Forgot to mention this here, since I know there are other artists that appreciated his work on Pixelation, but Moebius died this week. Chances are you've seen something he's done or influenced in your time enjoying artistic entertainment.

I picked up a DVD through Blender covering Low Poly Game Character Creation by CG Cookie.com. It will cover the creation of a model, sculpting it all at high poly, then baking those sculpted details onto a low poly mesh.

This was the character that the tutorial series teaches you to make, animate, and bring into Unity 3D:



I learn better by applying lessons to my own creations though (and I think their model is goofy as all get-out looking) so I will be going through all the processes with my own little guy.

I'll post up the progress shots when there's milestones when I have time to work on it outside of normal job stuff.

Here were the concept sketches I threw together before starting up the lessons. Just something goofy and not-too complex.





First pass at modeling it over the reference sketches:



Quickly didn't like his proportions, so I altered them before starting the sculpting. Here is what my sculpt is looking like so far:



Probably going to do something about the size of the hands before finishing up and making the low poly mesh. Will also have a few more things to add before finishing the sculpting phase, such as getting some hair, details like pockets, teeth, eyelids, adding the suspenders/gun holster, etc.

Thanks for checking and let me know if you have any critiques or suggestions to improve how I'm working on this. Been wanting to learn 3D for too long so I'm just diving in. Blender, being free, is where I am beginning. Not sure what software I will move to once I'm better at it. It will probably end up being what I see most widely preferred with companies/studios that I want to court for contract work.

Nice job on the perspective angle of each piece. Do you have a method of using 3D software to get your lines/planes, right?

The heart reminds me of a Zelda heart container, from Ocarina of Time.

Worried about the detail level, and the tattoo blurring too much over time, which they all do, to some degree.

No pin thingy in center of watch face for hands to connect to?

Will this not be colored?

You could add some background effect of some sort. That would help unify things. You could utilize the meaning of Design itself - starbursts.

Also, it all fits a little too conveniently into an obvious square. I would expect a more horizontal/landscape layout, since the watch is springing open to the left. Minimize the watch, mininze the watch face, make the heart bigger (supposed to be the focal point, right?) and also give the heart a little tilt so it's perpendicular with the spring attached to it launching it forward. Some speed lines?


yep

Thanks for the writeup! You're correct in thinking Zelda heart container.  She asked for a specific version of it, so I just overtraced a version that was close enough to the perspective:



Been busy with side work and home crap so sorry for not addressing the response you so nicely spent time on Here's an update:



As for perspective, I just eyeballed it. Later remembered that Illustrator has perspective grids you can customize and toggle so I checked it here and there after drawing it up and was pleased enough with the result.

The squarish-ness about it I knew would be lessened once I added the chain to it. This will extend from the shoulder-ish area onto the arm. Still though, good to make it less contained for the watch section itself, so thanks! I cut down on some clutter a bit, but most tattoo artists that would be worth going to would alter the design for the best interests of translating into a good tattoo so we'll see what they say once it's actually brought in, and alter ourselves before committing to getting it inked if need be.

To start, and maybe even for good, it will not be colored and I wanted to keep that in mind to cut down on overdoing things to allow for room to color it, but still wanted the lines to be well enough to hold their own.

Mockups! (she wanted sizes changed after I showed it plopped down as lineart, wanted the clock to be bigger, heart smaller. Aw well!)






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Cool map, Dennis! I have Starcraft II just because I wanted to appreciate it at a slow pace, single player, on easy difficulty because I'm terrible at RTS games. It looks like there's lots of room for different kind of strategy and challenges though. I'd be very worried defending so many openings, haha, but like I said - terrible at RTS games. I get too wrapped up in upkeep of things and stress out too easily . On US-Servers, though, so no luck to give it a whirl, sorry!

Haha, sorry, I guess as soon as I saw it I couldn't unsee the big glitchy-looking-font pattern so I hadn't even considered that it probably isn't as obvious as I think.