Still Here

 

A year since my last post here but that does not mean I have forgotten.  I stop by from time to time and this still remains the most comprehensive documentation of what I have been up to.  I thought other social media would take over but the shine has definetly gone from those sites. The traffic is down and the agression is up so I have been on there less and less.  I have set up my own website and that is what I have spent the most energy on maintaining.  If you are in your art journey and dont have your own website I would urge you to set one up.  As you can see social media trends wax and wane and change ownership and terms.  Your site will remain within your control and be a fixed point for all your work.  

A trend with a massive impact in the last year has been AI.  If this was 10 years ago I would for sure be rethinking my career plans and thinking about what to specialise in.  There is no doubht jobs are been lost in concept art, stock art, marketing art and I see jobs requiring artists include ai in their workflow.  I have all but stopped creating illustrations for commissions.  I imagine only the top tier big names will survive in those fields.  I still enjoy drawing and painting but create for myself. These are some 2 hour studies from photos  created as part of studybuddies. 

 

For now the more specialist, bespoke art still requires an artist.  I have focused on continuing with 3D with some animation. 

I even recorded some starter Blender tutorials.  Something I plan to add to but maybe in shorter form. 

The other strand of work is graphic design for technical folk. 

It is still a struggle to get by.  The cost of living increases are hard to battle against. Despite all that I am still here and still producing work.  I recomend checking in on my website to see all my work https://dertypaws.com/

I have lots more to post so I will come back and continue to add to this. In the meantime if you have any questions drop them in the comments and I will answer if I can.  

3D model of an ebike

 

Its been a while.  

I have been working and practicing.  The latest personal project was modelling this ebike.  I wanted to do a more complicated modelling challenge and this one certainly delivered.  

It took quite a while and I eventually had to decide on an end point so did not quite get to the level of finish I had thought I would but it was diminishing returns as I modelled smaller and smaller parts.  

I used geonodes to make the chain but had to apply it to animate the chain. Could not figure out a way to animate it otherwise.  The chain was on a curve constraint. 

To animate the bike I used the rigacar addon but only applied it to the two wheels. 

I used drivers for the cranks and pedals 

After working so hard on the model I wanted to work with it and took a few different approaches for animation.  One was a 2D /3D mixture. I painted grass and sunflowers on different layers and then animated the growth cycle in Blender importing the .[ng s as image layers.  The animation was edited in DaVinci Resolve.  

    I have had an Adobe cloud subscription for the past few years and have always felt I was fighting the software- the constant fidely updates and crashes meant I had pretty much done all my Photoshop work in CS6 of late.  As for Premier Pro I just never got comfortable with the work flow.  So rather that paying upwards of €750 this year I bought DaVinci and the Steam version of Substance Painter and still had change leftover.  So far I am impressed with DaVinci. 

The other animation was on a stage in Blender where I animated the rig and played alot with lighting. 

The final animation

A breakdown of the animation

You can see better quality on my website here https://dertypaws.com/archives/portfolio/e-bike-3d-model-animation/

Latest Showreel

 

Put together a reel of my most recent 3D work.  This was all done in Blender and has client work and some personal work.  The personal projects are explorations of various Blender systems and of late has been alot of geometry nodes stuff. It looks like the mechanics for geo nodes have been settled on and is now worth spending time to explore and learn.  

I have been creating 2D work as well mostly technical illustrations and have played around with using 3D to help with that.  The weakest part of that workflow is relying on freestyle export to obtain vector graphics. 

I hve though about creating  some videos to show how some of this work was created.  If there is some shot that you are curious about let me know and I will try and answer.