Brogan Ross' Blog of Random Interests

Just a quick word about HD

Brogan — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 06:14:34 +0000

HD looks pretty cool. I’ll admit it. But I find it’s use in period pieces to be very jarring. I feel that it looks too home movie like and that distracts me from the film. I enjoy HD in scifi or fantasy style pieces, but for past times i don’t like it. So please stop it.

District 9 Trailer out

Brogan — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:58:03 +0000

I can’t wait for this. When I saw the original trailer I was very very excited. I went back and found Neill Blomkamp’s past works and just drooled. This may just be a full length film of Alive in Johansberg, however I remember when I first saw that I wished that it was a trailer for a film soon to come out. And at last it’s here

Dark Tower Citgo

Brogan — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:02:50 +0000

So I’ve been working on this one for a couple of days. Been trying to get feedback from mattepainting.org. But nobody’s really writing back. That just makes me think it’s absolutely terrible.

Neil Gaiman reading

Brogan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:50:45 +0000

So I recently joined in on the whole twitter fad. Yeah it’s pretty lame. But it’s fun to see what celebrities say. My favorites so far are Neil Gaiman and Nathan Fillion.
But anyway the point of this was to link to these awesome videos of Neil Gaiman reading each chapter of his book The Grave Yard Book across the country. Very cool.

Another Dark Tower Sketch

Brogan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:29:32 +0000

This is from the 4th book. It’s the Citgo oil field that Susan and Roland check out.

*Updated - 6/29/09*

Actually started working on this as a matte painting. There is a WIP thread over at mattepainting.org. It’s got some way to go. If there’s anyone actually reading this and you happen to be a member at mattepainting.org, please give me some feedback. If you aren’t a member but are interested in matte painting I highly suggest the site. It’s a great community and a wonderful resource.

Mountainy sketch

Brogan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:22:04 +0000

very green.

Skecth

Brogan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:30:58 +0000

Just a random sketch I worked on today.

Marine Painting Progress

Brogan — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:17:08 +0000

And then the beauty pass! Dadadadaaaa!!

Marine Painting Progress

Brogan — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:13:15 +0000

And then there was texture paintings! Here’s the diffuse and specular maps I painted for each of the the parts of the drop ship. These images are only 512×512, but the original textures are 4096 squares, but are dropped down to 2k for the actual geo. Basically cause I was killing Mental Ray, and I didn’t actually need the full 4k res.

Marine Painting Progress

Brogan — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:47:10 +0000

Next came the Zbrush! This was probably the most time consuming. Mostly because I’d make a displacement map and in Maya it totally mess up the model. So there was a lot of back and forth. And much swearing. But in the end these are the hires models created with Zbrush, which were used as displacement maps in Maya with Mental Ray.

And this is the mid poly geometry. It’s basically the Zbrush models with the subdivisions reduced to 3: