Puzzle Pirates, Avatars and other things

[Silverwings]

This is a repository of work I've done for the MMO Yohoho Puzzle Pirates by Three Rings. It's fan work, or art contest entries, or things I've done for friends. As always with anything on this site, I hold the copyright, and as such, reserve the right to pester anyone who uses these pieces of art for anything without getting authorization from me.

This is especially relevant for the avatar art. These are pieces that specific people requested and in some cases, paid for with in-game money (time). I can display them here because they are my artwork, but please understand that only I or they have rights to display them publicly.

Thanks!

[Silverwings]

This is a forum avatar for Saadskellie. He's a famous skellie hunter in the game, and he asked that I make this for him.

The final avatar:


The sketch, somewhat smaller than real life:

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This is an icon I made for Saadskellie, just because I doodled something like it while coming up with composition sketches. It's sort of a weird skull design, stylized to incorporate the letters SAAd and the vague image of the cartoony skeletons in the game.

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I also did a painting of Saad's pets, complete with an avatar version. Here are his feline compatriots, Molly, Sebadoh and Melancholy, and his beloved squirrel, Fiesty.




This took months to paint, a bit here and there. I used Photoshop and Painter, with a few dollops of texturing thrown in, taken from a high res scan of an interesting bit of wallpaper. This is the first painting I've ever done of cats and squirrels, and I know the biology is a bit off... but it was fun painting them nonetheless.

I really should sketch more, especially from life... I just don't make the time. Earning a living and spending time with family is more important.

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These are the contest entries that attracted Saad's eye in the first place.
A captain fond of ramming ships,

And the Dread Pirate Frog

From this sketch:

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I did these a bit later on, for another contest. Once again, Saadskellie was the inspiration.
The avatar sized entry

And the full (at screen resolution) painting

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Later on in the same contest, I entered this little critter:

Big version:
http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d155/Sil...llyKittyMed.png

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Also, inspired by the Brigand Kings (notorious characters in the YPP world), I did this wallpaper:

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d155/Sil...erBarnabas2.png
and the portrait found here:
http://z13.invisionfree.com/Peregrine_Desi...hp?showtopic=26

The sketches later in that thread were just last-minute tinkering. The characters just elicit that sort of creative response.

[Silverwings]

There was also an egg designing contest for Easter of 07. (There was one in 06, also, but I wasn't aware of it then.) These are the designs I came up with for my contest entries. It was an interesting design challenge, as we had to design flat square images that would be "wrapped" around the egg's definitely non-square 3D form. I have been fortunate enough to earn a BFA degree in computer animation and art, however, so I've worked with this sort of thing before. Three Rings made the egg model available for download, so I got it and a demo version of 3DStudioMax, and started tinkering.

I wound up writing up a tutorial for the community so that other people could do the same thing. I (and some other intrepid, kind artists) also rendered test patterns for people who didn't have the ability to do the Max testing on their own. It was a joy seeing people tinker with the eggs, and it was very satisfying that my tutorial helped some people.

I was also flattered that the contest judges chose one of my designs to be incorporated into the game, along with several other excellent designs. That particular egg (the last design shown here) took a very long time to get "just right" since the distortion of the texture provided some interesting design challenges, but it was oh, so satisfying getting it to do what I wanted it to do. That the judges liked it also was icing on the cake. I was very fortunate to have Max and my experience with 3D and texture design; it made the iterative testing go much faster. This design would not have been feasible to design without those boons.

I will have to break this listing up into a few posts, due to limitations of the board.

This was a simple abstract, stormy design. I was just tinkering, but it turned out looking like a nice polished onyx variant, so I kept it.




It's pretty much just color streaks that have been tweaked with the Smudge tool in Photoshop, and a layer of leaves (thanks to the leaf paintbrush) for some variation. At the scale (and distortion) the eggs were rendered, the leaf shapes provided a nice static and didn't form recognizable shapes that may have seemed a little odd.

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A Celtic Golden Egg; this one was particularly finicky, and never did quite turn out right. Still, I really like the concept of a meticulously engraved golden egg.




I used a photograph that my wife took of some rocks in our neighborhood to provide the variation in the gold. I've been collecting high-res photographs of all sorts of textures for just this sort of thing. They are great for lending a naturalistic element to otherwise sterile computer art. Sadly, the rendering scale blur factor that helped the blue egg pretty much obliterated the subtle color variations in the gold for this egg. I figured that might be the case, but I forged ahead anyway. It just means that the egg looks better with a slightly larger render.

There were several other egg designs that would have similarly benefited from a larger render. Some were very intricate, and while most excellent at higher render sizes, they just didn't work all that well smaller.

[Silverwings]

This "wooden puzzle egg" was the first concept that I had for an egg design, but I wound up finishing it after those other two. Getting the shapes just right was a long process of trial and error, with a few educated guesses along the way. It also laid the groundwork for my winning egg design, since vertical bands around the egg were a core component of both designs.




This is another design where I used high resolution photographs of real wood to give the design a proper wood feel. The pictures I used were taken from Mayang's texture library, a most excellent resource for artists. Mayang is kind enough to allow free downloads of their pictures, for whatever use. That example is part of why I'm building my own texture library. I haven't put them up in a free download repository yet, but it's one of those projects that I'll make time for someday.

Tangentially, my wife takes some of the best texture pictures. The best photos I have are ones she took while wandering around on a walk with our little girl. I'm a lucky man.

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And this is the winning design. My eggs were unique in their use of vertical banding, which I think worked to my favor. There were certainly plenty of other excellent, intricate designs. This was designed as a variation of a Faberge egg/Croatian painted egg hybrid. I had originally thought to make a crystal egg, but I never got it to work properly. This was the alternative, keeping the "expensive, intricate" theme alive.




This one was a blast to design. I used gold and black, two highly valued colors in the YPP world. I had originally thought to use Navy blue as my third color, but my good wife told me that a burgundy/maroon would look better. She was right, as usual, thankfully. There are bits of the leaf paintbrush in there again (appropriate, for a gold leaf design), as well as some design elements (the flowers and dots) that were inspired by photos of real Croatian painted eggs. I tinkered for a long time with this one, providing my own tweaks to the Faberge/Croatian design ethic. It was a joy to put together, and when it all came together into a pleasing design, I was very happy.

One of these days, I still may revisit the egg and see what making that maroon part blue would do for it. The maroon is probably best, as purple has long been a "royal" color, so it fits well with the idea behind the design. The danger with purple is when it's too blue, since it may be jarring in contrast with the gold. Still, I'd like to try it out one of these days. Orange would likely be a disaster, though...

[Silverwings]

I've also done work for a community tool designed to make some aspects of YPP easier to finangle. The program, QuarterMaster 2.0, was designed by TailSpin, a programmer who asked for art help on the YPP forums. I entered a character design contest for the in-program trainer, and made a program splash/startup screen for him.

The character design was pretty straightforward; he requested certain expressions, and left room for a freestyle face. This is what I came up with, obviously inspired by the YPP design ethos.



And this is the splash screen that I came up with. It was something I did on a whim, hoping to clean up the UI a bit, as well as make a good first impression on startup. I used a Lorem Ipsum generator and some scanned parchment to get an authentic 1800s Quartermaster feel.



I had fully intended to do a bit more UI work for TailSpin, but I never got the time. Maybe for QuarterMaster 3.0...