Still alive!

Hey Folks,

For those curious I am indeed still alive. For those readers who do not know, I was caught in the layoffs that hit Sucker Punch and am currently looking for work. With that taking up most of my time, I have not had as much time as I would like for personal art, though I am hoping some of the content I am making will eventually be visible.

More soon!

Alex

A retrospective on painting

Just for fun I went and found some of my early collections of daily paintings. Pretty scary thing. Here is where I was around 18 months ago:

Here are some samples from my portfolio website of daily paintings I feel turned out well.

More are available on my personal site here: www.digitaldracott.com

Daily Production Still #5

Technically not  a still, but one of the big "quality" techniques I just implimented was a radial change in seasons instead of a passive one. I can still scale things passivley, and probably will for some instances but for some shots/effect changes, having the radial change is going to be super cool.

Warning: This Gif is large

Daily Production Still #4

Hey folks. Been a while since I was at Siggraph, then traveling (so essentially out 10 days). I did lots of concepts for the main device and have some cool stuff to show coming soon. In the mean time, just polishing up a few things (more on that soon).

Here is a still from me playing around with the amount of light the trees are picking up. Trying to remove some darker spots.

Daily Production Still #3

Lots of hours spent tonight populating the environment. Here is where I started:

After some work I got to here:

Nothing crazy. Much later I ended here:

This shot is a good representation of the final visual quality I will be aiming for. I consider the environment and lighting (not post and rendering) to be at ~85-90%.  It uses every asset I made over the past few weeks.  Here are my thoughts:

What I like: 

-The density feels great in spots. Very natural

-The lighting holds up very well. This is better than I had been hoping for.

-The grass blends much better than I thought it would, and shrinking down the flowers was a fun touch.

What I dont like:

-The big trees feel to sparse along the trunk

-Parts of the background still give that feel that they arent in a forest (specifically the back left)

-Some shapes still feel strange, like the big rock to the left

-Some ground meshes were lost, and some of the leaves don't hold up that well on the saplings when viewed from this angle

-The small tree to the center left is just too dark.

Daily Production Still #2

A second still. Last night was focusing on setting up the birch bark (which turned out excellent).

What I liked: The detail and blending around the base of the birch tree.

What I dont: The tiny weeds are not casting shadows, and the value of the secondary bark is just too dark and boring.

Daily Production Stills

Going forward on my current project, I will be capturing daily stills as a form of accountability, and to help motivate myself (and to track progress).  I will also be including what I like and what I dislike (for fun and to stay objective).

As of today, Most of the environment is near shippable quality. As a result I have switched over to shot and world building.  Here is my first true production still (an early WIP of one of the shots, no foliage, no real lighting, no ground painting, etc).

What I like:
A fan of the rocks blending into the mid and background, how 3D the grass reads despite being flat planes

What I dislike:
Still needs bark textures, Grass height feels very random.