Escape: Finale

Hey everyone! Its been an amazing 3 month period. Ive worked with 4 amazingly talented artists, and now I feel that I need a few days break before I start my next project!

I leared A lot over the course of this project, and I feel that moving forward, I have newfound inspiration for working with game engines! Our final submission was posted earlier by Nick ( http://nregim.wix.com/digital , http://nregimdigital.blogspot.ca/ ) who was great to work with. Its something we have talked about since graduation and Im glad we have finally got a collab under our belts! Here is to many more down the road!

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=117449&page=3 Our post is near the middle of the page

Our team was made up of Myself, Nickolas Regimbald, Allison Preswick (http://www.allison-preswick.com/) Emma Yonge(http://emmayonge.blogspot.ca/), and Olivia Wodziszewski (http://o-wodz.blogspot.ca/)

 Beauty Shot 1

 Beauty Shot 2

 Beauty Shot 3

 Allison / Emma Textures

 My Textures

 Nick Textures

 UDK Breakdown 1

UDK Breakdown 2

And with that I Will take a short break and start back on something new. I want to start working on hand-painting all my textures in A painterly type style. This project gave me the drive to make my own Polycount account, so I will mostly be posting links to forum posts in addition to these posts.

Thanks for reading, See you on the next project!

-David Stelmaschuk

April 26 ESCAPE Update

Hey everyone,

Some updated images for my contributions to the Escape project:

I was trying to render out a wireframe as well. But for whatever reason the targa file was corrupting. I will work on this issue and try and get something out one of these days.

There are still a few little errors that I want to fix. The normal map on the triangular building needs a little work, as well as a detailed spec map. And Im not sure if I like the pertruding windows on the townhouses. Perhaps I will sink them in slightly like I've done on the Tri Building.

As far as diffuse goes, Im happy with how its looking. I will probably use a similar pallet for the townhouses, though I want to go for a higher contrast feel.

The others are making good progress, and when we have an updated project page I will link it to this blog post.

Thanks for the read! I appreciate any comments/critiques that you guys have to offer.

-David Stelmaschuk

ESCAPE, and other things

Hi everyone,

Its been a long time since I've updated this blog, and I feel like I should let everyone know whats going on.

For the last few weeks i've been working with some of my old classmates from VCAD on Polycount's online contest branded ESCAPE. We are working on a 1930's Parisian style street scene, with the addition of a few simple characters. As this contest is a video game art challenge, we will be using UDK as our engine in which the scene will be running in. Currently we dont have much pretty stuff to look at, but were working hard on getting something onto the forums soon as well as getting some kind of renders to show. In the meantime here are a few different concept pieces that I've contributed.

Also in the works, I'm working on a new piece for my demo reel. Its a sort of pirate cave fortress. I've based my concept loosely around some concept art that i found on reddit/r/imaginarylandscapes and will continue to develop it. However this has taken a little bit of a back seat to the work that im doing with the ESCAPE project.

And as a final little bit of information, I am slowly getting my web design skills back in order so that I can design a new web page to use as a nicer spot for an online portfolio. This is kind of my pet project and ill be working on this in my free time. If anyone has any tips/resources for web design stuff let me know, I can use any additional knowledge I can get.

Thank you for taking the time to read this guys, I know its been awhile since I've posted anything worth anything on here, but you can expect quicker updates in the future!

-David J Stelmaschuk

Happy Halloween

This week I'm working on some tombstones and such as a small off project. Kind of fun and something a little different for Halloween! Also did some minor background painting, just threw something together to present the AO pass a little better. Enjoy!

Painting Day 2

Hey everyone. Today I started 2 paintings. First off I started to work on a mountain scene with a lake in front of it, however I only worked for about 30 minutes on this and got a rough block in and colour palate started.

Mountain Scene

And my second painting, I'm really enjoying working on this while listening to her music, Im only getting started but am quite happy with how things are turning out so far. Ellie Goulding is my next subject.

Ellie Goulding

Both of these paintings will be finished in an upcoming post unlike the last painting I posted. This brings me to my next topic. I will be out of town camping with my brother for the next 3-4 days. However I will still pledge to do 14 paintings or more over 14 days, posting multiple once I get back. Not every painting will be 100% complete as, like yesterdays post, I will use some to try out a new technique.

Thanks for reading everyone! and let me know how i'm doing with my current 2 WIP paintings, and if you have any tips to improve my art let me know, yesterday A friend helped me out by letting me know that you can assign a hotkey to flip the canvas. Thank you as this has saved me from destroying my knuckles and wrists =)

Signing off till the weekend,

David J Stelmaschuk

Breaking Radio Silence.

Hey guys,
Update for you today. I've shelved my forest cottage scene. I was feeling quite demotivated by it. I have however practiced up on some particle effects which was my goal for the project. Currently I've been thinking a lot about a project that a buddy and I came up with about a year ago. Ive been trying to design a story in my head and I'm getting really close to having it picture perfect in my mind. However, This leaves me needing to learn how to do some decent concept art, Which brings me to why I'm posting today.

I've just started to do a few WIP Digital paintings. These will give me a rough idea of what a character or scene looks like. I'm not going for details in these paintings, I will first try to establish tone, and a character likeness, something that makes characters unique.

I will be trying to do 1 Painting a day for a few weeks, I will upload all paintings here on the blog.

Please please please, if you see something you like/don't like, something I can do to improve my work, Let me know. I'm still in a learning stage for doing this kind of work and can use any and all advice that you can give to me. Thanks in advance!

And my WIP painting for the day:

I hoped to learn more about tone in this painting, its far from finished, but I learned alot about light and colour  in this and I feel that I completed the goal that I set out to achieve. Thanks for the read everyone. Tomorrow I will be uploading an environment painting. I hope to use tones and colours to take it one more step from this type of work tomorrow.

Once again, I'm still learning, and would love to hear any feedback that you can give me for my concept digital painting's sake

See you tomorrow,

David J Stelmaschuk

Why saving is important!

Hey everyone! I'ed like to take this time to inform myself and everyone that will listen to me about why saving is important. from Wednesday till now I must have lost 10-20 hours of work due to my own stupidity.
As a result I've missed out on my goal of having the building at least 80% modeled. The silver lining to this is that I relearned a major lesson on saving often and in increments, as well as to turn on that handy auto-save feature in Maya.

On Friday I decided to catch an early showing of Pixar's Brave, and I was really impressed! When it comes to a Pixar movie you know you're going to be getting top dollar entertainment as well as AAA grade CG VFX and animation, but to me Brave went above and beyond expectations. I would highly recommend seeing this movie at least once, and maybe a second time if you wanted to see it in 3D! Brave has replaced UP for me for my favorite Pixar story.

I plan on coming into VCAD this next week a few times, to help out a few of the grads with whatever I can, as well as work on getting you guys a better update for Wednesday. Thank you so much for reading, remember to save often, and go out and watch Brave a few times.

Until next time,
-David J Stelmaschuk