AIPOD Journal: Entry 2

The class I am currently in has me working on both regular and cartoon styled images. In this particular assignment we were assigned to draw a head turn around for each. I really struggle with cartoons but am enjoying the challenge.
-Meatmonkey

AIPOD Journal: Entry 1

So its been a while. Life has had me so busy I have not really been touching most traditional artwork for some time. Recently I decided to finish off my BA and needed to do it through online, my only financial available option was AI Pittsburgh. So I have decided to journal the work and have already discovered how out of practice I really am. Anyway, here some hands...
- Meatmonkey

Dreadnaught - Crash Site

I found this old concept digital speed painting I did for a possible level for the Dreadnaught project. Though the project is dead I did like the painting especially given the fact it was only a couple hours of work. I miss painting, need to do more painting..... (sigh).

-Meatmonkey

Dreadnaught - Hunter

This one is technically not complete but will get to it eventually. Either when the project begins to move forward or when my little personal time permits. This guy is suppose to be a long range fighter using advanced optics and a powerful railgun to make others lives miserable.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Boss C

Another low poly boss model for the Guardian Earth Project. They are starting to get easier to make since I can rework parts of previous textures into the newer ones since they share common schemes. I actually like this one a bit... have a few ideas on gameplay for it too.

-Meatmonkey

Chicago Racer

I was brought in on a car simulator project to do optimization on existing assets. I did not create these buildings but had to make them more efficient for the game engine. For those who know tech stuff, the game was not running so well at 14k draw calls in unity. After I was done it with the art assets I got the draw calls down to 1200. I think I could of gotten them lower with more time, but there was a steep turn around. So the time to investment ratio was no longer worth the clients wait.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Boss B

Work in progress of another very low poly model enemy for the Guardian Earth project. Trying to wrap up the project so doing some simple designed bosses for some of them but keep them interesting. This one is suppose to be some sort of mini reactor ship that drags the power of a small star within it.

-Meatmonkey

Dreadnaught - Hangar

The Dreadnaught projects hangar bay were players would customize their mech skins and equip them with any weapons they may have acquired. This is animated, but it was not completed yet with the gui interface and everything.

-Meatmonkey

Dreadnaught - Basic

The starting mech for the Dreadnaught game with a the design coming from a multi purpose construction model. The mech would be pretty much your standard across the board stats mech with nothing special about it. But there is nothing ordinary about mech combat!

-Meatmonkey

Dreadnaught - Ivan

A low polygon mech for a game that is in the works. Hopefully it will be done soon, but there is no realease date planned at the moment for it. This one is a heavy mech with apparent Russian origins.

-Meatmonkey

Dreadnaught - Tempest

A low polygon mech model for a game in the works. This one has been dubbed the tempest and is the king of the skies. Though none of the mechs are planned to be true flyers, this one can stay airborne the longest due to its lightweight, advanced thrusters and high powered hover fan.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Cruiser A

More Guardian Earth art assets with this one being an enemy cruiser ship. Hopefully the game comes out good.

-Meatmonkey

The Vault

There is more I wanted to do but I am at the point where I am getting too much diminishing return on my time for improvement. I am going to go ahead and call it done and move on to other projects which need more attention. Hopefully it is respectable enough to compete with the other entries.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Cruiser B

A smaller cruiser for the Guardian Earth Project. I picture this one flying near enemy ships ripping apart the hulls with the winged energy tips on the side. I doubt it will be programmed to do that in game though.

-Meatmonkey

The Vault (WIP) 03

More progress on the vault piece. Starting to explore some of the basic rendering and getting ready to flesh out more of the textures. I doubt I will have the time to get the astronauts in before the deadline since I want to get the rendering down first and I suck at it.

-Meatmonkey

The Vault (WIP) 02

The Vault piece for the monthly Gnomon contest further along now. I am getting to the point where I am touching on texturing and deciding on how to tackle the rendering. I am not a strong technical render and really wish I had Vray to render this. Hopefully it wont be to much trouble since I would like to add some other things instead of wasting all my time figuring out rendering.

