The Animation Art Show…

•September 30, 2014 • 2 Comments

The annual Animation Art Show is almost upon us! It’s a chance for you to trouser some awesome art AND help a children’s charity! With over 20k already raised, all funds from this year’s auction will go to the ISPCC and The Jack and Jill Foundation. Here’s a clip from last years show:

I’ve seen some of the art submitted on Facebook and Twitter and the standard is really high, there are some beautiful pieces in there already. I’m submitting one of the Batman images below and hoping it makes the cut. Be nice to see you at the auction!

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Greeble greeble…

•September 18, 2014 • 8 Comments

Had some fun with greebling this past week in 3DSMax (shout out to Tom Hudson)! Using Tom’s free Greeble plugin for the first time over 10 years ago opened up the world of procedural geometry to me, theories that I’d go on to use in pieces like this, this, this and this. Lately, I’ve been stress testing some renderers, 1st and 3rd images are V-Ray and the 2nd is MentalRay. Colour correction and DOF in Photoshop, no plugins.petemcnally_greeble_art03

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Ghibli Tribute…

•August 7, 2014 • 4 Comments

With Studio Ghibli either restructuring or closing, the Irish Sketch Society are paying tribute with a Ghibli theme this week so I spent my lunchtime making a little 3D tribute to Ponyo. Modelled in 3DSMax, rendered using MentalRay with Ink and Paint shaders with post processing in Photoshop.

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Unreal Experiments…

•July 17, 2014 • 6 Comments

Yes, OK, I bandwagonned. Dazzled by reflective bells and whistles I subscribed to Unreal 4. This is my first foray into working with the Unreal Engine and I’m liking it so far, FBX export from 3DSMax just seems to work, materials make sense and look really good and the editor seems to be fairly well laid out so far. I was looking at some terrain stuff in my day job and was inspired to continue at home. Starting with some random terrain in GeoControl I added some erosion presets and baked out a heightmap and an overall base colour. The heightmap, saved as a 16bit PNG, was easy to import and with a little fiddling with UV co-ordinates the base colour map soon fit the 2160×2160 terrain. I recreated the scene in max to baker out some additional info (slope, height, cavity) for my splat map in UE4 and then took some time to create a layer based shader to blend in tiling textures based on the RGB channels of the splat map. I wanted to try some tricky stuff, dry and wet sand, mixed – here are the results below which still need work. When I refine the pipeline a little, I’ll do a video tutorial.

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Baternity Leave…

•June 25, 2014 • Leave a Comment

I’ve been on paternity leave the past week or two and as you’d expect I’ve had my hands full! I’d been itching to get some time for some artwork so like an eejit I sacrificed some precious sleep the other night to work up some glitchy style Batman geometry between Max and ZBrush with touch ups in Photoshop. No textures, just a flat material with some area lights in VRay. I thought about adding some definition for his eyes but I like the ambiguity of that area of his cowl, so I left it out. Enjoyed it and looking forward to taking it further.

 

Coding Grace Game Art Workshop …

•May 25, 2014 • 6 Comments

This is a piece I prepared for the Coding Grace workshop yesterday, I thought I might as well blog it. There is no real consistency to the scene, it was just enough to demonstrate some different modelling techniques and game art specifics like PBR materials and lighting, alphas etc. In under five hours we covered modelling, sculpting, texturing in Photoshop and Mudbox, extracting normal and ambient occlusion maps, working with 3D scan data, generating HDR backgrounds for lighting, using masks for Physically Based Rendering in Marmoset Toolbag 2 and pipelines between applications- quite a lot for the participants, some of whom were new to much of what I was teaching. I enjoyed it and hope to do another one soon although I expect to be off the radar over the Summer to focus on family.

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Coding Grace Game Art workshop…

•May 21, 2014 • Leave a Comment

This is a thing I’m doing for Coding Grace this Saturday 24th May 2014 in the Science Gallery in Dublin. We’re gonna be looking at some modelling, unwrapping, texturing, lighting and rendering for real-time – lots to do in a few short hours but should be fun!

Tickets available here: http://www.eventbrite.ie/e/coding-grace-game-art-workshop-tickets-11136883719

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Knight Week…

•April 9, 2014 • 4 Comments

“Knights” are the subject of this week’s Irish Sketch Society and this is my submission. It’s a quirky, slightly awkward kid wearing an oversized morion (helmet) with chain mail head and glove armour. I’m not sure the image reads as clearly as I wanted it to, I hope it’s clear that those are hands resting on a sword or axe hilt in the foreground! Base mesh from 3dsmax, sculpt work in Mudbox, rendered in V-ray with colour correction in Photoshop, the whole thing took about 6 hours.

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A little more saturation and 2D post processing…

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Irish Heroes…

•March 25, 2014 • 8 Comments

A quick one done for the Irish Heroes theme on the Irish Sketch Society page. I’m a long time fan of Thin Lizzy so I thought this guy belonged up there. 3DSMax, hair and fur modifier and very simple Mii style head underneath the mop.

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Cats…

•February 6, 2014 • Leave a Comment

I haven’t had time to do anything new for the blog, so last night I threw some old assets into Marmoset Toolbag 2. The sphynx cat head is a high res model with some very quick textures and masks rendered in real-time with the skin diffusion shader. Marmoset does a great job with the lighting, here are some screenshots I saved out:

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