Because the world can't have enough aliens

As usual, I haven't updated for a bit, so I guess it's about time to do so now. I'm still doing plenty of work in Zbrush and Maya. A few months ago I had the pleasure of traveling to LA to attend the 2010 Siggraph event. For those who aren't familiar, Siggraph is essentially the biggest 3D animation convention of the year. It's a very inspiring event where you get to see new technologies, behind the scenes lectures from all the big studios (which means, lots of Avatar this year), and demos of new software. Well, of course I came back with a new sense of urgency and inspiration.

I spent a great deal of time at the Pixologic Zbrush booth this year as they were showing off the much anticipated ZBrush 4. Pixologic selected a handful of the world's best zbrush artist's to come down to LA to demo the software and I have to say, this was one of the coolest, most inspirational things I've sat through. Probably my favorite demo was by an artist named Jelmer Boskma who is primarily a character artist. You can see his work here: http://jelmerboskma.com/ . During his demo he showed off a technique for super quick concept drawing that he had picked up from someone else that basically involves mirror painting with a smooth brush. Now, I haven't done much drawing or digital painting for awhile so I'm still getting used to the technique but I have found it to be very useful. Here are a handful of rough 15 minute concepts I came up with.

I ended up taking the first image a bit further while modifying it to work better in 3D and sculpted this from zspheres in about 1.5 to 2 hours.

I have yet to render a turntable but will update with that as soon as I have one. I really intend to keep up with this sort of work as it doesn't take much time and is capable of producing pretty strong concepts.