I haven't written here for some time as I haven't had much to write about. But now I've actually finished a proper picture... which has been a long time coming.

When I first started the Drone model it was meant to be just a rough character with no real thought but when the idea sunk into my brain it went off on a tangent and the idea morphed into this. Not that it's that heavily designed. I kinda like the minimalist designs for creatures... especially my own. It's more about what feelings they invoke in the viewer.

I've never been happy with my rendering skills as such and felt that it never really brought my characters to life. So when this character started to come together it got the attention of the guys at work. One of which, Fabrizio, offered to render him up for me. As Fabrizio has got an eye for these kings of things I was all for it.

The first lighting test he did kinda missed the mark and I felt bad for telling him this. It can be tricky conveying ones vision for someone else to visualise. It was from there that we set up a kinda relay race of ideas. I did a rough render with the kinda of lighting that I liked... he took that and did his take on it... and then I took his new lighting and started to created the textures and subsurface feel of the character.

At the end of the texture creation for the subsurface I knew I had my limit with knowledge of rendering and so Fabrizio took over and pushed it further and refined and tweaked. He had a hard time as well. I was constantly on his back while he was working on half a dozen projects at the same time as well as this. It was a real team effort but he really brought it around.

Afterwards, we talked over the image and how it turned out and... I think... we are happy with the end result. That said, we agree that it's not perfect. If we had an unbroken run at putting it together we would come up with some better. But with everything considered... we are quite happy with the final result. Warts and all. You can spend forever tweaking and refining but sooner or later you have to call it a day.

So yeah, it's not perfect but I'm happy with it. We hope to have another fully rendered image completed soon (I say soon, but it may take some time). If you have kept an eye on my scrap book then you maybe able to work out what is to come next.

Thanks for your time and patients and I hope to push myself and bring you better artwork in the future. Fabrizio's website can be found here: [link]

MX