Arinrobinsonart's Work Blog

Where to work and what to do?…

arinrobinsonart — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:13:38 +0000

ok so the economy obviously isn’t in the best of shape and everybody is seeming to get laid off, which includes the game industry of course, making it awfully hard to find a job. but at the same time i can’t help but feel that i’m also not trying hard enough. i still build my portfolio and send out resumes but i feel i should be applying for everywhere and everything just to get my foot in the door. problem is i really want to work someplace i can be passionate about what i do, someplace that will push my artwork farther in a smaller amount of time. not just my art in general though, i really have a passion for stylized artwork and an appreciation for it as well. i still like a lot of realistic looking games but i love when an artist develops a style unique and all his own, that to me is something to shoot for.

my work process…

arinrobinsonart — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:36:09 +0000

I sent an e-mail to a friend explaining how I do my work so here’s what I sent. This isn’t always my workflow with projects but for Rikku it was.

Here is the image by the way…

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s244/Urthrese/myworkflow.jpg

Ok I couldn’t find the original gray scale for the head but I have the body so it’s all good. The first image going left to right is of my first base that gets made up in body paint. In 3dsmax its contrast goes away so in body paint you’ll want to make a nice contrast light to dark. Anyways that first image has basic values that are all around the same area of color; don’t worry about how light the skin will be in comparison to the leather just yet. Just paint in shadows where you would think they would be, under the arms, inside the legs, etc… After you set up that start to paint in the medium details like outlining the clothes and such. Detailed highlights and folds in clothes come last so don’t get to caught up doing the details until your base lighting and shapes look good.

The second image is a lot easier to explain. Set colors in Photoshop where they should be as a color overlay. when you do that you’ll notice that some area’s like skin are too dark, so when that happens adjust your grayscale using the levels in order to get it to be the right brightness it needs. After you do that you will see the grayscale look more like the second image. With that one you can now see it pop out more which is a good thing.

The third image is what your model would look like if you just used the color overlays on top of your grayscale. It looks good but it’s missing something from it. Doing textures this way is really easy but real artists don’t stop at this third step because it’s not true painting. True artists don’t just use values of grayscale to create shadows, they use color. That is what is missing from this step. So at this point you want to make sure you have everything where you like it and make a collapsed layer of everything (make a new layer in Photoshop and then hit ctrl+shift+e) and then start painting in color where it needs to be and adjust the saturation of your texture.

At the end it should look more like the fourth image. This one you can see it pop out a lot more and you see how it comes to life with the addition of subtle colors and changing the saturation. I wish I could just explain how colors work and what to use where but that is something you’ll just have to figure out through painting because every texture will be different. For this one I actually used a little bit of red in her shadows on the skin as an example. Remember that even if you use normal maps that are really detailed you need to know these color tricks in order to make your model pop out the way it should.

I don’t have any tricks for painting in body paint or Photoshop, I don’t use color dodge or anything else like that. I make one layer and just paint it like it was my own canvas. None of my textures go by quickly either, I am a very slow worker but in the end I’m proud of what I did.

That’s about all I did for this one. I hope this helps explain things.

Princess Ruto, finished?…

arinrobinsonart — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:38:01 +0000

There are still some things I would like to add to this model’s texture but I feel like I’m beating a dead horse. it looks good and I feel would look even better once the turnaround is put in the demo reel since those crappy save for web images don’t compliment it much. Still I wish I could use some darker blues but I feel as if I would be pushing the contrast too far. It looks nice in the concept but in 3d it didn’t make much sense so there are a lot of areas I toned down. Overall I really like the way it turned out but there are a few things I changed in the 3D model compared to the concept. I looked at both the concept and the in game footage of princess Ruto in the old Zelda: Ocarina of Time N64 game and mixed the 2 together. In the concept she looks more robust, shorter, and stockier but in game she looked more attractive and taller. I went with the taller idea since the shorter stockier look didn’t look very good in 3D as well. Also her head is more streamline in my version since I imagined she would be swimming a lot it would make sense. Things I know I need improvement on now are jewelry. I thought that would probably be the easiest thing but trying to get jewelry to sparkle when all you have is a diffuse is a lot harder than I thought. I originally put that necklace on her to have some different color in there and to use up some texture space (her head was so oblong and weird it was difficult finding a way) but I never would have imagined it be hard to paint. Still I like it because it’s sort of a nostalgic item from Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I might go back and make some changes to this model still but as for now I’ll at least post what I’ve got online.

Selphie so far…

arinrobinsonart — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:16:15 +0000

http://www.arinrobinsonart.com/selphiehtml/selphiefullbody.html

Ok so recently I have been working on a character from an old PS game (that’s right the first one) and I’ve been modeling her higher poly with larger resolutions. This character by the way is named Selphie and she is from Final Fantasy 8, yet another square-enix character. I know that most of my other artist friends out there say I should broaden my horizons and do stuff that isn’t Japanese but hey, their games are the reason I went to school for this anyways, in fact the opening intro of FF8 was the reason I went to school for this stuff. Anyways now that I totally went off topic there, let’s get back to how I feel this new model is going.

I used absolutely too many polys and way too high of texture resolutions… but given the fact all I wanted to do was make something that looked nice I didn’t really care too much. when I started this project it wasn’t like my more recent ones where I would like to use a lower res map and lower poly standards (i will post pictures soon of newer projects, one is based off an old zelda game!), I just wanted to make something that looked as good as the artwork coming from square-enix now. It seems however I have hit a peak with myself and have not been able to pass that peak without seeing how the professionals do things. I have learned a lot in all this time but no matter how large the texture resolution or how many polys I use, I can’t match up to the detail their senior artists can do. I still feel that with this one assignment I gave myself I have learned a lot and made a nice looking model in 3D. This was a good opportunity for me to practice not only high poly modeling but normal maps, spec maps, and much more. I didn’t realize how much I knew until I went all out on this model. I’m not entirely happy with it yet but I will surely continue to work on it in the future…

My Kingdom Hearts style character.

arinrobinsonart — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:01:22 +0000

http://arinrobinsonart.com/rikkuhtml/rikkupersp.html

ok with this one it was done in my last class of school ever so I kind of feel like I rushed it in some areas but I still think it turned out really well in the end. I like how I got pretty close to their cartoony style while still maintaining that sqaure-enix, Final Fantasy X feel. Something I would have changed though is probably the texture size. I’m fine with the poly count but the 1024*1024 textures were not worth having, I think I could have easily cut them down to 512′s if not 256′s but I love detail and at the time I didn’t really know the specs of what gaming systems used, so I just went all out. Overall though I think she is one of my best characters and possibly the one I had the most fun with.

Work so far

arinrobinsonart — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:47:09 +0000

well i plan to use this blog to show off my work process and explain what i was thinking behind each decision for my 3d models. hopefully this will be a good addition to my website. anyways so far i’ve worked on many 3d models but i haven’t really gotten any of them done, they are all like halfway though. for right now i’m trying to concentrate on one at a time so i can just finish them off. first up is my remake of the final fantasy 8 character Selphie. she was originally designed by tetsuya nomura while at square-enix (squaresoft at the time). i hope to use this model and my Kingdom hearts style Rikku character to apply for a postion at square-enix in L.A. for their 3D artist position. i know primarily they are a japanese company but i’m hoping they will still have some fun work for me to do in L.A. i just hope that i get the job.

well i should get back to work. i’ll post updates of selphie soon.