Wirehead Studios

For those of you who like to see me work, or want to know how I do stuff like skinning/texturing, I've something cool to show you.

This is a quick sketch I made:

(http://www.tabun.nl/tmp/monster_01_schets.jpg)

Which I turned into this:

(http://www.tabun.nl/tmp/monster_01_digi_done.jpg)

I've made another one of my video-tutorials, but this time it's both up to date with (basically) how I work on (Generations) skins nowadays, and it shows the process from sketch all the way to the result. I didn't go in and 'perfect' it, like I usually would do, because that would simply take too long, nevertheless, it's not really sub-standard work for me.

The downside is ofcourse that it's rather long (and large) because of that. The whole thing took me 2 and a half hours to finish, and the video speed is 10x actual. For those not wanting to do the math: it's about 15 minutes in length. The .avi weighs in at 80 Megs, so you've been warned ;]

You'll need the 'TSCC' codec to watch it. This is the TechSmith Camtasia Codec, which is what Camtasia's recorder makes. It's a good codec for this kind of 'desktop recording'

The codec can be downloaded here: http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/c...decdownload.asp (http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/codecdownload.asp)

The movie can be downloaded here:
http://www.tabun.nl/dl/monster_01_making_silent.avi (http://www.tabun.nl/dl/monster_01_making_silent.avi)

Sweet man.
I have definatly taken your techneiques to heart.

d'Oh, one reply (thanks Washu :)) - I really thought people would be interested. My bad :]

I'm interested, and the video was neat, but I lack the artistic talent or knowledge of photoshop to make sure of this. Sorry. :)

I'm very intrested and downloaded it and the codex but was not going to risk changing anything on my computer until I had recorded the entire series of Dr Who. Done it now, and intend to watch it this week.

Later....
I've now watched it and am impressed at the amount of work that goes in. Talent is not enough, you need dedication as well.

The eye impressed me the most, as it looked so 'round' , but I thought there was too much black around it, but what do I know.

I learnt 3 main things:
1  Keeping a palet of the colours you intend to use at hand.
2 when you filled in a background colour you then trimmed the edges with white. that helped to get the shape, rather then just add colour, which it what I've done on the few occations I've had to do anything like this.
3 the 'blur' or soften tool. Having no training or experance, for some reason I never thought to do it that way.


Also... for some reason I though you made the whole image in monochrome and lastly put the colours in. did I dream this? or did I hear it somewhere?

Shambler the impressed, who may now try to make a ut skin. :thumb:

I got sidetracked.  Snagging it now. :)

Edit:  I was thoroughly impressed by this, especially the fact that you're working in only a single layer as far as your painting is concerned.  You're using the computer as a digital canvas and literally "painting" it in the same way one would paint a real canvas.  You have a very strong grasp of how the colors interact, working from a very limited palette and letting the colors blend into each other to create the effect you want.  You use that sense of color blending to create your detail as well.  The texturing is added last to give depth and doesn't overpower the colors.

I'm glad you made this video.  It gives me a much greater appreciation of how you do what you do, especially since I tend to be a lot more technically minded and much less artistic.  :thumb:

One suggestion I might propose, is perhaps you could write a documentation, on what is going on, because I am guessing that some people can't really identify your technique, I think I got it down though.

When adding lighting or color, you dribble some color in one area, and refine it with the blur tool; I see that this is the most used technique you use. You also use the dodge/burn tool as well. You use hotkeys alot too. In the detailing you use a base texture, use the stamp tool and brush them in, with an overlay or, soft light setting. That is all I can really identify at the moment.

Here is my redrentaion of Tab's techneiqe, though it is a simpler object. Took me an hour to do.

Actually, what I use most often is the airbrush. The blur tool is used for turning hard edges into smooth gradients. I mostly use colours to define shadows and highlights, but every once in a while I might use dodge/burn. Not often though, because you have very little control over your colour that way - I advise to use the colour picker/a palette and the airbrush tool in general.

