Sindre Opsahl Skaare

Merry valentiones!

2012-02-15T03:12:00.001-08:00

Heart, haha.

Pollywog

2012-02-09T01:52:00.001-08:00

Other homework kept me busy today so just something simple today. A cute widdle pollywog.

Trying out a new technique.

2012-02-08T00:02:00.000-08:00

I saw a very interesting post by Magdalena Dadela on Zbrushcentral where she did an amazing sculpt of a girl in a straw hat. Her approach to doing the straw hat by weaving zspheres much in the same way you'd weave straw or willow inspired me to try the same.

My weaving skills aren't as impressive so made a pretty crummy looking basket, but I learned a bunch from it. :)

And I braided Mr. DemoHead.ztl's hair. :D

Pigman

2012-02-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

I intended for this to only be a quick one hour mouth study because I have other homework for tomorrow. Instead I ended up spending 3-4 hours on this guys' ugly mug.

And lookit! I recorded a video:

Ugly ladies

2012-02-06T01:09:00.000-08:00

Decided to take an acrobatic fucking pirouette out of my comfort zone and do a combination of two of the things I'm terrible at; females and full body models. I'm also trying to use the Clay brush as much as possible because I'd like to get the hang of it, most of the times I just use the Clay Buildup.

Today's and yesterday's sketches:

Organic Modeling, wohoo!

2012-02-04T02:32:00.000-08:00

Taking Organic Modeling this semester and just like with Hard Surface I will be doing daily sketches, except this will be 100% zBrush rather than Maya.

This is today's doodle. Started it in class and kept noodling at it when I got home. Seems like I subconsciously ripped off Faceless Void from Dota2. The rough idea is that he is a sage of sorts that has grafted a magical tablet to his head in order to gain divine sight.

Bone daddy

2012-02-01T14:41:00.000-08:00

I wanted to test out 3DCoat's voxel sculpting a bit more so I made a skull. I have a piggy bank that is cast from a medical skull so I used that as reference. It has some anatomical and proportional issues, and the underside is not finished at all, but I was sick of staring at it so I did a quick retopo and threw it into Modo to play with some more rendering stuff.

Modeled in 3DCoat. Rendered in Modo.

Jewelry sketch.

2012-01-15T16:25:00.000-08:00

Did a bracelet tonight. It's supposed to have a chain but I skipped doing it because I wanted to spend time messing around with Modo's renderer instead. Still haven't figured out how to apply textures properly...

Modeled in Maya, rendered in Modo.

Brazier

2012-01-14T15:30:00.000-08:00

Nothing is more fun than spending hours doing something, and then discovering that your method is all wrong and all the work is wasted. So instead I made this brazier. If my computer didn't suck i would probably have done some engraving and stuff on the metal parts, but my laptop chugs for a minute straight if you try to do a 32 increment radial symmetry stroke so yeah... Can't wait to get back to my desktop PC.

Getting back into it.

2012-01-11T15:59:00.000-08:00

All righto. After some weeks of too much holidays and Skyrim, and not enough work I decided to sit my ass down and be productive. I started a few sketches, a hard surface and an anatomy study, but they both sucked ass and I scrapped them. Instead I made this dude. Yay.

zBrush sculpt from a caricature by Marcus Sakoda.

2011-12-11T02:08:00.000-08:00

Just got a new computer and I've been toying around with it today. Did a sculpt for fun based on a caricature my friend Marcus Sakoda did of Beat Takeshi. Check out his stuff, he's pretty rad: http://marcussakoda.com/

I'll probably try to finish it the coming week, in between finals and all.

junk

2011-11-23T01:20:00.000-08:00

Just a shitty head I made while messing around with 3DCoat, nothing to see here.

It's finished!

2011-11-21T03:00:00.000-08:00

Wohoo!

GameArtisan Mini3D Challenge 1 of 6 Paths.

2011-11-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

All righto, not much going on here. Let's do something about that.

I have teamed up with the badass Sueann Williams to join in on a contest the GameArtisan forums are holding where you are supposed to pick a fantasy RPG stereotype and make a cute chibi version of it. I'm not a very good concept artist especially when it comes to cute stuff, but Sueann's work is a whole different thing. Check it out, it's lovely.

So less talk more art. Here's her design:

And here is where I currently am with the model and texture.

The deadline is on monday so I gotta haul ass over the weekend. Which could get tough seeing as I'm going to WorkshopSF. :x

Hands hands hands

2011-08-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

And some feet. A face seems to have snuck in there too...

updating again

2011-07-22T00:18:00.000-07:00

here have a mouth

A quick nose before work

2011-07-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

Hands when I come home

Trying out zSketch

2011-07-11T00:25:00.000-07:00

And it sucks...

