Very awesome work Sent. If I were you though, I'd be careful with the "smoke" rising from him and the helmet. It's a paladin, not a burning deathknight from the bowels of hell. A paladin shouldn't be scary, not even to a child. Scary armor isn't scary to those he's fighting. If I could draw anything I'd try to make his armor as 'clean' and 'neat' as possible, while you could still have the sense of holyness bursting from the cracks of his cro... armor. For example the draenei in the BC intro/trailer, that to me was a badass paladin. What you have there is too 'scary'.

Another "get it done in one day":
Arcane Acrona

Pretty. I like the facial expression, very sad/angry/cruel/sad.

I just wonder how many faces Acrona has... I mean, if you look at the "Resting Orchid" picture and the "Arcane Acrona" one, you can hardly believe that it's the same person. "Arcane Acrona" looks just as spoiled as the "Resting Orchid" looks cute and innocent.

Loved the Elune and Malorne picture.

About the paladin... I don't know what to say yet, since I don't know what style Sent is going for. Both versions look very robotic (especially the first one), which is not exactly the most fitting image for a paladin in my opinion, and his armor is just... too dark. All I can say for now.

Curse the will to experiment, Lekilor. After a while, I always grow unsatisfied of how I have previously portrayed Acrona - now again I think the latest piece portrays her the best.
I made the 'Resting Orchid' Acrona too cute/child-like...

This thread just got VERY interesting. Now that Sentallia mentioned the Dominance Wars :] My teacher at school is also participating, I would have aswell if we hadn't already gotten a huge task at school that just finished today.

But I guess there's another chance next year.
Best of luck to you though Sentallia! I'm sure it'll be shitloads of fun

Just wanted to actually add something to this thread for once. This is the school assignment I finished off earlier today. We were simply told to make either an environment, a vehicle or a character in 3d. I picked a character, and this is the result of 6 weeks of completely new experiences, shitloads of fun and crunching.





Haven't named her yet. But I know she's something of a dark elf.

I hope you're all doing good

Looks awesome, really nice done What kind of study you doing?

Beautiful work, Serenia!

Very gorgeous, Sere! Can you give us some stats? How many tris, can you show the wireframe, how big are the textures, did you build it from the ground up, did you concept it yourself, did you make the textures yourself?

I like the slightly pensive face

Also, is it intended to be ingame? Did you normal map it? What did you build it with?

Thanks Nasheen

I'm studying 3D game art at a school in sweden Will be studying here for two years and and first year is over in a couple of months. Since we're only here for two years we don't really have much time for that many 2d art lessons, which is a pity since it would help out alot So we're mainly studying 3d art With a lot of restrictions due to it being aimed for games.

Thanks Wai

Thanks Sentallia

And yes, I can give you the specs For the characters we had a triangle limit at 6000, texture sizes are 2048 and we're allowed to have one Diffuse map, Normal map, ambient map and specular map. We were also allowed to make a prop for the character, a weapon or so. Limits for that was 1000 triangles and the same maps but at 1024 resolution.

And yes, I started out with some cylinders Sent ;D So it has been build from scratch. But since I ain't that good at painting my concepts were only parts of what I wanted to have. Then just puzzled them together
Then I made a highpoly then lowpoly using the highpoly as a reference. It was pretty tough though, since it was my third character ever, and my second time baking to normal maps. So there were quite a lot of challenges But it was fun and I learned a lot

My character ended up at 5724 triangles.

Softwares used are Photoshop and Autodesk Maya 2008.

Here are some texture flats and what concepts I made myself. Looked at a lot of other random images for various references though, but I don't want to flood the forum ;P

Diffuse map
Normal map
Specular map
Wireframes
Concepts

The wireframed one has only the diffuse map on and no lights.

Once I had the highpoly up I made a work in progress thread on a game art forum and got some really helpful paintovers and critiques. So I've made some things different from what the concept shows, but most things atleast have their foundation in the concepts

Glad you liked it Taiev :]
I guess it could be used in a game. But with my topology on it, I wouldn't recommend it. Hehe. Since once I put some bones in it and posed it, some of the deformation areas were screaming out for some more geometry.
Either way, the task given to us was only to pose our creations so no, the intention wasn't to use it in a game.

This post has been edited by Serenia on Mar 4 2008, 01:28 PM

I'm pretty damn impressed, Serenia. Since I'm interested in applying for a 3D visualization education, but know little of all these forementioned 'maps', this is very fascinating. I fear it's beyond my skills to try and be constructive here.

Thanks for posting these!

While im hesitant to call it art (especially in light of recent postings, you magnificent bastards) the jiv has been learning flash for one of his uni modules.

This and this are my first efforts in flash wrangling.

I'd love to claim the haikus are mine, but they're not.

Over the course of the next few weeks im hoping to do some less shit animations of my own words though.


Crit welcome.


P.s. I know about the random blue appearing at the bottom of the animation, trying to coax flash into not doing that as I type.

Hehe, thanks Acrona ^^
Well, the school I'm in right now has a finnish branch aswell, located in Outokumpu :]
But when it comes to 3d graphics, all you need is a good teacher, alot of will and time and then you can get the hang of it pretty quickly. It really isn't that hard. And when you have such a good feeling for shapes and colors as you do, then it should be even easier You should really go for it!

Very cool Jivan ! I really like the first one, second one was a bit too slowish for me. And I think the first one could be pased up somewhat. Maybe the transactions between the shapes could be just a little faster, I don't know Looks really cool though.

Nicely done, Jiv.

A few comments:

Violets:
I would suggest that you start the motion on the stems more slowly, and then speed it up - a sudden start always looks a bit mechanical, while a slower start might look more organic. You might also want to detail the stems a bit more, with smaller bits that curve off them, fractally?

Summer Grasses:
I would extend the arms of the crosses just a little, to balance them a bit. Did you make the ground flat intentionally? Is it an echo of a cemetary lawn, or was it dictated by wanting to place the last word in a specific position?