Dundalis

An illustration for the first chapter of R.A. Salvatore's "The Demon Awakens". This was just for fun, not actually a commission or anything like that. I've just been reading the book and decided to create my own illustrations for it.

Ankheg - segmented body

I started work today on the segmented body of my Ankheg model. It is really just a big cylinder that I extruded from the back of the head. After subdivided the lengthwise edges I just positioned the rings along the y-axis where the segment joints were (4 per segment) and shrank the inner two rings to create the joint. Next, I subdivided the lengthwise edges on each segment into 5 rings, then sized each ring to give each segment a rounded look.

Here's a quick render of what's been done so far:

Gorn, post production

I did some post production work on the illustration for Gorn. Compare it with yesterday's to see the difference a little bit of layer work can do in Gimp. I added two layers, the first was a copy of the image blurred then set to "lighten only" to give a shimmering look to the whole thing.

The next layer was also a copy of the original, but I scribbled in some dark greens on the shadow faces and light yellows on the highlight faces. Then, I set that layer to "overlay" and tweaked the transparency a bit. All this gave the image that more dramatic contrasty look.

The Gorn

I’m working on a short story for the Facebook Fantasy Writers group. Naturally, I had to have a cover illustration for it. This is the current work in progress. So far, this was all done in poser. In fact, it has been a rather simple setup. But alas, just three figures in one scene has brought by poor little CPU to its knees. Every change I make in poser gives me about 10 seconds of hourglass time. The render actually goes pretty quick though, only about two hours.

This is the “Gorn”.

Suchomimus

I was trying to come up with a good marsh swamp scene a few nights ago, but Vue kept crashing on me with this one. I wound up clearing out most of the foreground elements before I could finally get it to render without throwing an exception. Mostly the point of this one was to experiment with creating a tree that looked like it was in a swamp. I did this by using two tree objects (one upside down). I also played around quite a bit with the sky. I’m impressed with the colors, but I don’t think I like how the stratus clouds appear to be beneath the cumulous clouds even though I was careful to put them at a higher elevation.

Vue bug

I don't see anything about it on the web, but I got hit last night with a bug in Vue. Luckily, I had saved the scene because Vue would crash every time I tried to render. It would get about half way through the preparation, then throw an unhandled exception.

It took me all night, but I finally figured out that it had something to do with a group object (in this case it was a pair of trees I was using to create a single tree with a complex set of roots - i.e. one was a regular tree, the other was upside-down). Apparently, the crash was caused by duplicating that group.

I wanted three such trees in my scene. So I just duplicated the one and rotated the duplicates a bit to make them look different. After hours of trying to render removing various objects I finally got the render to go through once I deleted those two duplicates. My scene is rendering now, but it's a very complex swamp scenes so it'll take a few days to complete.

Ankheg More Head Work

I did some more work on my Ankheg blender model today. I gave him a few spikey things between his maxilla and eye. I also gave a bit more definition to the head by pushing down a bunch of the vertices in the middle. The idea was to give the outer parts around the mouth and eyes a bit of a ridge to sit on. The big magic trick of the day though was to apply a level of subsurfing to the whole thing and smooth it out. It smoothed the eye out a bit too much though so I had to delete the old one and build a new one using the same steps I did a few days back.

Kentrosaurus

I wanted to have a nice fall picture to use as my wallpaper so I did some playing with vue last night. Yes, I realize that there are manmade ruins in the background, but I wanted something to add some depth to that side. It’s art after all, not history.

Winterwolf Valley

I put together a new image using Vue this weekend. I felt inspired to do a snow scene. The procedural terrain I used for the snow took forever.

Interestingly enough, Vue hit me with a bug that turned out for the better. The winter pear tree that I was using in the foreground had a rather terrible default material. I tried playing around with it when suddenly the tree took on the same texture as the mountain in the background. Nothing I could do (including restarting my whole cpu to clear the memory) would change the material after that. All the edits would just be forgotten the moment I left the material editor. However, it turns out that I rather like the way the material looked on the tree.

Also, I used a quick trick that turned out nice. To get those miscellaneos sticks coming out of the, I "buried" a dead tree under the foreground terrain.

Vue Ecosystem Layers Tutorial

GeekAtPlay studio added a new tutorial yesterday. I checked it out this morning. It involves using layers of ecosystem materials. I rather liked it and see how it could be quite useful in creating realistic looking scenes.

One of the really cool things you can do with Vue’s ecosystem materials is to have objects populating one layer gather around objects in another layer. For example, if you want have a field that has occasional islands of foliage, say trees surrounded by bushes, you could use this feature.

You can also do the opposite and have objects in one layer repel objects in another layer. Could be useful if I ever want to recreate my lawn where the trees kill all the grass around them. Also, you can get a free maple leaf object out of it.

Ankheg - more head work

I've gotten a bit tired of doing the step-by-step it's kind of tedious, so I'm going to try to summarize things a bit more. I had a chance to work on the Ankheg's head a bit more today. If you'll recall I had just finished constructing then antenna last time, but I had not yet attached it to the head.




In order to attach the antenna I extruded a square near the back of the head then deleted the faces on the end to create an open stump. I did a subdivide on the outer edges of the stump to give me eight vertices, the same number as a loop on the antenna. I then manipulated the vertices into more or less a circular shape. Then I just merged the vertices with those on the base loop of the antenna.

Now, looking at the original AD&D monster manual I see that the ankheg has some frilly things under his eye, so I just pulled the vertices out to give him some spikes then did a few subdivides to give me a couple of more vertices to round them off a bit. I also did a bit of miscellaneous head shaping using direct vertex manipulation.