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She had a poofy skirt on!
I like the wavy lines emanating from her hip.Originally Posted by Finch
She had a poofy skirt on!
Donk
Oh I thought it was her curvaceous aura.
Skeptical.
Some more warcraft banners:
Last edited by FuryFox; 30 Dec 2010 at 12:18 AM.
I know you mentioned earlier that you were having issues with them reading easily because the art was for a tiny banner, so what I notice immediately is that the colors could be punched up a lot more to give it more clarity. Well, "punched up" isn't exactly it, they're pretty colorful, but the characters and the backgrounds are too similar. Looking at the thumbnails here I can't distinguish the armor from the room in #2, the elf from the sky in #3. But even in other pictures different colors still hit a similar area on a gray scale. So see if you can bring in some more contrast between objects with color and lightness.
Skeptical.
Well, tiny is relative, and the TNL thumbnails are that, but 904x244 is the actual display size on the site, so what you see is what you get (some I left a bit bigger for show and tell). You're observation about what's lost when shrunk down is interesting though, but in some cases the similar colors are intentional. With the Night Elf image, the dragon mount was actually the focus (I guess it's a new in-game mount this site can sell you), so I wanted her a bit blended with the background.
Hurr
I think it is less about the colors used, than the values of the colors. Your tonal range is staying pretty similar from your focal point to your BG elements. In a smaller composition maybe you should try to make the foreground stand out more?
Your compositions are really strong, I really love the pirate goblin piece, but you could make it pop way more by intensifying the outlines and darks on captain and the gold pieces his plane and increasing the atmospheric lightening on the far figures and the ship.
With the pieces that show less distance in their backgrounds, maybe go with much more desaturated colors. Wow armor is so colorful, (too colorful if you ask me) keeping the backgrounds toned down will make those brights pop more.
A really good technique is view your image in B&W to make sure you have good tonal variation and that your focal point stands out. I really hope you don't take any offense to this little paint over, but I think this kinda illustrates what I'm talking about.
Here is your Undead Rogue piece in grayscale. (the figure, placement of the armor and weapons and the design of the BG are all EXCELLENT btw.) When viewed in grayscale though, it becomes a bit more evident that your tonal range is pretty similar throughout the composition.
On this one I just did some dodge and burn passes and I lightened and reduced the contrast of the background. This is all super quick and messy stuff but I think the eye jumps to your intended focal points a lot quicker.
I know that is a pretty ugly example, but I think higher intensity tones and values in your focal points could help some of these read better. You don't want these great figures getting lost too easily man.
That's my two cents anyway. I've always appreciated your advice about anatomy, just thought I'd throw that out there. Keep up the good work sir.
Skeptical.
No offense taken, I appreciate the insight. I have a lot of trouble working in greyscale, and that's a good reminder I should practice, and periodically desaturate a color piece and check the results. I'm trying to come at things from a "painting from the ground up" rather than "coloring in the lines" approach, especially the initial blocking in of values, but whenever I get short notice for a job (which is everytime), I just default to what I've done (lines/flat/shadows/highlights).
I suspect maintaining a greater tonal diversity would probably also help with the myriad calibrations a digital piece goes through visually, monitor to monitor, monitor to print.
I know TNL's thumbnails are especially small, but looking at your image zoomed way out can help you look at the big shapes. Blurring your eyes can help to see the tones, too, you don't have to go gray scale unless you're having trouble seeing it. JM explained it better than I did. Like he mentioned, I think the pirate goblin one reads the easiest because it has good contrast in tone.
Drew, a while back you asked if I took up any education for modeling. I haven't, and I wish I could make a profession out of this to justify getting better and spending more time doing this.
I wanted this done by the end of the year and I knew it would be a daunting task upon investigation, and in my desperation to get it over with I probably cut some corners at the end which I would have spent more time on, but I think I managed to do an OK job here.
Presenting -
The Grand Riviera Theater which formerly stood in Detroit. More pictures (including ~20MB TIF files) and drawings are available here.
To put things into perspective: The school which I posted last time was 1.2MB in size, had 9422 edges forming 3837 faces, with 16 components defined.
This model is 36MB in size, has 27247 edges forming 9404 faces, with 60 components defined.
Getting some parts of the octagon done took upwards of a few weeks, because I was slowly getting acclimated to how SU wants you to use curves on a surface. It also gave me fits for trying to mirror objects (notice that the entire thin long column and other objects are totally mirrored); only weeks later did I realize I probably could have used the Reverse Face command to
ease that process. Many of the organic objects I simply tried to copy from sight instead of trying to measure things out. As usual, I had to strike a balance between spending time to get things exact and putting what looks acceptable enough and moving on. Having the official drawings available made this balance a bit worse because I'd spend so much time trying to make sure what I was putting down matched up well enough both with the pictures and the plan drawings. By the time I put on the roof component which has all of those flower looking things on it, my machine was crying in pain and sometimes taking minutes per command. I had to finish this on the wife's machine.
Besides the octagon nuttiness, some other fun tasks were the flower crowns on the marquee signs (since you can't push/pull curved surfaces, I had to make that object and then bisect it by a few planes which matched the curve of the sign, then erase everything around it after having all the faces intersect), and the fire escape (which had a lot of tiny lines to erase so that each individual bar didn't leave visible intersections with the cross bars or anything else).
Tax season is near and I have to spend time to study tests to earn CPE so that I can get going on my career. This is the last thing I'll do in SU for some time.
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