Orion Mining Spaceship

Aaand back to spaceships.

Honestly, browsing my gallery the other day I realized that the number of spaceships in my portfolio is shamefully close to “no spaceships”, so I tried to put a remedy to that.

After a looong hiatus from ZBrush I eventually managed to clumsily put together a mesh to render and eventually paint over.

The endeavor was a confirmation of how terrible my memory is.
I hadn’t touched ZBrush in about a year, and all my recollections of shortcuts, menus and commands were gone.

Muscle memory, gone.

Tricks and slightly more uncommon procedures, gone.

Sure, I kind of knew what I had to do, fortunately that was well settled.
I just couldn’t remember how to do it.

So, well, the sculpting phase took about a dozen lunch breaks or so, as I had to re-learn a whole bunch of things.
Hopefully next time it won’t be as hard. I’ll just have to make sure I can do it again in less than a year.

As an exercise, I tried to stick with a very simple shape – pretty much a box – and see if I could make it interesting anyway.

As always, all my digital painting now happens with the help of Krita.
For this illustration I had to make a whole bunch of brush presets (lasers, scattered stars, noise etc), which I’ll make available for download shortly.

Sure, the most of this drawing comes from the occlusion shadows exported from ZBrush, but still, I’m quite happy with the confidence I’m gaining with the new tools.

Mostly though, regardless of the result, I’m content I managed to get something done with ZBrush.
So much saw that I rendered the turntable animation.

Look at her spin!

AH! The beauty of a spaceship spinning over and over again.
It reminds me of EVE Online.
Good times.

by Paolo Puggioni

Cyberpunk

I have to admit I fell to the hype for CDProjekt Red’s next project, Cyberpunk 2077.

The Witcher 3 was one of my favourite games ever, so I have to assume their new franchise will kick ass just as much.

Seeing their teaser trailer brought back my ancient love for everything Cyberpunk, together with memories of the throng of comics and books I read about it.

I even found an old link saved in one of my bookmarks folders, which led to the complete series of BLAME! (the exclamation mark is not mine, it’s in the title).
For those who don’t know about it, do yourselves a favour and give it a quick read.
The environments and the cyborgs in it are among the most imaginative pieces of art I’ve ever seen.
The mood and sense of scale of the entire comic are just superb.

Anyway.

Riding the wave of this newfound love for everything Cyberpunk, I started sketching something, and this is what came out of it.

Now, with cyberpunk you can go crazy in a lot of different ways.
With this one I meant to be conservative and focus on mood more than anything else.

Instead of tubes and cyber-augmentations and body modifications, I preferred to convey something different and through other means.

For example, the clothes indicate some sort of urban environment (as opposed to what happens here, where everything seems put together from a post-apocalyptic junkyard).

The snazzy glasses are obviously from a high-tech environment, whereas the old-style, vaguely ethnic bling is supposed to suggest another layer to the background.
Maybe a fashion coming from a society that contains elements from what are now developing countries, and that in the future might have a more prominent influence on world’s culture.

I’m quite happy with the level of finish (although I left the hair very much unfinished to leave focus on her face).
I’m still not 100% proficient with Krita, and I had to see if I could do something a bit more polished than what I’ve done so far.

Good God Krita is amazing.

Anyway, I have a couple more cyberpunk sketches to finish off, I’ll post them next week.

by Paolo Puggioni