Parasaurolophus Models

I wanted to put up the ten finished models that I did of the Parasaurolophus herd.  These found their way elsewhere on the internet, but I failed to give my blog any love with new dinosaurs so here's to changing that!

When I have some fooling around time I'd like to try my hand at doing a proper rendering pass on one of these, just to have a really nice render of the sculpts.  I've yet to order any prints myself, but some people over at the Dinosaur Toy Forum had their prints come in and love them.

If you happen to order any of these models, I'd love to see whatever paint-ups or dioramas you make of them.

All Kinds of Stuff!

First things first...My Parasaurolophus herd is now available on Shapeways in 1/40 and 1/72 scales!  There's ten poses in total, and I hope to model some juveniles in the near future to add to the diorama possibilities.  Here's the store for those interested:

Gorgonzola's Dinosaur Shapeways Store

And because I'd be remiss if this post went without art, here's some stuff out of the old fashioned sketchbook.  Doodles, character things for some comic ideas, and not much else.

New Dinosaur in the works...

New dinosaur in the works, Parasaurolophus.  I'm just about done detailing him, then all the posing will begin!

Unlike the previous dinosaur, which from start to finish was done in Zbrush, this one I started in Blender as a box and slowly modeled it out to get the best topology flow I could.  I had a lot of issues on the Carnotaurus with having too many polygons in one area while not having nearly enough in another, and in the end the sculpt is very uneven (and required a massive amount of polygons to fix such unevenness.)  By the end of sculpting the Carnotaurus I had somewhere around 9 million vertices, which made the file incredibly bloated.

So for this one I started off in Blender, and took the time to slowly model out where I wanted the topology to go and how much information I wanted to devote to each area.  Here's an example of the model about 70-80% done with its box modeling.  Before I brought it into Zbrush I did bulk up the number of edge loops in various areas as I tested importing the model to see where I might need it for sculpting later.

Once I did that and tweaked any last minute silhouette adjustments, I imported it into Zbrush.  By this point a major bulk of the modeling was done, and with such an accurate sculpt, a lot of my time in Zbrush has just been refinement and detailing, mainly making muscles appear and creating skin folds.  I initially didn't model him with an open mouth, but decided that my future poses might necessitate it, so I opened him up in Zbrush and added more geometry.

From then on, it's just been detail, detail detail.  I'm about 90% done with him, and the last 10% is going to go by real quickly.  From there I'll make a master pose file and rig him so I can easily set up a variety of poses.

Shapeways Dinosaurs now available!!

I'm super excited to announce this!  I've always been interested in dinosaurs, and after much tinkering about with Shapeways I'm able to sell some sculpts I did of Carnotaurus!  These are in 1/72 scale, so they're small and affordable.  I'm planning to put out some more dinosaurs in the future, and I should be updating the blog very soon with the next one I have in the works, Parasaurolophus.

To visit the store, just go to: http://www.shapeways.com/shops/gorgonzola

And these are the Zbrush renders of the two models.  Unfortunately the scale detail work doesn't show up as nicely at that scale as I would have hoped, but if I'm able to keep the cost reasonable I'd like to try selling him at a larger scale in the future.

Chunky Fruit and Faces

Title says it all, really.

Timelapse test!

Oh Mein Gott! A video of me drawing!!

Lately, I've been wanting to try out recording myself drawing, potentially to do some process videos in the future.  I had debated between doing video vs. a series of still photographs, and in the end I decided that for timelapse stuff it'd make more sense to just do interval photography.  For more involved things that would require audio instruction, video would probably be more appropriate.

So for a first attempt, it wasn't bad, but I did notice two things right away after assembling the video: 1) I should turn off autofocus next time, to prevent the camera from focusing on my shoulder when I step into the frame,

2) I need to figure out a better framing than just a vertical aspect ratio. Even though it's cropped close to the drawing, when it's uploaded to youtube there's the awful black sidebars.  I don't care for those on other videos, so I felt like a bit of a hypocrite having them on mine.  Next time that won't be the case.

New Year of Art

It seems every year around the holidays I taper off in my posting, and then it takes forever for me to get back into the swing of it.  So hopefully this post will jumpstart my blogging again!  Here's a handful of stuff that was done a while ago and recently.  The mock design sheet is for ArtOrder's reinvigorated artorder Nymph challenge.  I'm hoping to put out one more before Monday, but that's kinda up in the air at the moment.

Post Illuxcon sketches

Week after returning from Illuxcon, and already Thanksgiving is around the corner.  Illuxcon itself was fun!  I got to meet a ton of new people and make some new friends, and I even had the chance to meet some artists I really admired.

Unfortunately I am terrible at keeping a photo journal of this sort of stuff, but I did scan in some of the sketches I did while there!

Zbrush sketches and trolls

Just some quick doodles before I head off to Illuxcon - Some trolls, a bust I sketched in zbrush, and some more work on the Avaceratops.

Sketches...