ArkOfDarkness - Art Bloggin' From My Noggin

[arkofdarkness]

After 2 years of consuming Cubebrush Tutorials, I can't believe it's taken this long to start an Art Blog Page.
Well, better late than never!

Basic Stats:
-3D Artist - Props, Weapons, Characters, Creatures (If it's creepy, I want to make it)

-Majored in Game Design and Digital Animation, and still truckin' along, trying to get somewhere with it (but hey, it's the journey, not the destination, right?)

Artstation: https://arkofdarkness.com/
^ Not gonna lie, probably gonna have most of the same stuff as this Blog, only a bit less "Work-In-Progress"

[arkofdarkness]

"DeadBeat" - Face Practice

A bit of Face/Hard Surface practice in ZBrush from this past week.
I might actually give this guy a body at some point - I like the concept behind him.
Sorta like a half-dead guy kept alive by a Sound-Weaponizing Exo-suit.

Technical Specs:

[arkofdarkness]

A bit more Head Sculpting/Retopo/Texturing Practice.
Sculpting in the wrinkles was pretty fun.

[arkofdarkness]

Really pleased with how this one turned out - you can never really go wrong with a creepy clown. (And on a shameless personal promotion sidenote: if you're ever working on a horror game or general spooky project and need a Creature Modeler, hit me up - I live for this stuff!)

This one was also literally painful to make - from base sculpt to retopology to UV's to texturing to rendering, all in the span of a single day.
It was a really fun day, though.

I'm also noticing that I have a bit of a tendency to display exposed esophagi/tracheas in some of the last few models (or at least some form of emphasis on them). So that's a thing I've learned about myself over the past month.

[MattD]

Damn that clown is going to haunt my dreams. The unholy spawn of Venom and It. Great work!

[arkofdarkness]

Another new model to add to the heap.
Basically hammered this one out over the last two days. (I'm trying to push productivity to crank out something new each week. Hopefully it'll yield some improvements to speed and quality.)

Polycount: 3,382 Tris
Textures: 2048 x 2048 (Albedo, Normals, Roughness, Metallic, Emissive Maps)

(You ever stop, look at something you've made, and think 'wow. That looks way too good for me to have possibly made it.'? Because that's kind of how I feel when looking at this ZBrush Sculpt Render.)

[arkofdarkness]

Alright, so I should probably take a break from the creepy stuff, and work on an actual human character. (Just in ZBrush so far - I haven't started Retopology/UVs/Texturing)

A bit of relevant info to share thus far:

1) They say that you should learn something new with every project.
I have learned that Polygroup By Normals and Polish By Groups are a very powerful combination for getting strong, clean meshes to work off of.

2) Working on creepy faces is far, FAR easier than trying to make a normal or attractive face.
At least with something creepy, the uncanny valley becomes your friend - for a normal human, you have to actively fight against it at practically every step.

3) ZBrush can be very useful for blocking out Basic Colors, but since my focus is on Game/Animation-usable assets, I probably shouldn't try to use ZBrush for much more beyond that - with time, I could probably figure out how to maximize Materials and Rendering in ZBrush, but that time would probably be better spent using a more comprehensive Texture Workflow in Substance Painter, or Rendering in Marmoset Toolbag/Unity/Unreal.
Especially since Material information (Metallic/Roughness/Transparency) can't really be passed out of ZBrush.

So this is basically what 2 days of Sculpting (with breaks and downtime) can get me at the moment.
- I've figured out what it is that bugs me about the face: the Eyes. They're very harsh/piercing. I should be able to fix that during Texturing; soften them up a bit. The neutral/blank expression probably isn't helping much either; that may resolve when the character actually emotes.
- I've also finally found a decent workflow for making Collars/Lapels; Basically, you just use the CurveStrapSnap Brush, Polygroup by Normals to get nice groups, Polish by Groups until you get a clean base and edges, and then you can manipulate the straps into the desired shape.

I also included the concept art. I am definitely not a concept artist.
It is also several years old. (Like 3-4 years old).

[arkofdarkness]

And so I finally have it Retopologized, UV'd, and gotten the Texturing to a stage I can be somewhat happy with.
But, I've also been feeling that showing a character model in T-Pose or A-Frame just isn't all that interesting (a basic thing that almost any portfolio critique will mention, but one of the things that is also super easy to overlook or forget)

A full Rig may be a bit unnecessary (although, making a basic human rig would probably be useful for posing additional characters down the line, as well as some animation snippets), so I guess it's back into ZBrush at some point for posing and facial expressions.

[arkofdarkness]

ART DUMP TIME
Just a few weapon models that have been lurking in the background for whenever I've had a bit of "I don't want to work on the current project, but I still want to work on something" time.

[arkofdarkness]

Another piece of Weapon Practice (I've been hashing out a new Hardsurface Weapon Workflow in ZBrush over the past week, which looks to be much faster and efficient)

Extra example - this one took about 5 - 10 minutes at most. I'll never claim to be super fast, but it's a fair bit more speedy than the previous workflow.

