Updated!

I came across a pretty cool portfolio site last night. I've been looking to update my website because it's always a bit of a pain when I want to um... update it with work (which doesn't happen very often, but anyways.) I was searching for hours last night trying a bunch of different sites, and programs, and I can across DA Portfolio- or www.daportfolio.com/ from Deviant Art. It's incredible simple and easy to use. There are not very many options to customize the look of it, but if that isn't as important to you... the ease of use is incredible. And it's free!

I did my new portfolio site through it, so check out the link on the right side of the blog, under 'My Places'. I've also updated/re-designed (since I took down my last one) my MySpace page. (Thanks for your help Marco!)

Happy New Year!
-kube-

Put a fork in me

I really didn't want to leave the latest image I had posted unfinished. I had to at least put some effort into painting it. It's a far cry from where I originally saw the image going, but I think it worked for the time I was able to put into it.


I'me really looking forward to the next theme we're doing on Art Bot Central over at http://www.robotentertainment.com/.

MONSTERS!

I'm definitly going to do that in 3d, probably a bust in zBrush. I cant's wait! Until then,
Happy New Year everyone!
-kube-

Almost 2 months, and it's not even finished!

It's been a while, a long while. I realized that I was starting to neglect the blog. We had another theme up over at ABC (Art Bot Central over at the www.RobotEntertainment.com) where we got to do our favorite Saturday Morning Cartoon characters. I was looking at either doing something from He-Man or Thundercats originally, but there was interest in both of those topics from other artist, so I went with something else.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I thought if I did a different, more realistic take on them, it would be more refreshing and keep my interest. It was, but I still found it hard to make the time to finish it off. I started out great, and was hitting it pretty hard initially. I did the thumbnails and had a buddy of mine choose which one to move forward with. He would have been a much better friend if he would have finished it for me : )

I started to run into problems when I was making his attire work. The original Turtles in the comic and the Cartoon are both from pretty minimal designs, in trying to sell more of the realistic take, I wanted to add a bit more clothing and equipment. I went through quite a few iterations on designs, and only ended up with this one since I had to back into the deadline to post before I left for the holidays.

I want to make time to finish it, and add color… but I also want to make progress on our next theme, Monsters, over the Holiday time off.
So happy holidays to all, see you next year!

-kube-

Anastasia DeCobray

Finished up the Baroness picture for the Art Bot Central post.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out after just spending a couple hours here and there over the course of 2 weeks. After the other guys started posting their stuff on the blog, I knew I had to do something new and step up to the plate. Check out their submissions here: http://www.robotentertainment.com/Blogs/Art-BotCentral

The artists kicked ass on this one and we had half of the entire art team participate in this after hours project. Very cool!

Next up is Saturday Morning Cartoons for December. I'm currently thinking of TMNT (Which wasn't a Saturday morning cartoon, but it's close enough :) I'll try and post progress pics as I go and get back to my bi-weekly updating. Until next time, take care.

-kube

Destro… see me after class!

After my last Baroness post, Cots had a better idea for a title… I had to use it.

We had a G.I. Joe theme for the latest post for our blog at Robot Entertainment, Art Bot Central (ABC). I had every intention to take the easy way out, and just post my earlier rendition of the Baroness, because I was a bit burned out by all the work it took to get Greta done. After I started to see all the participation and the sacrifices the other Robot artists were making to get stuff up on the site, I knew I had to stop being lazy, and get to work.

It’s also been too long since I’ve posted. Here is the sketch I blocked out to create the painting.


Hope you guys like it. I’ll have the painting up here on Monday. I may want to spend a couple more hours over the weekend tuning it a bit from it's current state. Unitl then...

-kube

This one's for you Cots!

Finally done. I'm not going to say much this time since I actually got pictures to post! This was a lot of fun, and even though I wanted to do some more with it in zBrush... which never happened (Damn you dense mesh!), I'm pretty happy with how she finally turned out.Thanks again to Andy Cotnam for the great, and inspiring concepts. http://www.seecotsdraw.blogspot.com/

So Close.