Shambler:
Although it appears I trim the edges with white, that is not the case. In fact I use the eraser tool to create the clean outline. That way, the object will be independant of its background. In that image, the background is white while I'm painting. You can see at the end of the movie that I switched it to a brownish hue, without affecting the paint layer.

Some painters prefer to work in monochrome for anything they do. I prefer working directly in colour for organics, because you get fresh and living colours that way, even though it's harder to do. For metallics, like weapon skins, I sometimes work in greyscale, then add colours later by using the 'select' tool and overlays (etc). The typical Strogg-style as seen in my Strogg weapon/item skins is all directly in colour though, much like this piece.

Washu:

My basic approach to this kind of thing (that is pre-sketched organics) is the following:
- 1: fill  in shape in the most common (usually a darker shade) colour.
- 2: airbrush harsh shadow and highlights and defining differently coloured areas
- 3: once I'm happy with the general shape (which is usually immediately with pre-sketched stuff), I select an area to detail, and pronounce the shadows and highlights with a litte more precision
- 4: within the selected area, I airbush the varying colours that I expect to be dominant for specific bits (like gum, the iris of an eye, teeth etc).
- 5: I use stronger edges on shadows/highlights in this area and use the blur tool to smooth them out if needed.
- 6: I airbrush details in the (smoothed) areas, usually with the 1-pixel brush.
- 7: When I'm done, I select an overlay texture (if needed), and overlay it on everything. Then I set the desired opacity, and set a null mask for the layer (black mask, nothing of it is visible).
- 8: I then proceed to airbrush white on the mask, so the texture becomes subtly visible in some areas. (I don't use the stamp tool)

And it's back to step 3, usually redoing what I don't like right after I tried something

Most of the stuff I do is entirely intuitive, I simply try something that feels right, work it out, and see if I like the result. If not, I paint over it again. You can see that I rarely ran into that while painting this little monster. For stuff that needs to be right, like Generations material, that'll happen a bit more often.

All the painting happens on one layer, but I sometimes (not in this case) keep a backup by copying the layer.

At about 9 minutes into the video, you see that I detected an inconsistency in the level of contrast of the head and body (forearm/paw area), and I went back to areas previously detailed to fix it.


Also, it's hard to make out what exactly is happening on the skin of that axe - can you post the 2d map?


Thanks for the comments posted, it's inspiring to read how much information/ideas you all get from that video.

Actually Tab, I made that from scratch in Photoshop. I used the Pen tool to draw the major shapes, and worked from there. Here's a higher quality image. I beefed it up a bit too.

The technique is much more like oil painting than I imagined it would be.

What edition of photoshop do you use Tab? I have paint shop pro 7,8,and 9 that I use for ALbum covers, but thats just photos and text etc.

Washu:
In that case, nice lighting :] - The metal could use some work, but (for this style) the wood is good. You might want to get a bit of anti-aliasing going on near the edges though, the jagged edges gave me the idea it was a model :]

Shambler:
For painting, I use PS 5.5 - because everything that came out after that has annoying brush panels and tool settings in a top-bar. For (web)design, I use PS CS 8.0, but not for skinning and painting. I've never liked PSP, but I've heard from people that they love it, so it can't be all bad ;]

CS 2 has a really good brush palllate, and I find it very useful. I customize all my UI for painting. You should get the tryout version of CS 2 Tab, just to check out the customizable menus you can create.

I'm running Photoshop 6.0 myself, I've not seen earlier versions so I have no basis of comparison.  What I love is the layer control.  Most of what I have to do involves alpha channels, or situations where layer stacking has really come in handy since it's mostly editing work and not raw artistry.  I use PSP 3.2 (very old version) for quick and dirty stuff, like screenshot resizing because it takes a lot less time to load.

The biggest difference between 5.5 and 6+ is that the former does not have the same options for style/typography editing - you can play around with that a lot more in later versions. The rest of the changes aren't all that important, and I've never had any need for any updated filters or tools yet.
PS does load slow, but this isn't a problem for me, since it's almost always on when my editing rig is running anyway ;]

I'll be sure to give that CS2.0 a try when it is released. I'll probably be getting every Photoshop that will ever be released anyway :] - customizable tool windows sound marvellous in any case.

