2014: Artist Challenge

Yup. That's right. 2014 is here and it's time to create a bunch of new year resolutions and goals that I will most likely never finish, but hey... it never hurts to try ;)

Besides the traditional goals, like losing weight, saving money, use less facebook...  ect, I have a bunch of art goals in mind. Below is my so called 52 week goals. I won't beat myself up if I miss a week here and there, as I tend to be busy with actual "work work" and all the stuff I want to do is a pretty tall order... but it's nice to have a target or something to remind me that I have a laundry list of unlocked goals I can do, rather than browse more baby pics on facebook or puppy videos on Youtube.

Feel free to join in if you're interested. :)

52 Sketchbook Studies (Make at least 10 of each) 

1. FREE WEEK!!!
2. eyes + noses
3. mouth + ears
4. hair and facial hair
5. women faces
6. men faces
7. hands +feet
8. arms + legs
9. female + male torsos+backs
10. Human skeleton
11. female + male bodies
12. children
13. elderly
14. Drapery
15. Clothing from modern day street wear
16. Clothing from modern day formal wear
17. Armor - Medieval
18. Armor - Asian
19. Armor - Modern
20. Canines
21. Cats
22. Bears
23. Elephants + Rhinos
24. Horses
25. Bovine + other hooved animals
26. Rodents + bats
27. Birds
28. Reptiles
29. Fish
30. Bugs
31. Amphibians
32. Rock and Stone texture
33. Foliage
34. 1 point perspective
35. 1 point perspective objects
36. 1 point perspective landscapes
37. 2 point perspective
38. 2 point perspective objects
39. 2 point perspective landscapes
40. 3 point perspective
41. 3 point perspective objects
42. 3 point perspective landscapes
43. fish eye perspective
44. fish eye perspective objects
45. fish eye perspective landscapes
46. Glass + metal
47. cars
48. FREE WEEK!!!
49. boats
50. planes
51. fire + water + electricity and other fx
52. FREE WEEK!!!

Weekly Movie Screenshot Speed Painting Studies

1. Basically a new scene from any movie and spend less than an hour on it.

Monthly 3D Character

1. Pull out a new Character each month.

Monthly Traditional Study

1. inking
2. marker
3. scroll-work
4. calligraphy
5. sumi ink
6. watercolor painting
7. Screen printing
8. acrylic
9. oil painting
10. charcoal
11. sculpty
12. airbrush

Grandmother Uses Oculus Rift as Therapy

The other day I posted this video on Youtube.


The response was overwhelmingly kind and thoughtful. So many viewers were very encouraging and some even suggested other Oculus Rift demos for my grandmother to try. The top comment suggested Oculus Google Street View. I was at work when checking it out, and a map popped up. I decided to put my grandmother's house address in it and was dumbfounded by the results!

A picture of her taken a few years ago waving at the google van! WHAT?! That alone was amazing. I can't wait to show her this. I will post more updates when I can on here.

Over all this has been an amazing, powerful and humbling experience. To feel, for so long, like the world is unjust and unfair.. but then to see strangers extend a helping hand and waves of love and encouragement has been such an awakening experience. I thank you all for your support, and only wish you pay it forward and help another in need when possible.

Cheers,

Pri

Viewer Critique

Orignal by MaterB8

Marmoset's Skyshop

3D Rendering program, Marmoset, takes it a step further, allowing sky objects, HDR and more options being introduced as it makes it's way into the Unity Engine.

"Web-Player Demo: http://www.reinot.com/skyshop/

Mipmapped Gloss-

The specular cubemap also stores varying gloss levels in the different mip-map levels, allowing for blurry specular reflections and gloss-maps in the IBL shader. 

A custom cubemap importer saves and loads these mip levels from sub-assets of the cubemap for now. Eventually I want to use DDS cubemaps for everything.