[arkofdarkness]

Alright, so it's been a while since I posted more stuff here (almost a month, it looks like) - and I've been using that time to work on a few different projects.

I've gotten what should be most of the bugs worked out of my new Blade Production Workflow, and decided to take the opportunity to try to push my sculpt details to make something fancy.

I'm sort of hitting a bit of conflict as to what should be prioritized next:
I've got a handful of in-progress Characters in various states of "not-done", and literally dozens more that I still want to make.

At the same time, there are also several Prop Model ideas that I've filed away to make in the future, although I know I'll be thinking about the Characters I could be making while working on those.

It's literally like trying to choose between your own children.

[arkofdarkness]

...So, guess it's been (let's see here)... about 3.5 years since the last post.
That's, uh, a pretty long time with no updates - looks like there's a lot of ground to cover.

So over the last 3 years, I've been working as a 3D Generalist for a client-focused studio - basically, clients come to us with games or apps that they want to make, and we get contracted to do the necessary coding/art/store integrations/etc.

Naturally, there are some NDA-related headaches with getting clearance to include previous client-work in a portfolio - especially when a lot of the larger projects are created specifically as polished prototypes to show to investors (since the general rule-of-thumb with NDA's and portfolios is that it's safe to display when the finished product is publicly available, things get very muddy when a project just never reaches a public release.)

Luckily, when we have a gap between contracts, we are encouraged to work on portfolio pieces for both studio and personal use (which I CAN show below!).

Campfire Ghost
When I first started with bencin Studios, we were sorely lacking for cute/whimsical portfolio samples. So I thought something Luigi's Mansion-esque could help fill that gap.

Knife Set

Soda Cans
In the early days, we were also lacking for photorealistic 3D samples. I'm not the greatest fan of going for photorealism (personally, I prefer the stylized approach), but it's always fun to work with glass and metal materials.

Toy Boat

Gnome - Enemy Character Model
There was one internal studio project that several of us were working on, which was given full-clearance to display for portfolio-use. I got to make several enemy models from start-to-finish, Sculpt-to-Animation.

Gems - Re-Usable Assets

3D PBR Potion Bottle

Skateboard

3D Platformer Character

3D Human Bust
We needed to fill another portfolio-gap (samples of 3D Humans), and I wanted to work on improving my Hair Card workflow.

Train
A prospective client wanted to see samples of 3D Vehicles we'd made, and we didn't have too many to show - so I tried to fill that gap.

Tapioca, The Candy Corn Witch
Aside from the Branding, this is rendered entirely in Unity - it gave us a sample to use to show what we could provide for Particle FX, URP, and doubled as a nice content post for Halloween.

Gilded Flail - Weapon Model

Grassy Shrine

Gyro Globe
(This one wasn't actually done for the studio - it's just my most recent personal study)

There's definitely quite a few personal pieces I worked on outside of work (I've been running a Tabletop RPG campaign for this same length of time, and made a lot of 2D and 3D Art for that), but that's probably best left for another post.

[arkofdarkness]

Okay, only a 6-month gap since the last post this time; that's... better?
Work's been more or less the same so far - got some more clearance on stuff I can put in the portfolio, and made some more progress on personal pieces. (So yeah, if you're seeing a gold shield logo, it's from work; anything else is on my own time)

There was an internal project I was part of around 2020-ish, where we were working on an idea for a VR Tower Defense game. (It eventually got shelved, but I got through a good chunk of creature and prop models)
We changed our file storage method in the meantime, so it took a bit of time to get access to some of the files, but I think the creature models were worth adding to the portfolio.

Overall, I got to do some concept art for all 4 creatures (and then the final designs for the Spider, Skeleton, and Werewolf), and then I was responsible for Sculpting, Retopology, UV Layout, Texturing, Rigging, and Animating all of them.

If you want to see the animations, everything's uploaded to Artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/arkofdarkness
(Well, the Spider, Drake, and Skeleton are there - still need to do the rendering on the Werewolf)

I also finally got approval to share the art assets from one of our client projects from 2021, which was a polished prototype/vertical slice of an infinite-runner style game: (and for this one, I once again got to jump around the whole range from Concept Art to Modeling to Rigging/Animation and even Particle FX)

The Big Hog (Enemy)

The Hog Trapper (Enemy)

The Monkey (Player Character)

The Bananas (Collectibles)

The Oxygen Tank (Power-Up)

And other Environment Stuff (including the track and grass that's been in all these renders)

In the meantime, I've also been working on my own stuff outside of work (not sure if I've already mentioned it here, but one of the biggest curses of being an Artist AND a DM for weekly tabletop RPGs is that I have a compulsion to make character art for EVERYTHING - both in 2D and 3D).

However, this post is already super long, and was definitely a lot of images to drop all at once; so I'll cover the personal stuff in another post within the next few days, and hopefully ease into a more-frequent posting schedule.