Actually, it's probably just me sucking at it, but zSpheres and zSketch is just not giving me the results I want and they are waaaay unintuitive to work with. I think I'm gonna drop zBrush for now and do it the old way. I feel I'm spending way too much time noodling around with that program and not getting shit done. Probably gonna start with the sculpting again when I do stuff like lips and noses, but for now hands seem to be just too complex to doodle in zBrush.

Here is today's hand. Shit sucks.

Grrrr fucken zBrush

2011-07-09T03:06:00.000-07:00

As much as I like zBrush there are parts of it that really grind my gears. I haven't updated the last few days because been struggling to figure out how to use zSpheres, and i've lost two sketches to crashes now... I really need to get better at saving. After losing my second hand I decided to doodle a study of the asaro head. It looks like shit and is all wrong, but here it is.

New hand

2011-07-06T01:08:00.000-07:00

Leaving the other hand alone for now, my computer is too shitty to do fine details like the knuckles and wrinkles.

Here is the rough start on a second hand.

And my super shitty basemesh. I see people do sketches from rough box meshes like this so I wanted to try it. Seems to work pretty well so far, but I miss Slide Edge Tool and Insert Edge Loop. :(

Hand part 3

2011-07-04T01:17:00.000-07:00

Todays work on the hand. Put in more than 4 hours today on account of it being a weekend.

Hand part 2

2011-07-03T01:18:00.000-07:00

All right so this is all I'm gonna bother doing in Maya for now, I'm feeling that from this point on it would just be nitpicking and a waste of time. I got to take a close look at the fine details and crinkles in order to model them in and that's why i did it this way. From now on I'll be doing quick sculpts in zbrush from simple basemeshes.

Here is my hand:

Start of 3D Hand

2011-07-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Here's the start of today's sketch. 2 hours of work so far, but I had the rough start of the hand laying around from earlier so add a few hours to that count.

Daily Anatomy Studies

2011-06-30T23:50:00.000-07:00

Over the summer I'm going to chop away 4 hours of anatomy studies every day. It's going to be tough but I'm gonna do my best. My boss Shon advised me to start with hands as they combine elements that are reoccurring in most body parts, like proportion, soft form, bones, tendons, wrinkles, etc.

So here is my start. It's a few days worth and not as much as I wished, I need to speed up ans stop getting caught up in detail and rendering. From now on I will be doing these largely in 3D, but I may mix in some drawings depending on my mood or whatever is the most practical.

A couple of WIP's

2011-04-16T01:02:00.000-07:00

More hard surface stuff. I'm making a suit of armor piece by piece instead of doing random objects every day. It's going slow though so I'm not sure if it's the best idea...

Oh, and this week we're making a building. Modularity is fun! Allows me to tweak and noodle without wasting time.

Hard Surface Homework

2011-03-06T15:22:00.000-08:00

I mentioned one post down that I had to do the daily sketches in addition to normal weekly homework. Here are the weekly projects. A pair of AKG 741's and one of those ornate street lamps that are scattered all over San Francisco.
These are technically two week projects, we did the whole model the first week and then we spend the second week doing fixes and revision. We got another week for the lamp so I'll do some small fixes after I caught up with my sketches.

I'm planning on building these into lowpoly game assets and pimp them out in Marmoset or something like that. I had extreme lowpoly and now I'm doing highpoly assets, but I don't have much in between those two extremes. It will be fun to try out.

Daily 3D models.

2011-03-06T14:35:00.000-08:00

All righty. This semester I am taking a hard surface class with the amazing Shon Mitchell, a 3D modeler from Massive Black. In addition to the weekly assignments that are tough enough he has us do one model a day. Very intense but also very rewarding.

I will update by a weekly basis to avoid cluttering up the blog too much. This first update will contain several weeks.

Week1:

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4:

Week 5:

I am slightly behind this week so I need to do two sketches today, I will update this blog post when they're done.

The Rook - Final Model

2010-12-15T19:11:00.000-08:00

Sheesh, I didn't update about this guy a lot did I? Well, most of the work since my last update went into doing corrections and hcanges to proportions and topology so there wasn't really much to say. Most of the detailing was done this last week! For a long time I really regretted going for an original concept instead of doing a realistic bust as the teacher recommended because he knows a ton about realistic human modeling so that would have made better use of his resources, and also because I feel I'm not experienced enough with sculpting to be able to convincingly sculpt something imaginary. But in the end I'm pretty pleased with the results. I learned a lot from both my mistakes and from trying to jump into something new and different.

Realistic head assignment.

