The explorations of an artloader.
Digital Art
Here’s my first attempt at a logo for this website.
It was done in Blender by first constructing a 2D shape and then extruding it upwards to give it thickness.
I like the shape but am not sure about the texture. I’m after something more … “clockworky”. Maybe some-kind of a cogwheel bumpmap …
Here is a concept picture of The Dark Temple Of Mymosule from my upcoming digital comic.
In Manga Studio, I imported the planetary rings render I did from Blender and added a bunch of digitally painted layers:
I’m not sure the temple really looks like a temple so I will do a bit more research into dark temples and maybe do a 3D model to get my head around it all.
Using the 3D model from experiment 4, in Blender I moved my camera down to the planet surface and pointed it up at the rings. This is the resulting render.
I will now paint on top of this in Manga Studio to create a concept image of the Dark Temple Of Mymosule from my digital comic project.
After studying some reference photos, I played about with the planetary ring texture a little more in Blender.
Also, the sun is now shining from the lower left and has a bit of a red tinge to suggest a sunset.
I then scaled the whole model up by roughly a factor of ten because I will then locate a camera on the planet surface and take a render with the rings coming down from the sky to the horizon.
Hopefully I can use the render as a background for a digital painting of the Dark Temple Of Mymosule.
OK so I decided to use the colour ramp method from Experiment 2 and put together a simple scene with a marble textured planet.
The rings are actually made from a single disc, it’s the colour ramp texture that makes it appear as multiple rings. Colour ramps allow you to specify transparent areas so I’ve just got a single ring with some transparent areas on it.
I then followed Reaping Fire’s YouTube tutorial on making a star field.
Here’s the result of my Making Planetary Rings In Blender Experiment 3:
Continuing from my Blender planetary ring experiments with the Wood texture type yesterday, I thought I’d try out the Blend texture type.
I created a ring mesh by extrude-scaling a circle.
It took me ages to understand the different Blend texture parameters but I’ve found the following settings yield good ring-like patterns:
I then had to play about with the Mapping – Size X and Y values.
After that I made a concerted effort to finally learn how to use the Blender Colour Ramps (they’re flippin difficult to understand to begin with but once you learn how to use them, they’ll help you to world domination!)
So here’s the result of tonight’s experiment:
I’m working on an environmental picture of the Dark Temple Of Mymosule. It will be dusk and the planetary rings of Undomea are to be visible in the sky.
I’ve decided that I cannot draw the perfect arcs of the planetary rings by hand so I’m breaking out the heavy machinery: 3D modelling in Blender.
Firstly I created a sphere with a ring around it:
Then I positioned the camera as if it were on the surface of the planet looking up at the rings.
After that came the time consuming bit: messing about with the Blender textures.
The following was achieved using a Wood procedural texture along with a lot of tinkering about in the Texure – Mapping section:
Lots more to do but time for bed now – I’m a bit tired after a friendly bout of food-poisoning the other night, but you probably don’t want to hear about that.
I’ve been rolling ideas around inside my head and have settled upon a ruined steampunk factory as the site of the opening scene in my comic book project.
The next task in my comic book project is to do a concept picture of the ruined steampunk factory. My approach so far has been as follows:
One thing I’ve noticed is that for environments, the pro’s seem to use many more layers. This works pretty well when you’re going for an environment with mist and a distant background landscape.
After struggling to get a good brush stroke for the planetary rings in the painting above, I reckon I will model the rings in Blender and then combine with digital painting in Manga Studio.
I’m done with my winged panther digital painting. The background was done using Manga Studio’s water colour brush set at a really big brush size. I also tried out the snap to grid feature when drawing in the gold border. The total time taken was 5 hours, less than half the time of my previous picture so I think I will stick with this new process.
I’ve given Iyeon the Winged Panther some more definition on his hind legs and also given him some armour. The membrane of his wings now also has a redish tinge to it which I thought would look more natural – not sure when I last saw a winged panther in the wild though …