Sky Objects - 

The IBL cubemaps can be stored and managed by a custom Sky object in your scene. Sky objects are treated as ambient light-sources in your scene and work along-side Unity's direct lights. They also take care of binding all cubemaps, skyboxes, and exposure settings to our IBL shaders globally, making swapping out skies and messing with exposure through scripting very easy.

HDR(!) -

High dynamic range skies are handled with a .pbm importer and turned into RGBM textures. All the shaders handle RGBM cubemaps as well, allowing for super light-weight HDR without floating-point textures or any hardware restrictions really; HDR that'll run on a phone!

I plan to write more file formats later, .pbm was just one I had code for already.

Gamma Correct-

Much care is taken to do all the fancy maths and light convolution in linear color-space. All the output textures will work in both Linear and Gamma color-space so both Pro and Free versions of Unity are supported.

Shaders-

Along with the IBL tools, Skyshop will come with all the permutations of shaders and material types you've come to expect from Unity:

diffuse, Blinn-specular, normalmaps, and transparency. The IBL overhead for a shader is really just two cubemap lookups so adding new shader types is easy and I plan to do more of it.

The shaders I've written so far conform to what Toolbag uses and include parameters for:

- Diffuse Color

- Diffuse Intensity

- Specular Color

- Specular Intensity

- Specular Exponent

- Specular Fresnel

And channels for:

- Diffuse map (RGBA)

- Specular (RGB) Gloss (A)

- Normalmap (RGB)"

VIEW ORIGINAL POST HERE!!!
VISIT MARMOSET'S HOMEPAGE HERE!!

3D Coat V4

Some new features added to 3D Coat V4.

VISIT 3D COAT'S HOMESITE HERE!!!

Wacom Announces Cintiq 13HD

Looks like a nice little, somewhat, travel-size Cintiq. Much cleaner display than the 12". One of these will run you about $1000.

For more information CLICK HERE!

Etsy Shop for Pri

Pri created an Etsy shop to do some trial runs of selling prints. This is in preparation to Emerald City Comic Con 2014.

Feel free to check out the shop and add any comments or questions to this post.
- Are the prints reasonably priced? If "no," what would be a more suitable price and why?
- If you bought a print, was packaging durable? Was your product shipped in a reasonable amount of time?
- Are there any other art pieces from Pri or other Art Tavern artists you would like to see as a purchasable print?

CLICK HERE TO VISIT PRI'S SHOP!

Free 3 Point Perspective Tool

"Carapace enables users to place up to nine vanishing points or as few as one. One, two and three-point perspective grids are possible along with some extras to accommodate any weird angles in a scene."

GET CARAPACE HERE!!!

Photoshop Color Wheel

People have been asking me where I got the painter's wheel in Photoshop. Here's a link to download the plug-in.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PAINTER'S WHEEL!

Epic Battle in 3D

An amazing reproduction of the Jan Matejko painting, "The Battle of Brunwald," all in 3D. Talk about jaw dropping!
CHECK OUT THE BATTLE OF BRUNWALD PROCESS HERE!!!

Photoshop Swatches

Hey all, Pri here. A lot of people on the Livestream have been asking me where I got my swatches in Photoshop. You can check em out and download them from Kim Taylor, aka "Sketchling".

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD SWATCHES!!!

L'Ecorché on iTunes!

Hooray! A while back, I had posted about the L'Ecorché kickstarter. With easily hitting their kickstarter goal, they've completed their anatomy app for the iPhone and iPad. I don't know about you, but I'm definitely getting it!

BUY IT HERE ON iTUNES!!!

Jaime Jones Painting Process

The amazing Jaime Jones and his painting process.

CHECK OUT HIS STEP BY STEP HERE!!!

If you haven't seen Jaime's work, you should be ashamed!
CHECK OUT JAIME JONES' PORTFOLIO HERE!!!

5 Fears that can Destroy an Artist

A pretty insightful post about the 5 fears that can destroy an artist. I have to say, I don't know a single artist that hasn't come across these mental blocks at one point in their career.

CHECK OUT THE BLOG POST HERE!!!