I like doing environment work but I'm not very good at it, started a tileable scifi-ish wall piece and didn't like how it was going so I stopped before it got worse, thought I'd post it as an update.
Absolutely no textures, not even finished.

Some more weapon work.

Came out to 1236 triangles, I've been trying to make my stuff higher polycount but I'm really struggling at it. I probably could have added in the grip as actual polys instead of using clever amounts of maps.

2048x2048 map, I just felt like working high res. Looks basically the same at 1024x1024 and a slight loss at 512x512.

I really haven't had anything to post, I've been just practicing and procrastinating.

Made this in a few hours, thought I'd update my blog. I feel like I've made decent progress since my first post.

3126 triangles, 1024x512 map.

Worked on a high-poly sculpt of the lower mouth just to get a better feel for that region, I think it went "OK", also messed around with polypainting a little.

One of my sculpts from my "300 sculpts of summer", I'm actually happy with this one, it's the first thing that looks sort of close to what it was supposed to look like

Now that I'm doing studying, I can go back to 3D art.

Started working on a tileset yesterday for a low-poly dungeon, this may actually go into an android game. The archway is bad, it baked wrong and I need to fix it. 344 triangles atm, using a 2048x2048 map, but I'll scale it down later, I prefer working at a higher resolution.

My organic skills are terrible, I decided to do 300 sculpts over the summer, which is 3-4 a day. All organic things from reference, let's see how that goes.

Working on a big project, made this as a small intermission just to test rendering and some other stuff. Going to take a 1-2 day break then continue on my project.

Happy with how this turned out.
973 triangles total, but it has two different materials between them because I didn't plan them together.

I might add some more pieces to this and make a town-sorta thing.

Fixed the texture up, gonna go work on other stuff now.

Said I was going to work on anatomy and I lied. Made a well.

624 triangles, 1024x1024 diffuse and normal map. I think it turned out really well. Bricks were hand carved/hand placed, well baked normals/AO. Texture isn't finished yet, it's just too hot where I live to keep rendering/baking/whatever during the day, my CPU temps are spiking.

I haven't made a post for about 2 days. I made things the entire time during, but none of them were satisfactory. Studied materials, watched some tutorials, and I think this one is a rather big improvement over what I've been posting.
1024x1024 diffuse, spec, and normal. All objects are on the same map. 1446 triangles for bow+quiver+a single arrow.

Gonna go work on my anatomy.

Another quick anatomy sculpt, about 30 minutes. I need to practice more...

Made a simple dagger, I see a few places I need to really work on.

Redid the handle

Apparently saving as jpg has been destroying my renders, and I'm having trouble with PNGs on blogger.

Another anatomy study.
I spent a large amount of time actually studying muscles/muscle groups today, I think it showed. Quite a few errors however.

I think I'm gonna go back to my comfort zone and make some hardsurface next

I said I'd work on some anatomy, and I did.

I hate working on anatomically correct things because I'm terrible at it. I don't have an artists eye - because it's one that's trained.
My only motivation is that someday I'll actually be good at it.

Made a simple barrel to see how fast I can model props and to work on my wood texturing skills, took about 5 minutes to model.


Things to note:
The wooden planks are off center, I should have stitched the top/center/bottom UVs together.
There's nails in the wooden planks, I was having trouble finding good plank references. I don't think a barrel should have nails.
Barrel is bent too far outwards in the center I think.
Probably other stuff I'm completely missing.
 
268 triangles.

The planks not matching up bothered me, fixed it.

Decided to work on another weapon to work on my metal skills, a Pike. The spearhead turned out alright... the shaft is terrible. I didn't think about how much space the shaft would need in the UVs to not look squished.
208 triangles, 512x512 diffuse and spec. Never quite realized how simple a pike is until today.

Decided to work on a shortsword to help out my metal texturing skills. Learned a lot.
248 triangles. 512x512 diffuse and spec map. I need to read up on rendering.
My game assets will be posted on http://opengameart.org/
I think tomorrow will be an anatomy study.

Decided to retexture the shield because it didn't feel right at all. I wanted it to feel warn, like it was in a battle, so I started from scratch, and read this tutorial over http://polygonseverywhere.weebly.com/metal-textures-in-games.html.

Front came out nice, but I don't like the back that much. The bronze still looks bleh. Bumped the texture up to 512x512. Should add a normal map for the rivets.

Was playing a history game and decided to work on a kite shield, something from the Teutonic knights. 420 triangles, lacks any type of actual detail. Next time I need to add some sort of wear to it. The finish was supposed to look like brass but it doesn't at all. Need to study up on materials. Rendered in a game engine. Handle was added at the last moment because I somehow forgot about it, so it doesn't look quite right. Uses a single 256x256 texture with spec in the alpha.

I made this blog as a way to start posting my (objectively terrible) 3D art. I'm a programmer by trade and wanted to start doing 3D sculpts/hardsurface 3D, however I'm not very good at it. I get disheartened quickly and often stop before I've started. I wanted to try and keep at it this time, so I thought making a blog out of it might help.

I'm aiming to do at least one piece of art a day, either a sculpt in Zbrush or something hardsurface in 3DS Max. A lot of my art in Zbrush is just random doodles, I know nothing of anatomy. The last real art piece I did was probably in middle school. Along the way I want to move on from random doodles to full blown art pieces, but that's quite a ways ahead of me. I usually spend about an hour on my sculpts each because I don't have that much free time.


I started this sculpt off as a D&D beholder then went my own way. It didn't turn out perfect, and next time I know to put the mouth/teeth as their own subtools because painting them was almost impossible.

The eye is quite off because it was too low poly for polypainting to be effective, so it isn't round at all. I'll fix that next time.