Scifi Sketchup Modeling

liam887

You are starting with a city and maybe you can finish with a planet!

A work worthy of Atlas!

Planets already done you can see it in the background here>

dyl

Thanks Liam. Love your models, really inspiring me as to what is possible in sketchup.

I've got the 12 inch Cintiq. I really like it though it's not quite the jump in quality from the intuos you might expect. You lose a bit of accuracy especially round the edges. It is great for drawing on though. I used to use the Intuos(I had and A4 Intuos 3) for colouring and it was brilliant I could never quite draw with it though. On the Cintiq drawing is much easier I tend to do most of my rough work on it using Manga Studio. I still prefer to do my finished work by hand.

liam887

@dyl said:

Thanks Liam. Love your models, really inspiring me as to what is possible in sketchup.

I've got the 12 inch Cintiq. I really like it though it's not quite the jump in quality from the intuos you might expect. You lose a bit of accuracy especially round the edges. It is great for drawing on though. I used to use the Intuos(I had and A4 Intuos 3) for colouring and it was brilliant I could never quite draw with it though. On the Cintiq drawing is much easier I tend to do most of my rough work on it using Manga Studio. I still prefer to do my finished work by hand.

Yes I have the same problem, coloring and filling is a dream on the intuos although the drawing leaves much to be desired I have to do that by hand and then scan it in or use a base 3D model. Love your work its pretty epic, I notice you do a lot of 2000AD thats pretty cool I actually wanted to model some of your images a while back.
I have seen mange studio but never tried it what are the benefits over photoshop/illustrator?

dyl

Manga Studio is brilliant for comics. You can really tell that it's been designed for them from the ground up. It has tools for specifically for panelling up pages, letratone patterns, a whole section for lettering, special filters for speedlines I could go on. One of my favourites is the perspective ruler you can setup anchor points for one, two or three point perspective and get your tools to lock to them. Also, even though I still do most of my inking by hand, I think it's got the best inking tools of any digital program out there.

liam887

Here is some more work on the city model, its tempting to go overboard on the details but I cant if its to run smoothly in the game.

You can see it larger here (5000*3000px) on my blog. http://liam887.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/space-city-large-copy.jpg

liam887

@dyl said:

Manga Studio is brilliant for comics. You can really tell that it's been designed for them from the ground up. It has tools for specifically for panelling up pages, letratone patterns, a whole section for lettering, special filters for speedlines I could go on. One of my favourites is the perspective ruler you can setup anchor points for one, two or three point perspective and get your tools to lock to them. Also, even though I still do most of my inking by hand, I think it's got the best inking tools of any digital program out there.

I have so may models I want to use as guides as painting over, is this compatible with manga studio working with layers as I normally would with photoshop? I know its for character modeling but how does it handle vehicles and environments?

This is my usual workflow http://liam887.wordpress.com/tutorials/ it relies less on drawing and more on utilizing the model for coloring, although the tutorial is very basic, a real finished piece would look something more like this http://liam887.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/image-499-copy.jpg although something like that takes ages and has nothing to do with sketchup, this would be a good example of sketchup workflow for vehicles and environments: http://liam887.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/final-shot1.jpg, most people think the batman car is a render but its just a paint job in photoshop.

dyl

You're better off with Photoshop to be honest. Manga Studio is primarily a black and white platform it can do colour but in a much more limited way than PS. Cool stuff on your site btw.

liam887

Probably stick with photoshop then it suits my needs, hopefully drawing will be more natural when/if my cintiq arrives!

jason_maranto

I know nobody asked me but I'll chime in anyway I like Corel Painter for painting, drawing, and inking... It's used very heavily in concept art for those things and I've used it for comics as well.

Best,
Jason.

liam887

@jason_maranto said:

I know nobody asked me but I'll chime in anyway I like Corel Painter for painting, drawing, and inking... It's used very heavily in concept art for those things and I've used it for comics as well.

Best,
Jason.

yeah I have never used it although I think I have a copy lying around somewhere on my hard drive or on a disk im pretty sure I got it bundled with my tablet when I bought it I must look for it!
How do you rate it compared to photoshop for using it for concept art painting over 3D models?

jason_maranto

The most glaring things different with the current version (11) of Painter vs. Photoshop is the lack of 16-bit and 32-bit support.

For drawing and painting I think it is superior in almost every aspect -- for painterly painting styles it is far superior, but for gradient based "coloring" styles it can be too big of an adjustment for somebody comfortable in Photoshop... mostly because you cannot create gradients with transparency (although you do have the standard layer blending modes).

I have a video series geared towards comics creation that uses it extensively for penciling, inking, and coloring: http://www.vtc.com/products/Creating-Modern-Comics-Tutorials.htm

Here's a page I show from start to finish in the videos (Sketchup is used for the background, everything else in Corel Painter)

Best,
Jason.

numbthumb

Yummy.

liam887

Still alive, just busy!
Ran the model through the computer at work on my dinner yesterday and started on a new paint job. Exterior modeling mostly complete just need to tidy up the interior now. Have been using Artisan a lot to tidy it up and smooth the body.
The tree cutters on the rotor hubs are Artisan all the way using a proxy, they turned out really well but sure is horrible getting them right.

MikeR

wow.....seeing those images....i couldnt imagine how it was done in SU

liam887

When I get more time, and a computer I will try to get some how-to pdf's done but incredibly busy in my new job dont have time for anything right now.