2010-11-29T21:13:00.000-08:00

This week in my Organic Modeling 2 class we got an assignment to render a realistic head using a SubSurface Scattering material in mental ray. The head model and texture is a free 3D scan from Infinite3D, but we had to take care of baking the normal map, creating other maps like spec and SSS depth, adjusting the SSS shader, and finally lighting and rendering the model ourselves.

I'm pretty impressed with the results myself, but I still see room for improvement. At least a lot of the mystery surrounding the mental ray SSS shader has been lifted. :D

All the images are rendered in Mental Ray using Maya. In all the setups I use a single light with an HDRI probe to provide additional ambient light through Final Gather.

The Rook - Model

2010-10-25T22:35:00.000-07:00

Remember this guy? I'm done with the basemesh and ready to send it over to zBrush for sculpting. I still have to UV him, but that's not a very exciting step to blog about...

The model is much denser than I would usually make it, but our teacher insisted that we put most of the detail in the basemesh to avoid having to retopologize the model after sculpting. I also felt that I had more control over the shape despite there being more manual work. I want to try a different workflow some other time where I instead start from a really rough basemesh, do all the detailing in zBrush and then retopologize the model when I'm done. I think this could be a lot faster and looser, but it kinda depends on me finding a good retopo workflow which I've heard zBrush lacks.

Enough about that though. Here is my guy:

Colour and Design - Midterm Portrait

2010-10-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

Time for something non-3D. In addition to Organic Modeling I'm also taking a color theory class names Colour and Design. Because Everybody at my school always complains over how hard it is and the work load, and while it's true that it's a lot of work I'm having a lot of fun with it and I feel like I learn something new every class. I haven't worked a lot with colour outside of some 3D texturing so this is a much needed subject for me

So far we haven't done a lot of work outside of theoretical stuff like value chats and colour wheels, but for our midterm we had to pick a photo and make a posterized image of it that we then were to colour with a complimentary colour scheme. I chose a red-red-orange to blue-blue-green scheme, but because of the way that colours become desaturated when mixed with whites, blacks and complimentaries the final result is rather subtle. The image I chose was from the french movie The City of Lost Children. It's a beautiful movie where pretty much every frame can be framed and put on the wall. The man is a part of a cult of blind people that serve a mad scientist in exchange for bionic eyes that allow them to see again.

The picture is a bit grainy and the colors are a bit off because the board and the mount of the picture is so large I had to take the picture using my camera. I did my best to clean it up in photoshop but it still leaves some to be desired. It also looks much better from a distance, like this:

All in all I'm very pleased with it, especailly considering I had to work on this while I was sick and was a nyQuil fueled zombie most of the time. I need to darken one of the midtone steps because it jumps too much when it goes from the gray to brown, and there are a few tiny spots I forgot to paint. But once I have made those corrections I plan on submitting it to the school's Spring Show.

The Rook - Concept

2010-09-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

This semester I am taking Organic Modeling 2 at the AAU. While I was recommended to pick a concept by a professional concept artist I chose to make up my own concept instead.

My idea is as follows:

A small kingdom ruled over by a powerful wizard, he is known as the Wizard King. It's a peaceful kingdom, but it is surrounded by nations and countries that are always at war with each other. The kingdom has avoided conflict because they have taken a neutral stance and because the other countries fear the Wizard King's powerful magic.

However lately tensions have been rising, and the war has moved closer to the kingdom's borders. The Wizard King has slowly grown more paranoid and is spiraling into madness.
Using his powerful magic he merges men and beasts and weapons into powerful guardians. Being an avid chess player he shapes them after chess pieces. He merges his guard and their horses into agile and deadly Knights, his advisors are joined with predatory birds for fast flying Bishops, elephants seized from a traveling circus got spliced with his strongest masons and stoneworkers into the monstrous Rooks. Even his beloved wife was sacrificed in his madness and transformed into the tormented yet lethal Queen piece.

Here is my color concept that will also serve as my modeling orhtos. The plan is to make a basemesh in Maya and then take him into zBrush for heavy detailing.

zBrush hey hey hey!

2010-03-28T01:21:00.000-07:00

Apparently the most common blog post is the author apologizing over the lack of updates, so I'm not going there.

Instead I will post some stuff that I have been doing in Organic Modeling 1 where we just started fooling around with zBrush! I've played around with that application once or twice before but I've never really done any serious work in it, so if you don't count the spinning head in my showreel (which was just a detail pass on a model in maya) these are pretty much my first digital sculpts. They're still pretty rough but I'd say it's a good start.

