Bunch of paintings I’ve done in the last couple months.  Mostly on the new iPad M4.  The paintings not done on the latest iPad were all done on gen. 2 iPad Pro.  All procreate paintings.  Most of these are Dune 2 inspired, there is the young African American boy that is based closely off Meybis Ruiz Cruz’s work, and a couple of insta gram (ref shown) painting studies (sorry I don’t know by who).  My buddies Doberman Pinscher there as well.  First one is another insta gram painting study (but the original was done with traditional painting).  I tried to simulate that in Procreate with some cool brushes.  These are all loose studies really, I got a little too details on some and def. Not super happy with all of them, but I learned a lot and that is the point really with these.

Decided to post up on the Blog one more time for my own records before I finish this off.  It sorta helps me to find areas to improve by doing this.  Right now my to do list is getting pretty reasonable.  I want to re-texture the gun entirely and add blood sweat/dirt to everything similar to how Ryan looked like in the movie. I need to add those tiny facial hairs that go everywhere. Lastly I need to do some general polish and material tweaks.  But everything is in place finally in Unreal 5 which is a relief because its my first time doing this.  I love how performant Unreal is, its pretty crazy... I have a beefy machine but its almost like its not even rendering anything with how fast this runs and its doing real time raytracing and stuff with complex hair systems.  This will def. be my main workflow moving forward.  These are all just "high resolution screenshots" btw.  I had a hell of a time figuring out how to get offline renders to work, but I finally managed to do it with the help of console commands.  There is a really great tutorial on it incase anyone is interested I can link.  Anyway, last time posting wip on this... I know I've said it a million times now but this time I'm determined. ;)  haha.  Its time to call this quits finally.  Thanks to anyone that's been following along here, its been a long journey.  Next post is beauty renders and stuff with final textures etc. on the old portfolio.  cheers!

Finally getting into Unreal 5 to make some attempts at realistic rendering.  Also taking some time to put the finishing touches on my Ryan Gosling Likeness sculpt.  The hair is undoubtedly much better in Unreal over Marmoset, and since I can use the xgen hair systems its a lot lighter performance wise.  I'm also liking the skin shader here also.  Lots of challenges I faced along the way getting to this point in Unreal.  I STILL can't for the life of me figure out why offline Unreal renders look WORSE then just real time screen grabs.  So these are all just real-time "High Resolution Screenshots".  If I can figure out the offline renderer I guess the hair might come in a bit better.  

Anyway, need to do another texture pass on everything as well as a bit more polish on the sculpt here and there, but feeling like I'm finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel with this project here.  Oh yea, and I haven't imported his clothes/jacket and gun yet, but that will be there also.  Starting to look forward to the next project as well which I'm positive will go a hundred times faster since so much of my time here was learning stuff.  Thanks for looking, next update I'm calling it quits!

Doing a talk tomorrow about Getting into The Games Industry and Sticking it to the Man!  Well.... Not so much about Sticking it to the Man, but it'll be fun anyway, you should join!    
@9:00 pm pdt time zone... 9/6/22 

Just a few more painting studies I did on my Ipad this past month:  Couple more game of thrones portraits, a john singer sargent master copy, Chani from Dune, and a super quick skull study after watching a tutorial from Ryan Lang.

Finally got a chance to go thru this tutorial by Greg Rutkowski (which I purchased ages ago on gum road).  Tried to simulate his style using his brushes without doing an exact 1 to 1 of his painting (I drew stuff differently intentionally). Mine isn't nearly as good as his, its too stiff and now that I look at it way overboard with the texture quality of the brush strokes.  But anyway, was a good learning experience and I'm sure I'll get better with some more practice. This is all done in photoshop, from scratch with Greg's Brush pack.

Side note: I've been sorta all over the place lately with my art... but I think I'm going to try to commit a little bit of time every day to drawing and painting (cause drawing especially I need to improve on) and see if I can get back into some of my 3d projects again like Ryan Gosling likeness.  I recently moved and started a new job so its been pretty challenging lately.  Anyway here it is!

Greg Rutkowski Tutorial: 

https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/JlK/desert-dragon-demo?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace

Gregs Final result for reference: (not mine)

Been messing around with this AI image generation tool called "Disco Diffusion".  Its pretty neat, def. has a pretty strong learning curve in order to make anything useful, but now that I'm getting the hang of it I'm starting to discover some use cases.  I got this idea to use some AI images I generate with prompts to make a cohesive Matte painting... then get it printed to a large canvas and then use real oil paint to make a hybrid type Impasto painting.  This is the first real Matte painting I've made so far with this process.  Anyway, ask away if you have any questions, the bottom two images are the main images I used that were generated by AI with prompts (disco diffusion).  So that gives you an idea with how much post I did on this after the generation.  Oh yea, I up-res'd this a lot with Topez AI Image enhancer, so its at print scale and painted a bit more after that.

Starting point below (AI generated image):

Grabbed the ship and modified it from this other generated scene below:

There is a quick demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdBOsyogEVY

This is a substanace painter material I recently made in substance designer.  Often times when making textures in substance you will want to add some subtle random color variation. I can't tell you how much time I have wasted setting up materials like this from scratch in substance painter, so making a proper material in substance designer to do this is long overdo for me. This material will make that task quick and easy for you.  It works with both the metalness workflow and the spec/gloss.  Please let me know if you find this tool helpful and if you have any questions.  Cheers!

(lots more info at the store:)

Get it Here Free: https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/Aa1l5/free-substance-painter-material-color-variation-mixer