100th Post!

Wow 100 posts! Not bad, and this one is a dosey!
It's no secret that I love Shadow of the Colossus, that game along with Ico have had such a huge influence on me artistically. I've wanted to create something in that style since I saw the first trailer way back in 2003



I STILL get chills watching it. No game since has instilled such a sense of wonder in me.
Anyway, enough waxing poetic.

Rather than just recreate one of the many amazing Colossi from the game I decided to create my own. I named him "The Slave King"
When I fist envisioned him I wanted to incorporate more of an environment into him. So I came up with a cloister that would be strapped to his back.

This is a project that I've been meaning to do for a few years now, and this is the initial concept from about 2008-2009 I think.
So I changed a few things, Obviously I don't have the tech that team ico had to render the fur. So I couldn't cover his whole body. I decided to just use alpha planes and it worked well enough.

The biggest step for me was the textures. Texture painting has always been a bit of a struggle for me. I enjoy it but I never felt I could really do my models justice with my textures. But on this project with a huge shout out to my buddy Jeremy Huxley. He helped me with some zbrush know how on the texture front (see the post "Texture Tedium"). Anyway I feel that this was a huge step in my skill set and I feel WAY more confident creating textures now.

Anyway, here is the finished piece. Like any artwork there are tons of things I am not happy about, but all in all I'm very proud of this one. I hope it does the source material justice.

Moar Textures!!!

Some straight up old school painted textures. Done in the World of Warcraft style.

New Stuff!

Some personal work, I wanted to do a futuristic scene. Something quite different from my personal work. Of course I wanted to complete it! Which meant textures. Something I shied away from on previous personal project. I started this on a Wednesday and finished it the following Tuesday. So less than a week to complete!

Texture Tedium...

So I'm in the process of applying textures to my colossus model. I am pretty much creating all of my textures in zbrush with some photoshop adjustments. This is a relatively new technique to me (as of 3 months ago). So I'm getting better with each one.

I still have loads more to do. But I'm getting closer to finishing each day! I've been looking at Shadow of the Colossus A LOT, and I'm trying to replicate the symbols and patterns used in the game.

Making progress

I'm juggling two projects at the moment. But I decided to really sink my teeth into my Shadow of the Colossus model. I've finished most of the modeling, I just have to make some vegetation cards and do some destruction detail. Then it's on to textures.




Today I worked on the the zbrush sculpt for the main body. Nothing too crazy just some muscle definition and texture.
Oh and just for full disclosure I did use the base male from zbrush to sculpt over.


The other project I am working on needs some re-work I didn't like how the main character was turning out... I fell back on my comfort zone of muscular heroic proportions (it's ok for the colossus, he's carrying a castle on his back).

So I'm going to start over from scratch. The head scarf I like, but I got the idea from a concept I found on the web and I modeled from that..... I want to make something original, so I'm scraping it.

Influence Map

So quite a few artists I know did this so I thought I'd give it a shot. It was actually really fun!

Uncharted 3

The last thing I worked on at Naughty Dog was the reveal trailer for the new game. A LOT of different people worked on this... concept, animation, effects, lighting, texture, props etc.

My small part was modeling the sand dunes...