So after I finished my Clash of the Titans submission, I've had some more time to spend on getting Greta a bit closer to completion. I'm pretty happy with how it has turned out, but it hasn't been without its share of problems. I wanted to get her to a certain point so that I could take it to zBrush for detailing, unfortunately, I did too much modeling in 3dsmax and when I took it into zBrush it was very difficult to mess with. I was having problems no matter what I tried to do, model, texture, masking selections, it was everything. I thought I was doomed, and this project would never find the finish line. So I took a step back, and I went back into Max and did some more detailing in there. I added stitch lines, and more detail into the mesh to get her to this state.

So I'm thinking the next post will be the last one for Greta. I HOPE! I look to have some materials on the model, and I will try to pose her. But the mesh has gotten pretty dense, so I hope it's not too much of a problem.
See ya next time.

-kube-

Detour Ahead!

So my feverish pace is starting to slow even more on Greta :( But she’s continues to get closer and closer. But I do have some great excuses:

1. I was on a great, much needed, vacation with the entire family (13 of us fit into a beach house! It was a very quiet, relaxing vacation. Well not really, but it was a lot of fun, and the kids loved it.)

2. I had another project that I was working on that I had to complete for a Robot Blog theme. You can check it out here.

We wanted to start doing themes as an art department to help focus some efforts into getting some more content on our art blog, Art-Bot Central. So the first theme was 'Clash of the Titans'. I wanted to continue working in Max, so I chose to do a 3d bust of a stylized Perseus.
Here is the final version here:

I also posted a progress shot on Art-Bot Central, so check it out.

Until my next post,
when I will most likely have more excuses,

-kube-

Too many irons in the fire.

In my efforts to finish this model, it seems like there is a little bit of everything trying to make Greta end up on the proverbial shelf. But work continues (slowly, but continues none the less). I got her to a place where she’s pretty much all blocked out. Still a couple areas I’m looking to tweak onces I get her in zBrush. I know I modeled a bit too much details in Max, and I’m sure I’ll pay for it once I’m detailing in zBrush :/. I don’t plan on doing that much detailing as much as I need to do fixing and tweaking on some of the spots on the model. I need to add a bit more detail to her attire and equipment.

I was looking to have this done before the end of the month, but I may be off a bit. I started another quick project for work (and by quick, I mean I have been working on it on and off for a couple weeks now, I wish my definition of quick was really a short amount of time). On our work blog at Robot Entertainment, some of the artists are doing a theme project around Clash of the Titans. I went with a bust of Perseus, so hopefully I’ll have an update on that soon.

Until next time.
-kube

Pushing Polys.

My first mission was to dust off what can loosely be described as a base mesh.

After looking at what I had and the concept again… I decided to push the proportions of the model some more. My original take didn’t carry over a lot of the style that was portrayed in the concept that I liked so much.

So much of the personality and attitude of the character was coming through its proportions. I took out some of the details in things like the collar bone region, reshaped the chest and hip area, and I adjusted the arms and legs quite a bit, and really like how they are all looking now. Although I added a bit more ‘flair’ to the hands, I’m not sure if I really like them just yet. I also focused a lot on getting the structure in for the face and hair. Now that I am happier with the base body, I will be starting on blocking out her spy outfit next. Special Agent Greta coming up next week!

Damn you Greta! Damn you!!!

Have you ever have one of those projects that you didn't quite finish, but think... if you only gave it that extra couple hours, it would be amazing? In this instance, it was a 3d model, and the character even had a name.

Simply...

Greta.

Now usually, I would find that name completely unattractive and boring, but this concept made it so fascinating and elegant. Check it out...

These concepts were such a strong source of inspiration, I could just see the polygons forming in my head and the rendered pose was envisioned even before I fired up 3dstudio. (Andy Cotnam did the concepts that I'm speaking about, check out his amazing work here.) I was so motivated that this was going to be an amazing model, and that nothing was going to get in the way of its completion.

But something did. (I won't get into that, it's not important to this story, so back to Greta.)
With each month (or year) that went by, the feelings just got stronger and stronger. I remembered it as THE best thing that I ever did, but it wasn't quite finished yet and only would need a couple more solid hours to finish up. I would constantly have it in the back of my head telling myself to get back to it, and finish it up... but I only wanted to do it when I would be able to finish it, and the timing was never quite right.

