Short Introduction to Speedpainting

One of the things I love doing most is speedpainting. When I first started, there was a lot of trial and error. For the first ones I did, I wasn’t sure about the subject, about what it will be. But I practiced a lot and found my voice. 

With time I would usually start by thinking about the themes I wanted to work on. Not every time, though. Sometimes I would just start drawing and then, in the process, I would find out what the painting is about. That’s the crazy thing about speedpainting: it just takes you to places you never knew you were going!

I think the most important thing to know about speedpainting is that you need to work without thinking of time limits. It’s much better to let yourself go, let yourself create in a crazy rush and see what comes out of it. Start drawing something, even simple lines crossing each other, it doesn’t matter. The more you do it, the easier it will get and this way you’re sure to get something original.

The best thing with speedpainting, for me, was that by exercising every day, doing at least one speedpaint a day, it changed my way of creating art and it affected my style. In the beginning, for example, my style was rather raw, but now, after a couple of hundred speedpaints, it is really different. It’s cleaner and crisper.

Norbi

3D Cyberpunk Alley Environment

  

For the past few weeks, I've worked on creating a piece of the city in which the characters will be placed. We've decided on making an alley just off a main street, at night. My goal was to capture the feel of a shady bar, where crooks and outlaws go to have a drink and scheme.

Using Vlad's concept here as a starting point , I made a rough block-out.

This was used by Vlad to further enhance the concept and get a feel for the environment.

 

I then started roughing in the main pieces of the scene, using this new art and some more images I found that felt that could help me find interesting shapes and construct a more believable environment.

I decided that I wouldn't bake any normal maps. Instead, I would try the workflow I talked about a while back here. So with that in mind, I started detailing my block-out.

After some more work, when I considered the modelling almost done, I took the model to Marmoset Toolbag, for a quick lighting test. Since the software is really simple, it only took me a few minutes to try out a quick lighting scenario and test what works and doesn't.

 

A few days later I had the whole piece broken up and UV'd, ready for texturing. By this stage I've migrated the Unreal Engine 4 and made a few changes to the geometry that made the whole piece read better.

In Substance Designer I created a basic brick and concrete material, to check the feel of the large shapes. I then moved to Substance Painter where I started to lay the foundation to my materials and do a simple detailing pass.

 

All the normal detailing was done in Substance Painter using alpha masks or just simple panelling with the basic brush.

In Unreal Engine I started working on the lighting. Iteration was pretty easy and fast, so I came to a decent result in quite a short time.

 

I then moved on to detailing and adding more elements to shape the atmosphere. For this I created decals like water puddles, concrete cracks, water leaks on the walls. Then I added fog and revamped the lighting for a more dramatic and cyberpunk look and feel.

 

After this came the finishing touches. A couple of more decals of grime and some newspapers were added, as well as steam from the vents and some small props like cigarette packs and broken bottles to give a better sense of scale.

This, coupled with a few post effects, concluded my work on the scene.