Wednesday 27 May 2009

The Times They Are a-Changin' / Luke Skywalker

Well, I've been offline a few days whilst my family and I make the move from busy Nottingham to rural Lincolnshire. This should mean more help in looking after our two children, as both sets of Grandparents live up the road from our new Georgian townhouse (complete with its own study, from which I'm writing this blog - cool, huh!).

So, ideally, I should be able to spend more time working, woohoo!

Anyways, I digress - enough of my yakking and more pics:


"Luke Skywalker" was a portfolio piece to try my hand at likenesses. As an image I wanted to have a brooding Luke poised between the Light and Dark side, at the moment of choosing from the two paths. The intense contrast in lighting is quite illustrative and probably something I'd like to develop further.

"Luke Skywalker" Detail

He was fun to work on as, at the time, I was working at Free Radical Design on the Star Wars Battlefront 3 FPS project before it was moved over to another developer. He was made with 3DSMax, Maya, ZBrush and Photoshop. The bulk of the image was painted as I find it's easier to really get some character into an image if it's been hand finished.

Also, notice how I tend to add a low opacity CMYK noise 'grain' to the image to knock back the cleanliness of the finished render.

Trivia: The reference photos of me holding two wrapping paper rolls does not look anywhere as moody as the final piece ;)

4 comments:

god0fgod said...

Was that piece made for the Battlefront III? Or was it just something you wanted to do as a result of working on Battlefront III?

god0fgod said...

Oh, and is it definite that Battlefront III moved to another developer?

Nick Carver said...

Hey Neil! It's a darn shame I didn't get to see you before your move, but Lincolnshire's not that far away, I guess. Hopefully we can have an ex-FRD reunion in the near future. Teatime's not the same at Crytek :(. My visa application was successful, by the way. We'll be heading over at the end of September.
Saw some of your covers in WHSmiths the other day - most cool!
Keep posting!

Cheers, Nick.

Neil Roberts said...

Hello,

Thanks for comments:

godOfgod: the Luke Skywalker piece was a personal project that was inspired by working on BFIII. I believe the project was taken to another developer but I'm not sure who.

Nick Carver: We'll deffo meet up before you go to the old U.S of A. It'll be good to see you chaps again. Hope Crytek is treating you well! Keep an eye out for those covers - I'm pretty sure they're getting better!

Cheers,

N