Well, now seemed like as good a time as any, and I just reopened this file after it being on the proverbial shelf for too long, way too long.

Oh Greta... how deceptive you are.

So, as you can see, I really have my work cut out for me on this one, but I really do love the concept and owe it to Andy (and Greta) to get it done. So more coming on this over the next couple of days/weeks.

Stay Tuned
-kube-

Mr. Ro-Blog-O

Ok, so I was really reaching for a title for this bit, sorry. But I put a blog up on the Robot Entertainment site.



I started the blog off by introducing myself to open it up for the other artists at the studio. Additionally in that post, there is a group picture with all 14 of the artists, and I showed off a couple pictures of my work space at home. Art-Bot Central will be a blog hosted on the Robot Entertainment site and will be a hub for all of the artists at Robot. We will have random posts of various art and ramblings by individuals as well as doing group themes or projects. So stop by, and stay tuned.

Feeling a bit Nostalgic

I saw Star Trek recently, and like a lot of other people, I was blown away! I really liked it a lot, and I started to have these feelings of a bit of nostalgia come over me.

It may have been the buzz generated from Star Trek and all of its awesomeness, and maybe a bit of seeing that another Transformers trailer, which will probably end up being entertaining. But it could have had to do with that G.I. Joe trailer that will most definitely be horrible (the animations looked so bad, and there is a Wayne's brother in it, WTF?), but I grew up on G.I. Joe's. And the Baroness at least looked good! Sienna Miller is fitting into the character very nicely :). Personally, I think they went a bit too real world with the design, and I wish they would have taken some more inspiration from the comic. I followed a bit of inspiration, and did a drawing of what I thought would look good.

We're for real!

The Robot Entertainment website is live! It looks pretty swank.

Imagine That

So no one has just one blog anymore. If you are going to invest time into it at all, you need at least 2 :)
So a long time buddy of mine, Bart Tiongson, had an idea to bring some people together onto one site, and started up something called- The Imagine Nation on blogspot.




The idea is to bring together artists, and post a wide variety of work. It started with just guys from Ensemble Studios, and has grown a lot since then. The last image I 'finished' (and I use that word lightly), was for a little friendly competition we did for the website which was themed 'Capcom Characters'. I choose to do a random character from the Monster Hunter series. That universe is incredibly inspiring to me personally, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to do a character design that fits within that world.

Robot in the News

And so was my buddy Gene and I. We started in the industry together back in Pittsburgh in 1995. And here we are... still working together almost 15 years later. Even thought it looks like I'm as big as Lance and Charles combined (which I blame the camera lens :), it was really cool seeing Robot guys in the news.

What's going on?

Man, I go away for a while, and everything change. I have another child now (Which makes a 2 1/2 year old girl and a month old boy), and Ensemble Studios is no more. It's been a while now since I've heard about the demise of the studio, but It's still a very hard situation to comprehend. After 14 years, the studio generated an IP in Age of Empires that sold well over 20 million copies, and on the heels of releasing Halo Wars (which eventually cleared over a million units), Microsoft decided to close the doors. But as they say, as one door closes... another one opens, and I was fortunate to have an opportunity present itself with the start of Robot Entertainment.

Robot is made up of 44 x-Ensemble employees, and even in the early stages of only operating for a couple months, it has been an absolute blast and extremely passionate and productive. It's some of the most fun I've had in my 14+ years in the industry. I still get to work with a lot of my close friends at Ensemble, but not all of them. And I wish those guys nothing but the best. It's been a weird year for the entire game industry, and hopefully it rebounds soon. Ensemble had an art department that was about 40 people, and all of them were amazingly talented, which was evident in the release of Halo Wars. It's THE best looking RTS on the market right now IMO, especially on the console. I will never forget my 9+ years at Ensemble, I got the opportunity to work with so many people that have all affected my life in some way. But I also look forward to what lies ahead for the next 10 years, it's an exciting time.