-Meatmonkey

The Vault (WIP) 01

Gnomon contest this month is "The Vault", so I am working on an entry despite having little free time. I have always wanted to enter and decided to stop making excuses! Here is my work in progress of my piece and am going Sci fi with the vault being a giant metal globe in space.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Boss A

A boss for the Guardian Earth project, an asteroid station with lots of fire power. After a lot of work it is finally respectable. Hopefully the project does not stall out like so many others I have been on.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Player Ship E

Last player ship for the game (at least at this time), now work on other assets for the project. This one is more of a bomber ship, but we will see. Overall the poly count is really really low, but maybe we can go increase it after we see how things run the way they are.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Player Ship D

Another low polygon resolution model for a mobile application game. So much work to do even when they are low resolution like this. Hopefully I get more time in the near future to kick this into higher gear.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Player Ship C

Another very low poly ship for an curtain shooter ipad /iphone app.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Player Ship B

Starting to go through and take more screen shots of the Guardian Earth assets. Weeeee!

- Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Title Screen

Guardian Earth Title screen without the buttons. Hand painted the background and made everything in Photoshop. Not quite done yet and how far it goes will depend on time constraints. Hopefully it will look nice after it is all said and done.

-Meatmonkey

Guardian Earth - Player Ship A.

One of the player ships I did for a Ipad based mobile app game. Extremely low rez as all the assets for the game are, but they are tiny on screen anyways. The name has been changed since it was completed, so disregard that.

-Meatmonkey.

Guardian Earth - Bats

A pair of ships for a side project I am working on. Probably will be making technical edits later on and want to primarily get it working well for mobile development.

-Meatmonkey

Space Ship Silhouette 01

Been quiet lately... but really busy. Concept sketches for some space ships and some them will be turned into really low ploy models. Will try to start posting more regularly again now that things are starting to form into more of a routine.

-Meatmonkey

Concept: Egyptian Portrait

My concept done for a monthly concept group. I was originally planning on duplicating the grayscale bust of this and doing multiple costume designs. But ended up just practicing color painting on it. It is far from good since I drifted from my original plan the painting came out pretty stiff, but I was happy with the lessons I learned from painting it.

-Meatmonkey

Raven Skull WIP4

I have learned the value in not caring. I figure whats the worse that can happen... another failed piece of art. So I have begun blocking in the background more and played more with some experiments. Overall I am not sure if I care for the direction it is going, but heh.... thats the beauty of not caring. Lets see what happens.

-Meatmonkey

Raven Skull WIP3

Did not have much time to work on the piece in my last session, but wanted to knock in some of the background. I am keeping it light, since I am not sure what I am doing there yet. I want to start adding a bunch more vegetation throughout it and lock down the placement of things before I get too opaque.

-Meatmonkey

Raven Skull WIP2

So I have decided to go with a dirty watercolor style. Thats what I dubbed my watercolor style sense I make no efforts to preserve the whites. I usually am much more opaque in my watercolor then come back in with another paint like acrylic later to paint the highlights.

-Meatmonkey

Raven Skull WIP1

This started out an attempt to add a value rendering to my portfolio and utterly failed. So I was in the process of destroying it by erasing all the rendering but liked the line work of the skull. So I decided to start experimenting and redrew the raven back in. Lets see where this goes.

-Meatmonkey

Dreadnaught Ruler

A height comparison chart for a mech game I hope to get done sooner or later. Thankfully making them more realistically smaller will allow for greater design options and more playability as a FPS style game. I hope to eventually do a full comparison chart with all the mechs together when it is possible.

-Meatmonkey

Thumbs...hands.

Thumbnails of hands... with thumbs! These are really old actually, I recently finished a sketch book that took way way too long to get through. But anytime that happens it is something worth celebrating for me. Took some pictures of the bearable stuff and put this up here to share.

-Meatmonkey.