It is released. Check it out:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html)

I got a very good deal on the upgrade to CS 2, $100.
What I like the most, is that you can set up your UI the way you want it. It also has many new useful tools, like the healing brush. They also completely re-did the file browser from CS. I love this new version; I'd recommend this to any seasoned Photoshop user.

Small Update

Too much glare. The previous version looked a lot better. :)

I agree: the wood on the previous version also looked better than the new handle, to me.



Believe in Intelligent Design? Want to readsomething? Prove that you can read, and score free material to read now! (http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html)

;]

Ha Ha Ha.... Ha Ha...
No money involved, because they know that their pocketbooks will be in debt. I'm not gonna get into it in this topic, beware, I'm gonna post Mr. Ingnoramus. Beware ot truth.  :wtf:

Back on topic (but for how long?) I agree, Lukily I make archives of my work in every save.

I mainly posted that to show how annoying it is to have to read controversy-corner worthy stuff where it doesn't belong - and mine is not even in EVERY thread posted.. If you want to discuss how this person defends a non-falsifiable theory by demanding that an opposing concept be proven with hard evidence, please do, but stick it in the CC. Please keep it there, if at all possible.


Does the new PS have auto-save (every x minutes)? I do that by hand, usually incrementing filename-number combinations to keep 'backups', too. It's a good practice, but if it were automated, you won't get that power-failure the one single time that year when you didn't save often enough ;]

That was my annoying signature.  :wtf:

As to your question, I havent fully explored that yet.

Update...

wicked axe man

i was board so I made a model of an axe in Maya 6. BTW I will be gone until next saturday on vacation, won't be back until next week. So see you guys then!
Take a peak.

(http://img222.echo.cx/img222/2899/axerender11cy.th.jpg) (http://img222.echo.cx/my.php?image=axerender11cy.jpg)

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(http://img222.echo.cx/img222/9894/axerender25xu.th.jpg) (http://img222.echo.cx/my.php?image=axerender25xu.jpg)

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(http://img222.echo.cx/img222/7874/axerender30lw.th.jpg) (http://img222.echo.cx/my.php?image=axerender30lw.jpg)

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My skin map:

(http://img222.echo.cx/img222/8375/axeuv6di.th.jpg) (http://img222.echo.cx/my.php?image=axeuv6di.jpg)

I'm afraid the screenshots are a little dark - from the looks of it, it's a very nice (first?) attempt though.
You may want to try to get a bit more subtle metal texturing on the blade, and some shadow/light play on parts of the model itself, while tuning down the contrast of the wood texture.
Keep at it, and one day you may be able to take over a Resurgence modelling project :]

Oh yeah, I gotta keep working on my chaingunner dude, haven't touched him since school finals.

I am a very avid modeler, so things like the axe I just did took no more effort then making a piece of toast. That model and skin took me about an hour and a half roughly. Not to brag or anything. :]

Here is something else I'm working on. It is a map for UT2k4

(http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2942/shot1copy4bf.th.jpg) (http://img51.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot1copy4bf.jpg)
That torch model I made in Maya, I used various alpha channels to deliver the transparency on the top. The particles, I made them a while ago in Photoshop 6, then I had to program a script to make the flames react realistically. There is still some bugs to work out. I want to colorize it more. In the center should be that yellow color, and as the flames move up, get more red.

(http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/9121/shot49lj.th.jpg) (http://img51.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot49lj.jpg)
Close up of the torch model.

(http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/3901/shot20rl.th.jpg) (http://img51.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot20rl.jpg)
The landscape: The terrain textures were made in Photoshop 6. and the amethysts were modeled in Maya, skinned with Photoshop 6, and an environment map was created from the scenery around it. The black is just brush clipping.

(http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/9186/shot37xx.th.jpg) (http://img51.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot37xx.jpg)
Castle WIP.