Dalton Ulloa's Art Blog

Here I have the turnaround for the "hero" props for my Flower Knight project. I imagined The Flower Knight was someone who had a softer side to him. The harp was for when he wasn't protecting the feywild. He would gallivant and cavort with all manner of creatures and his hammer, while big, and daunting, also doubled as walking stick when he hiked through the forest and hills.  I set up everything in Unreal Engine 5. I learned how to create lighting for making renders by making my own lightbox and setting up a key, fill, and back light.   

 I decided to revamp an earlier project I made in one of my classes as part of my beginning portfolio. The project was to create a "ruins" theme. I decided to go with a mix of Gaelic architecture, specifically their burial mounds. I wanted to create a tomb dedicated to a being known as "The Flower Knight". A man who took up the sword for the local Fey after seeing how his common man treated them. They enshrined him in a tomb on an island where he can know rest. The coffin is carved with the visage of his Fey lover who has long outlived him. The goodness inside his soul was a seed for a giant sunflower to burst through the roof of the tomb. He loved playing the harp and carried around a big hammer that could be used as a walking stick when held from the bottom.   I textured everything in substance then set it up in Unreal 5. The flowers themselves are from the FAB store that I downloaded. 

  This is a reference sheet for a character I'll be turning into a 3D model. Her name is P0-T4N. The world she lives in is similar in aesthetics to alien, starfield, and the aesthetic genre of cassette futurism. She is a medical bot living in a hospital after the apocalypse. She takes people who wander into her hospital and stuffs their organs into robots. With all of the complex parts this model will have, I really spent a lot of time tying down what I want everything to look like so I'm not sitting there slackjawed when I open up Maya. 

  Working on going back to a sculpt I had originally used for an animation project for one of my classes. I'm working in and adding an expression. Later, I will add hair and possibly clothed shoulders. It's based off of Mike Myers' character in The Love Guru. 

  Continuing on with revisiting old projects, I went back to a project I did a couple semesters ago when I created a "Ruins" for a project. In the original project, I had a circular, stone roof that had been broken by a giant flower. Without enough time however, the roof came out very plain and low poly. My professor caught that and told me I should go back and give it another once over, among other things.  Above, you can see the roof after I have had a chance to give it a good sculpting. I originally based the roof on Celtic ruins. Their dome roofs had a bunch of rounded rocks piled up into a circular dome. I wanted to recreate that same look. I did that by first using a damian standard brush to make the outline of bricks. Then after smoothing everything over, I inflated the bricks themselves to give them more roundness. After that, I gave the whole thing some much needed thickness and did the same thing on the other side. To give the look and feel of something old and ruin...

  For my Portfolio class, I have started revisiting old projects. To start off, I brought my first major project for the program into Maya and gave them new life with new Arnold standard surface textures.  My first big project was picking out a Lego set. My professor then gave me the okay, and I was to model every piece to scale and put them together like actual legos. I then had to make a turntable animation and a render. Here you can see what the models look like after I've prettied them up in Maya. Aside from a few hiccups while still learning, I'm pretty proud with how this project came out.