By the way, these are all sculped out of a basic sphere, except for the last one which was a plane as you might see. I made no basemesh in maya. Speaking of which, what we have been working on in this class up until now has been to make a male human basemesh in Maya. You'll probably see something of him soon.

(click for full size)

This guy is the first one I did. I spent a lot of time on him, not only because I was learning the ropes but also because I kept refining detail and trying to tweak him towards the very specific image I started out with. In the end he ended up looking nothing like my original idea at all which was more of a fish lipped frankenstein, but that's how it always works out when you doodle.

(clicky click)

Next up is this creepy son of a bitch. This guy is an idea I've had spinning around in my head for a while, initially inspired by Hoss' horrible hallucinations at the tattoo shop in House of Leaves if I remember correctly. My last entry had a bunch of thumbnails for my creature design class. Well, the dude in the top left corner with the massive arms was originally supposed to have this face but I changed the design to make him insectoid so in that case a humanoid face like this just won't do. Speaking of the creature design monster, I will post my progress as soon as I can take some pictures. I have been putting this off because I couldn't find the charger for my camera and I've been loaded down with work lately. I promised not to make excuses so enough of that, on with the show.

(you know the drill by now)

I took a bit of a different approach to this guy. Originally I wanted to test out the subtools system by giving him a pair of big fangs and eyeballs, but aligning the objects were such a pain in the butt I decided to see go for a hard surface direction instead. This one was really fast and fun, most of my time was spent on playing around with shaders and lights. My experimentation only resulted in zBrush crashing a lot on me, and as it turned out the default metal shaders looked a lot cooler than whatever I was able to slap together.

Stay tuned for some maquettes from Creature Design!

What I'm working on this semester.

2010-02-11T01:18:00.000-08:00

This semester I'm taking a class called Creature Design. The jist of that class is essentially to draft a concept for a creature and refine that, when the design has been properly polished and refined then we move to the next stage which is to sculpt maquette of the little freak in clay. The maquette will serve as reference for a 3D sculpt done in zBrush which will be the final product.

Sounds like a lot of fun right? I'm stoked!

So far we've only done thumbnails, which are essentialy really quick and dirty sketches with little to no shading just to block in the proportions and silhouette of the design. Here are some of mine. They were more conceptual than purely visual so some of them might be hard to get.

Homework for next week will be to take two or three of these designs and do some additional thumbs of them and flesh out the design some more with color and line if time permits.

2009-12-15T17:33:00.000-08:00

This is my previous 3D modeling assignment. He was originally supposed to be really steampunked out but I had to do compromises because of time and budget. He was also supposed to have either a flying scooter or a weapons-carrier sidekick as a second part of the assignment, but I joined a collaborative game asset project for my final instead. I'll post the results of said project when I'm finished, it's due tomorrow so it'll be up soon. I also have a self portrait I did in the beginning of the class, but I need to take some screenshots of it first.

2009-12-11T22:55:00.000-08:00

All righty! I won't excuse myself for never updating because it's silly and everyone does it. Instead I will post two and a half week's amount of perspective homework. Hoorah!

This was the fisheye assignment, and my latest work because blogger decided to place them in backwards order and it's a pain in the ass to edit. The initial idea was to have an Escher inspired scene where a prisoner tries to escape his cell by digging a hole in the wall, only to be surprised by the applied paradox of having dug a hole into his own cell. My friend Johan mentioned that the picture would look rather boring if all the rooms are perfectly symmetrical, so I went for a more comedic approach of four prisoners trying to escape only to end up digging into each other's cells. This enabled me to play more around with the lighting and narrative.

This was three point. I knew I wanted to do an action scene because of the dramatic characteristics of three point, and after some sketching and brainstorming I landed on a Lovecraftian scene of a team of tomb raiders disturbing an ancient evil best left alone. I put a lot of thought into the characters and the narrative here. You have the charismatic yet morally grey leader in the foreground, the dimwitted goon in the background who does all the heavy lifting and manual work, and the booksmart nerd who has unfortunately been grabbed by the tentacle because he is the only one who knows what the hell that thing is and possibly how to stop it. Also note the Elder Sign on the lid and columns and the diagram of the ruins on the floating paper in the foreground.

2009-10-29T04:56:00.000-07:00

This is my assignment for 2 point perspective. I got hooked on Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds and wanted to illustrate a scene from it. I've always loved War of the Worlds, and this amazing album reignited my passion. There are plenty of issues in it, especially with the shading, but I simply don't have the time to make it perfect.

Next up is some Lovecraftian heebie jeebies in 3 point.

Showreel

2009-05-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

Back in Norway, and trying to land me a summer job in 3D so I made meself a showreel to show them what I'm good for. Personally I think it's kinda weak, but I know I'm too judgemental of myself so yeyeyeye.