UCR Poster

I know it has been a long while. Have been sucked into many education and game related 3d oriented tasks. We hit an unfortunate snag on the project and we are assessing what needs to be done. This actually was done for an educational posted using assets from the project. So since its for public advertisement I threwh up here as well.

Shawn's Tattoo

A marine friend asked for me to do a design for a tattoo for him before he is deployed. He wanted the tribal flame thing going on with the USMC letters in the middle of it. I supplied the first draft of what he was requesting. It is heavily lifted from a design he showed me off a beer can.... haha, marines.

-Meatmonkey

Gun Composites

A work in progress of the Gun composites based from the silhouette that I did earlier. They are no where near complete, but they should not take too long to do and I will just update it then. After this I will probably will choose one or two of the guns and do a final schematic drawing.

-Meatmonkey

Papa Monk

Started out decent, went really bad, then salvaged in below decent piece. I need to do more studies, but I would feel weird posting a bunch of studies here and I do not want to ignore all of you. Must keep pressing forward.

-Meatmonkey

Rufus

A hobo brawler or a pirate? Who knows, but it reminded me a bit of a younger version of Uncle Rufus from Boondocks and thus named him so. Just a sketch in hopes to get better at many things I need help in.

-Meatmonkey

Bonk Color Comps

Rough Bonk color composites done in Photoshop which I am leaning towards the bottom middle one. I will be doing some more detailed color character paintings here soon, but want to do her armadillo pet design first.

-Meatmonkey

Bonk

Wanted to diversify a little bit and get a cartoon like character in progress. This is Bonk, a little prehistoric heroine that is a rather strong tomboy. She runs around with her dinosaur bone club and her pet armadillo that she knocks into things.

-Meatmonkey

Axion

This was an introduction animation I did for a class project not too long ago, it can be played on a loop. I did everything within the video except design the logo. A bit too much glow for my tastes along with other things, but was on a timetable and had to go with it. I also updated the pod model images in an earlier post for those who follow along.

-Meatmonkey

Fey Magic

Crap. But at least I am back on the horse and drawing again. Nothing much to talk about here, just another drawing on vellum. I might take it and paint it digitally and see if I can make it more respectable, but I have not decided yet.

-Meatmonkey

Digital Portrait 002

More practice from reference, this one is a black and white painting of a young man. I am strongly considering of trying to do at least a painting a week of a character in a movie released that week. Right now though I am just going to paint as much as I can and see where it takes me.

-Meatmonkey

Digital Portrait 001

I have been doing too much 3d stuff lately (or nothing) and need to get back to sketching and painting. I need a LOT more digital painting practice and really need to make more effort to get more of these digital paintings done, actually more than that I need to make it routine.

-Meatmonkey

Pod Model

Have not really decided how far I want to take this model, figuring it out as I go at this time. I am working on the texture some, but will probably build up the model some more for the normal map. It has been frustrating thus far, but we will see how far I can take it.

-Meatmonkey

Pod Concepts

Have to do some pod designs which is like a futuristic cockpit of some strange device. Working on blocking it within maya but figured I should show where I came from to show the progress of the pod device.

-Meatmonkey

Gun Silhouette 004

It seems the guns are getting bigger and bigger which is fine. I do plan on the final product being an unrealistic large gun. But only plan on doing one more page and taking it on the next step,but I have so many guns to work from.
-Meatmonkey

Gun Silhouette 003

Rolling right along. I was unhappy with some of these as a whole, but they had interesting parts that I will continue to carry on into the next batch. Thats kinda of the idea of this method, rapidly produce a bunch and begin taking pieces from some of them and recombine them into something better.

-Meatmonkey

Gun Silhouette 002

Here are some more gun silhouette's and I have no intention of stopping here. I am not 100% sure how many I am going to do. But it will probably be many before I end up choosing some and taking them to a more detailed stage.
-Meatmonkey

Gun Silhouette 001

The first of many weapon silhouette's I will be doing. It is my hope to improve on weapon design, and eventually add some nice 3d objects to my portfolio. Cool characters need cool guns to blow things away, anything else would just not do.

-Meatmonkey