Growing Slowly

It's been a couple of weeks since my last blog entry, so I have quite a lot to talk about!

Since my last post I've been working with ZBrush to try and bring a tree stump to 'life'. I've made 2 separate attempts at it, and I'll explain why...

Here's the first one that I made:

Looking back on it now, I can understand why people weren't really registering it as a tree stump. Let's look at a picture of an actual stump for reference:

Notice the issue? It's the bark - it doesn't grow horizontally around a stump, it grows vertically up as that's how the tree grows. Now with that in mind, here's the second tree stump I modelled:

I think this one reads much better as a hollowed out stump, but I do still have a little way to go with it. It's also tricky to tell how convincing it'll truly be without texturing it, so I need to do that next.

For now I want to go back to some concepts - I've spent way too long on tree stumps and I need to get moving with this project so that I can make what I actually set out to make! 

Thanks for reading and have a nice week. :)

Friendly Treestumps

Since my last post I've been working on some tree stump designs. They're the first characters that I want to try modelling for my scene so I wanted to spend some time desinging a few different stumps that I could try out.

Here are the sketches that I started off with:

Josh suggested that I try Paint Tool Sai to create these, which I hadn't even considered. :'D Sai feels more like you're actually painting onto a canvas, and this is something that I really want to apply to my work. So rather than working on them in Photoshop, I've taken on the challenge of trying Sai. Here's the first tree stump to go through the process:

I feel happier with the texture that this image gives off, so I'll definitely be sticking to Sai for the other designs too. I'll be getting them finished over the next few days and will post them when I'm done. :)