in some areas. I'd say the best way to start is always with the move brush and nothing else, keep the Dynamesh resolution fairly low as you can always re-mesh it when the verts are being pulled to much, then continue.
Same thing with the plates around the face, keep it rough and use the clip curves brush to cut the plates into shape. The tiger skull I made from scratch, with a Dynameshed sphere and some reference images on my second pc, same as before I blocked out the shape with the move tool. Obviously this isn't an exact type of tiger, i had many reference images open, so I went for a sabre tooth skull and then added extra horns from the sides and deer antlers out of the top just to make it more interesting, as this character is made up of the remains of various humans and creatures, I wanted to get that idea across. Once everything was roughly in place then its time to get the sculpting brushes out.

Main brush I used for this was the Clay Buildup with a square alpha, I really like this brush with a square alpha on it even for organic shapes. You can create some nice texture to your sculpt and knock in important features very quickly. I try to stay away from smoothing the sculpt to much as well as this takes a lot of the texture away, it makes it feel flat.
Simple really I just used this brush to build up areas, cut into parts of the skulls and bone to make deep holes for the eye sockets and nose etc. Also on a low intensity I brushed over all of the model to give a base texture to the bone.

As for things like the teeth, horns, and the wings at the back, its a combination of brushes but very quick to make. Insert a cylinder and move it into position, Dynamesh it, use the move brush to get the rough shape. The Snake hook brush to get bit of a point, then the pinch brush to sharpen it. you can also use the inflate brush to increase and decrease (if you hold the alt key) areas.

Finally the detailing, its mainly just adding more texture to the model or anything interesting. In this case mainly texture as bone has an interesting finish. I have a cow skull in my room that I found walking in the Pyrenees mountains one year (its super clean, it must have been there for years) So I had a good look at the surface, and there's a lot of tiny cracks and ridges throughout the skull, even in the smoothest areas, its very pitted. So I had to get that kind of micro surface detail in the mesh to make it look like bone. This is where the alphas are your best friend, I just use the standard clay brush and on a fairly low intensity used different alphas as you can see below.

Just experiment and you can find some really nice combos. That's about it, from working on this I'd say I learned that it's important to zoom away from your model often when sculpting, certainly in the detailing phase. You can sculpt a whole piece of armour and it looks great close up but when you zoom away the detailing isn't strong enough, the details just fade away.

That's it for today, if you like my work, or CG work in general and want to learn a little more about how I go about making my work then follow me for new posts every day.

Volcanic Concept art

I still don't really have a title for this piece as I didn't really plan anything. Usually when I'm making characters I have the idea first and then I go about making it, but with this project it was more of a way of me practising hard surface techniques in Zbrush and I'll explain how I got to this end result.

I'd be watching an artist on youtube and found his concepting workflow interesting, He'd concept the rough shapes and design of his character in zbrush using the dynamesh feature, render the scene and then bring the image into photshop, then paint the environment around the render. I thought this was a really neat way to do it and something I never tried. So this is how this project came to be, I didn't want to start with any plan or design.

So as you can see below is the zbrush sculpt, I kept the sculpting to a minimum, I wanted to leave detailing out of it to save time as I was just using this as a practise. To begin with I started with the head using a dynameshed sphere and just pulled the shape around to until I got something interesting, then carved heavily into it with the hpolish and Trim dynamic brushes. These brushes are great for hard surface work and you can get a lot of interesting shapes that you wouldn't otherwise think of. 

I continued this process to create the rest of the armour, using the clip curve brush to trim the shapes into harder looking panels. Once all the big shapes were in place it was just a matter of masking areas and bevelling, inflating, sculpting pieces away etc, to add some extra detail to the armour.

With the sculpt complete I exported the render and began to paint in photoshop. As I was sculpting this I was thinking of a scifi setting, I wanted something exciting, interesting lighting etc. So I ended up seeing this character as like a colonist/scientist and he's studying this new planet. So to give it more interest and mood, as well as reason for the heavy armoured suit, the world would have to be very hostile. 

With that in mind I painting rough sharpe rough shapes behind him, not spending to much time on any particular area. Just painting with a flat grey to create a bit of skyline and outline to the background. This stage I always keep really rough, you don't want to spend 2 hours on a rock and then find that it just doesnt work or looks out of place. I pretty much created the whole background in greyscale first before I considered any colour, and I revisited the greyscale layer to edit the lighting later on.

When it came to the colour I thought about painting the landscape a purplish colour but it just clashed with the lava explosions to much, so I scraped the idea and just went for a more hellish theme for the background as the character in the foreground is in cooler colours to make a nice contrast.

So this is how the final image came out, I was pretty pleased with the final result, as I started with no idea where I was going and got to this. I like the workflow of roughing something out in Zbrush because you can set up the lighting and just quickly paint on top if you wish to change any part of it. It also gives you a good starting point for colour and the direction of the light when you get to painting.
Its certainly a quick and effective way of starting concepts and if you have used zbrush before then I would definitely recommend it if you are having a hard time coming up with ideas,

If you like my work then comment or hit that follow button for more of my CG work every day.