The quality is also horrible, and for the life of me I can't figure out why. I tried a ton of different codecs and settings but it all ended up looking like a youtube video. Possibly has something to do with the fact that I used media that had already been compressed. My video editing skills leaves more to be desired. Oh well.

Still Alive

2009-05-11T01:04:00.000-07:00

Holy CRAPOLA! I haven't updated this baby since...February? Gah!

So let's not waste time. My last post was a rough WIP of some Figure Modeling shiz, so now I will show some actually finished work from the same class.

The first entrant is a cute little lady named Susan. My first attempt at a clay portrait, and petina at the same time.
For those not in the know, petina is a coloured wax used to colour terracotta. I think the pink colour of the clay we use is hideous, so I decided to coat her in a warm red and yellow. The results are a little shaky I'll admit, bit I learned a lot from it so the nest try will probably be a lot better.

But enough of that, here is the lady of the hour!

However, I am more proud of my second head. I named him Frank. Sadly I haven't been able to apply petina to him yet, but I should hopefully have it done by the week.

Here he is!

Let's throw in a little detail shot.

And a turnaround for good measure.

And that's all for today folks!

Modeling in clay kicks ass!

2009-02-08T19:44:00.000-08:00

So this semester I have something called Figure Modeling. It's like Figure Drawing, where you draw nekkid people, except you do it in clay. Now, my experience with clay is rather limited. I had a brush in with it five years ago or something, and it rather sucked. But this time with some experience, a live model, and a really good teacher (who for the record looks like a bearded jewish Robin Williams) I am having so much fun with it!
The only thing I feel I can complain about it that the model is too hot. Yeah, what an odd thing to say! Most people would assume a worst case scenario would be to get a fat 40 year old dude to pose naked for you, but that's the funny thing. When you use nude models or reference the nudity doesn't become anything erotic because you concentrate on the work you are doing rather than the fact that there is a really hot naked girl standing in front of you. It just becomes anatomy, nothing more. which brings me back to the point I was trying to make. I would love to have a fat 40 year old dude as my model, simply because I think ugly people are so much more fun to draw simply because they have much more pronounced and interesting anatomy. Pretty people are all smooth and skinny and have no real detail, so you have a really fine balance you need to maintain in order for them to look the part. If something is just a little off then they will look all weird and ugly. With uglies you have much more freedom because they are essentially composed of flaws. But most importantly you can often see much better how stuff works on them. There is for instance this old lady I've had a couple of times who has really pronounced musculature in her back and legs, I've learned so much from drawing her!

But enough dillydally, now I have to go out and buy some groceries. Enjoy the pretty pictures.

And here she is all wrapped up for the night.

2009-02-08T17:10:00.000-08:00

This is work done for my Games: Modeling and Texture class. Our assignment is to make our apartment, starting with our desk/workspace.

Our current budget is 1200 tris divided on six props. And when we get to the texturing part the limit will be 5 maps of 128x128 pixels. Pretty oldschool, despite the polycount maybe being a little higher than what was common in the olden days, and the fact that we are allowed to use Normal maps if I understood my teacher correctly. Good luck getting a good result out of a 128 pixel normal map though!

Here is my WIP screenshot.

I am a little proud that I was able to stay 406 tris under the budget, so I'll keep adding stuff through the week until I run out of polygons. Maybe start doing a little texturing if I get the time.

2009-01-30T18:44:00.000-08:00

Right, This blog has been here for a hundred and five years without any form of updating. Mainly because I forgot about it, and secondly because I am a lazy bastard. Time for some change.

I'll just post some doodles and experiments I did in Photoshop for now. More stuff is coming up as I make it.

Here is a picture I did of the SSMB:Brawl version of Princess Zelda for my brother, after much nagging from his part. Looking mighty Paris Hilton there princess! Not sure If I'll bother finishing it.

This is a little experiment I did on shading in photoshop. I tried painting the values as grayscale on its own layer, and then blend it with a flat color layer. The resluts here were nice, but I am unable to replicate it of some reason...

Just a bullshit self portrait.

And we're up and running!

2008-09-30T16:14:00.000-07:00

All righty then. All the cool kids on the block seem to have blog these days so I felt that in order to protect my lunch money from the internet jocks I'd better get one myself.

I am a norwegian gentleman who is currently situated in San Francisco of the glorious nation of USA in order to study 3D and animation at the Academy of Art University. This blog will be to show off my work, keep my friends and family updated on whatever it is we do over here in america, and of course pose with at the local Starbucks along with my Mac and an orange moccha frappuchino.

Nothing more to say really. Hmm, nope...