It’s been several months since I’ve last posted…It’s not that I haven’t been doing any art; I just haven’t been doing anything worth posting 
Warhammer Online came out last Thursday, and I’ve had a few chances this past week to check the game out. It feels great to see everything come together so well, and looking at everything brings back fond memories of working on WAR. I’m proud to be able to say I’ve contributed to the Character Art of Warhammer Online.
Here are a few screenshots:
Chaos Zealot - Tier 3 Armor Set
Chaos Zealot - Tier 4 Armor Set
High Elf Archmage - Tier 1 Armor Set
High Elf SwordMaster - Tier 2 Armor set
Chaos Horror
These are all flat shaded screenshots of the models, so there isn’t any specularity. The final in-game models look considerably different (especially the metals).
I have a whole bunch of other stuff to post, but I haven’t had much of a chance to get everything together…More WAR character art coming soon!
I wrote up a little guide for rendering Ambient Occlusion maps with XNormal for some people at work. Ambient Occlusion requires a lot of settings to tweak, and after a lot of experimentation and searching around the web, I figured I’d share my workflow for setting up my diffuse textures.
Tutorial link here
I hope this proves useful to some people struggling with rendering AO maps. Oddly enough, I usually get nicer results with my real work, but this at least demonstrates what the settings do
For those who haven’t tried it yet, XNormal is a great program that generates different kinds of maps (quickly and easily) for game model creation. I highly recommend it 
XNormal link
Further refined his outfit and slapped on some rough color overlays. Not really sure if I like this color scheme….but there’s always room for change.
I decided to turn his close range alternate weapon into a kind of double broadsword. His quiver will be floating behind him. I should probably flesh a few more areas out more, but I’m going to have to start modeling and design as I go.
So a week has gone by since Dominance War started, and I really don’t have much to show Anyway, I joined the 3DTotal team. I’m designing a Stalker class wielding an Air/Lightning artifact.
Silly Heads!
The back of his outfit is still pretty iffy, and I’ll more than likely change it as the days go by. I have a pretty clear idea as to how his artifact weapon works, and his background story too, but I’m still working on writing all that out I guess that’s all for tonight.
Man…I really need to learn how to draw….and paint….
Link to my thread over at 3DTotal
Dominance War Rules here
One of the recent issues of ImagineFX had a few sample images from Ballistic’s Ultimate photo reference series. Figured I might as well put it to good use!
Link
I like the idea behind the photo reference series, but now that I actually have some samples, it’s hard for me to want to buy any of the dvds. More care could have been put not only in taking the pictures, but also post processing (like making sure zero-pose photos are all level with each other). At the moment, the price seems a little high for the current quality. I hope the series improves from here on out!
Hmmm…now that I actually looked at the product link, I wish I had done so earlier. There are a few photos available that would have made good reference. Oh well!
This time I wanted to try and sculpt a head from a sphere, which has some advantages and disadvantages over Mudbox’s head primitive. I think from now on I’ll start making my own base meshes. Not entirely satisfied with the way I resolved her hair (among other things), but I don’t want to think about this any more since Dominance War starts soon.
I really did not like the direction that last head was going, so I decided to putz around with something different.
Loosely based on some Bridgman drawings.
A friend of mine asked me to post more pics of the 12WX:
Tried to do a younger head this time. Ugh….I’ll come back to this some other time
So I said I was tired of working on this. Well, I am
Another level of subdivision kills my computer. Convenient!
Neck’s still weird, but I don’t feel like working on this guy any more
