Hey everyone!
It's so close to Christmas now and I'm starting to feel the festive spirit of Christmas creep upon me as each day draws anew. I thought I'd write a little something here as I've taken some steps outside of Artstation that i thought may be worth posting here.
Social
I love Artstation but i don't tend to browse the amazing artworks that are daily being posted by all of you until i'm actually sat at my pc. Usually, i'm on my phone on instagram or viewing posts to the artstation facebook group (which strangely enough has had a lot of weird spammy requests of old accounts) or the marmoset toolbag user group.
And it's on instagram where i have found myself spending most of my time outside of Artstation itself oogling at nice and inspiring artwork. So i decided to use it myself to post tidbits of my work here and there. I'm really treating it as a semi-small blog update whereby you can catch snippets of a new artstation post and even for stuff i wouldn't consider posting on here like timelapses. Timelapses like this one of a picatinny rail.
For stuff like this, i really don't think it's worthy of a blog post on here and instagram is a nice way to bridge that sort of mini blog update.
So if you're on Instagram and you post art stuff, I'd love to follow you. My instagram link is here. Feel free to follow and lets fill our feeds of each others work.
This also reminds me, i've renamed my artstation and instagram to have some level of cohesion, from "FGSLW" to "Art of Pilgrim". The latter is easier to remember (it also points to one of my favourite books called A Pilgrims Progress with former being a biblical passage. I wonder if you can figure that one out?) and I seemingly have too many social account names across the various art forums. I just wanted some clean up and unification.
Tutorial/Walkthrough
This one i've wanted to do for a long time, but i just haven't had the time to do it. I've had a lot of questions over the years and i've attempted to answer some of them in a previous blog post and in private messages but as time goes on workflows and pipelines change and some of that info is outdated for myself. So i've decided to create a FULL walkthrough of making an impromptu home-made weapon with my current workflow. I think, from writing this, i'm at around the 5 hour mark in recording the tutorial. But the whole process will follow this structure for game development, or at least the one i use.
1. Model the base mesh and/or high res meshes
2. sculpt details
3. create the low poly
4. UV
5. Creating a bakescene in TB4 and baking out the low poly
6. Texturing the asset in Substance Painter
The walkthrough will contain many common aspects of impromptu weapon creation, like the creation of tape (see vid below for a brief timelapse of my recording). And boolean operations in zbrush and in blender to get some nice threads and complex geo to sculpting welding (which process has been simplified greatly since my last art tut blogpost). And i'm thinking of even doing variations of the same aspect of the model if you don't have zbrush or marvelous designer.
It isn't aimed at beginners, i don't want you to have to sit through a bunch of videos that explain basic stuff you already know about. It's more about the process and way of achieving something. I want it to be useful.
I'm even considering extending this tutorial to other aspects of impromptu art
As you lot know based on my art uploads on here, it isn't just weapons i do but a whole bunch of different types of home-made, impromptu assets and i think it'll be worth doing at least another one after this to do something cool like that. But I don't yet know what i could make.
The question I've had floating in my mind is that would anyone find this useful? If anything, even if one person finds this useful then it'll be worth it for me - also, i've really enjoyed doing this process, and it's an aspect of the artworld that has really intrigued me.
Ideally, in terms of release, i want to have it finished before Christmas, so all of you who would be interested in this can do it in their Christmas break.
So yeah, that's about it. I just wanted to let you all know what i'm doing, and what to expect besides my usual Rust art uploads. If i've missed anything that has either confused you or has left you with a question, drop a comment below and let me know.
Peace!