Still alive...Again!

Hey folks.

It has been almost 2 months to the day of being laid off, and I have now moved on to my next big project professionally. While I am keeping most of it under wraps, it is an exciting new thing for myself and the folks that I work with. This blog will become active again tonight after my first day of work!

Alex

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.