The Lord of Bones Concept art

This is a character I actually designed a couple of years ago but the design has changed a lot, I was scrolling through my deviantart, just looking at old work to see how much I had improved. Now that I have a lot more experience drawing in photoshop I decided to redesign the character and give it some more background to make a more solid design. If you want to see the original drawing check it out here on my deviantart,
http://reponic.deviantart.com/art/Demon-330685829

I wanted to redesign him as a fearsome boss like creature that you would come across in dungeons, something you'd find in games like skyrim, an epic boss that would drop a legendary weapon. So with that in mind I started drawing, as I started I tried to think of what materials he was wearing or made up of. I thought it would be cool if he was an extremely old soul, his original mortal body long since gone and now he/it is nothing but a powerful force, and his physical form is the remains of may victims he has slain. So his armour is made of bone and iron, his sword full of the skulls of the fallen in their final moments, and there souls endlessly flowing through it.
I had a lot of fun with this one and I think this is a much improved design over the original drawing a did a couple of years ago.

I'll also be doing a head sculpt of this character as a extra concept piece so look out for that.
if you like my work follow me on deviant art - http://reponic.deviantart.com/
and you can also contact me through Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=399959023&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile

Undead Myrmidon and Shield Designs

 I wanted to spend some more time in Zbrush after the Duke project and practise more of the basics, so I picked something simple that I could produce and texture quickly, so some shield designs seemed like a good and interesting place to start. I'd watched Troy a couple of days before for the millionth time so this is probably where this came from.

Producing the shields was actually very simple so I decided to make a couple of designs when it came to the texturing.

As for the second Image I wanted to make extra use of the shields that I made so I did a quick line art, spent about an hour on it. I was thinking about the skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonaughts, so that's where the inspiration for the drawing came from.

If you'd like to see more of my work or contact me then feel from to check out my deviantart and Linkedin here, 

http://reponic.deviantart.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=399959023&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile

Duke Final Renders Zbrush

So here's the final renders of the character Duke that I was working on for quite so time. This was my first proper Zbrush project, I didn't really have much experience with Zbrush at all but through making this I learned a lot and know a lot more now because of it. I made loads of mistakes mainly stupid rookie stuff like how to use subtools properly and also things like not knowing about the decimation master tool would have been really helpful while making this as the poly count got incredibly high making it extremely difficult for my PC to run. You'll see in more recent work that I've become a lot more familiar with Zbrush and I'm pretty confident making things from scratch in Zbrush using Dynamsh, whether it be Hard surface or organic.
Anyway I was pretty pleased with how this came out in the end as when I started I didnt really know how to use Zbrush and I got to this in the end. Looking back if I was to redo it I would sculpt things differently to give better texture. I Also wanted to pose this character but at the time not knowing how to decimate the subtools made it impossible to rig, I actually revisited it to try and pose it a second time and the mesh was to dense to decimate, my Pc couldn't cope calculating it so I gave up.

In future zbrush character projects I'm going to pose characters much earlier in the sculpting process when the polycount is at a much easier level to manage and then continue.
Anyway, I hope you like the final renders, I'm sorry its quite a jump in the development from my last posts on this character but I was really busy at the time with the end of Uni and then going on holiday etc I just forgot to update the blog.

Next Ill be posting more character concept work that I've produced over the last couple of months as well as some game props.

Duke extra concept artwork

If you liked my series of development posts on the character Duke then here's some more concept artwork that I produced for that character and it seems like I forgot to upload it :s so sorry about that but here it is! :)

As you can see the top image is a 3 stages or character/level progression concept piece that I painted. I was thinking about how the characters armour and clothing could change if he was in a game. So the player could salvage or find schematics for extra pieces of armour and make them, Improve his weapons, aswell as his clothing gets more battered and torn from combat.

And the second image was made much earlier, This was back when I was still getting the concept of the character roughed out, trying to work out the back story and the environment that this character lives in. I like to start with a characters head, I find that if you can design a characters face and work on the ideas of backstory and environment on just the face then once you've nailed that, creating the rest of the body and armour/clothing etc becomes much easier.

Anyway hope you like it, 3D renders to follow very shortly.

I'm Back and there's going to be some changes!

Hey guys,

Sorry I been away for a while and haven't posted anything since the end of Uni, but now I'm back and I'm going to get this Blog kick started again. I'll be posting all of my most recent work to get things up to date and then this blog will have daily CG posts, any personal CG work I'm creating at the end of the day the progress I've got will be posted here.
I'll talk about what I'm working on or ideas I have, how I'm going to go about it (Programs, methods etc) and then plenty of renders to show you how its going.

So if you like CG art and my artwork then keep an eye out for my next posts and daily follow ups once I've got all my most recent work uploaded.
Also if your interested check out my deviantart here - http://reponic.deviantart.com/
and my Showreel here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnfkL3QTJ9I

Jamie