WHOA fancy new website! I finally gave up on wordpress and telling myself I'd learn HTML and CSS. I ain't got no time for that and it's way too hard for me. I actually love how easy this is with squarespace and it's looking like I'll be able to finally do all the stuff I wanted, like being able to upload a resources page with tutorials and nice looking links, and downloads of the massive archive of artists folders I have... and have my own nice and easy store instead of an Etsy, and that's besides this nice and fancy blog. Aw yeh!
I finally finished the tutorial... and the painting it's a part of! Holy frigger, that was the longest and hardest and sweatiest I've worked on something to date. I think I've finally got giant ass paintings out of my system for the moment. I'll make a whole separate post just for the painting as it's very special and I'm just going to talk mostly about the tutorial and play with the cool new features of this site for now.
This tutorial was a first in a whole lot of departments for me and took a very long time to figure out. There was a lot of time spent figuring stuff out as opposed to actually making the thing, but now the next one will be much, much quicker and easier. I could definitely use a lot of practice getting my thoughts across when I'm speaking and not pausing for a full minute to pick up in the middle of a sentence. That makes for quite a bit of editing, which I got a lot better at because of my freaky dumb way of talking.
Just the recording of the knight raw was over ten hours, so if I estimate the time it took to finish the whole painting it's somewhere around the 150+ hour ballpark range. Maybe even 200, and that's not considering all the ruminating and conceptualizing I did in between painting. Here's the description for the tutorial and some links that go with it.
In this tutorial I give a brief (almost 40 mins) overview of light, form, and materials. I talk about some of the differences between ambient and direct lighting, how important it is to have a good understanding of the 3D shape and form of what you're rendering, and the nitty gritty of surface materials and how roughness can affect reflectiveness.
As I'm painting the knight I started out describing almost everything I was doing (this is my first time really recording myself talking so there was a good learning curve) and mostly after I had demonstrated some of the concepts I mentioned earlier I move on to mention little things that pop into my head as I'm working. I talk extensively about approaching what you're looking at and rendering as a mirror and trying to imagine what will be reflected onto the spot you're looking at using a good understanding of what angle the plane is at in relation to you (the viewer) and at which angle it will reflect to. What will that surface will look like based on the environment around it, what material it's made of, and the lighting scenario?
As you go through the videos I start talking a little less. In those spots that I'm just painting I sped it up to 3-4x and tried putting nice music in there. My brother and friend Taylor (aka Doof & Grub) were awesome enough to let me use their music for these spots, their stuff is amazing. I also threw in a few of the shitty songs I made a couple years ago when I had a drum set and was learning guitar.
The video is 960p, almost 4 and a half hours long cut into 4 sections: Intro/crash course, the head and helmet part 1 & 2, torso & hand, and da legz. I finally figured out the bitrate thing and the whole package is just under 4 GB.
I put an insane amount of hours and loving into this, just the painting part was over 10, and editing and exporting was multiple times that. I really hope this helps people get a grip on rending and painting in photoshop (the secret is you just zoom in 300% and noodle for hours on end). I think this is an awesome investment for beginner ~ intermediate, maybe even ADVANCED artists wanting to pull off a realistic style through simply painting alone.
Doof & Grub: https://doofandgrub.bandcamp.com/releases
no-fii: https://soundcloud.com/no-fii
Here's a little preview:
The bitrate was YUGE for me to figure out. Just a tip, if you're making a video in Premiere and don't want it to be a giant phat ass file when you're done exporting for 30 hours (I learned all this the hard way) LOWER THE BITRATE. For some reason it defaulted it to something like 25 Mbps, when it only needed to be something like 0.5. That's where you have the most freedom with compression and not losing video quality. Lots and lots of learning I learned, indeed.
If you got this again, thank you so much, I really appreciate it and really hope it makes your brian gooder to paint. If you have any feedback with the way I made it, like how fast I sped up certain parts or if I was loud enough, the concepts I was talking about or anything, please let me know! I want to make the real nice.
I currently have it up on Gumroad but I'm trying to figure out a way to have it here on my home store. It's way too big to upload so if you know of any file hosting site that would be good to upload things securely to that would be awesome. I'm thinking of just having a private file on Mega and letting you download the link from my site. Anyway, here's the link to the Gumroad
In the meantime keep your eyes peeled on the Resources and Store pages to see if I figure out how to get it on here.
HOLY FUCK IT'S DONE. Keep your eyes peeled for the next post, I'm going to have all the process shots (there's like over 80) and talk about everything involved in making this beast.