Blockout/Rockout

This is a pretty rough and ready block out of the bridge and mountain structure. I need to spend some more time figuring out exactly what's going where without making it all a busy mess.
I got some block walls baked down for the bridge sections but they're not "cutting the mustard", whatever that means. I'll scrap them and put a bit more time into the structure and details.

These walls are from my environment production module last year, I'm working on something in the same vain at the minute so I thought I'd post these too.

Oh my Topogun...

With the tree sculpted, I didn't really know how I'd go about the low poly.

I tried decimating in Zbrush, but the resulting topology was (and usually is) very erratic.

Then Topogun appeared. My housemate, friend and fellow artist Ben Armstrong

http://benarmstrongart.wordpress.com/

gave me a crash course in mouse-clicking, and in an evening my work was complete. The bake turned out pretty well and I was really stoked at how slick Topogun behaves even with obnoxiously high poly counts!

You'll see I've added foliage to the tree but there's some stuff that needs fixing, I need to create more negative space between the leaves and correct the colours somewhat.

Tree Sculpt

After falling out with Xnormal for baking the barrel, I decided to move on for the time being.

Here's a tree!

I created a very simple basemesh using Max's freeform tools and crafted the main form using Dynamesh in Zbrush. From there I worked up the bark's direction at a low subdivision before refining the details at a higher res.

Remember barrel, I created you, and I can destroy you...

Let's begin!

Hey y'all!

Friday was the first meeting with my FYP supervisor, Simon McKeown. He's pretty cool.

http://www.simon-mckeown.com/

After an edifying group discussion and individual presentations, I wanted to get my hands dirty and have some fun in ZBrush.

Naturally blocking out/white boxing the scene will begin very shortly, and I've loosely scheduled out a time frame for the project (we'll see how that goes...)

Anyway here's the sculpt: