Art Director & Senior Concept Designer in Film, Games, Books, Tech. Builds Scifi Worlds. Professional Work: Pixar Alum (16 Yrs), Blur, WarnerMedia, ++
Neil Blevins is a Canadian born artist who has worked in the Film, Videogame and TV industry for 25 years. He has contributed to 9 feature length animated films, including the 5 Academy Award winners The Incredibles, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3 and Brave during his 16 years tenure at Pixar Animation Studios as a digital artist. During his time in videogames, he has worked for companies such as Blur Studio and Warner Brothers' Monolith Productions. He has also seen 4 books published, and taught extensively at workshops and conferences around the globe. He is currently an Art Director and Senior Concept Artist.
This channel will be dedicated to the education side of things, so check out the main education page below for text tutorials, and this channel for videos that accompany the tutorials. Thanks for visiting!
Thank you so much, it's great to see more Max content from you. I started my journey on your website years ago, learnt so much I'm very grateful to this day. I'm happy to have found your channel on youtube!
hey! i'm following all your comp tutorials and idk if you style answering to comments on these videos but i was wondering, isnt tangent a real life thing making a creation looking natural ?
Good question! So yes, tangents absolutely happen in real life, but there's a difference between something being natural and something looking natural. In pretty much any work of art, be it film, a painting, whatever, we're generally trying to get some sort of point across, and remove anything that distracts from that point. Even in a documentary film, the camera person will try and avoid tangents because they want you to focus on say what the person they're interviewing is saying, and not the fact their head keeps lining up with the top of a building in the background. It all depends on what you're trying to do, so you certainly don't need to remove tangents in all cases, but if your goal with whatever visual you're creating is to focus the viewer on something, tangents can help or hinder that goal, and so it's good to keep in mind.
I'm happy to know I'm doing it a good way. I think at 2:39 the student might benefit from seeing the original model with the texture map applied in axon. "Here's the model with the texture. You can see the bottom is black and the top is white. Now this is what that looks like in top view."
It's sad that this doesn't have more views. I really wanna see more thought out responses to AI in regards to art, not just straight up fear and rejection. I really feel like AI has the potential on cutting down work so artists can benefit and focus on the details they like
@@ArtOfSoulburn Swinging by again today to say I'm super excited to receive the copy. Megastructures are my favorite concepts in Sci-FI. Going through The Bobiverse books and reading about the Topopolis featured there got me super hyped for this again.
@@ELxSQUISHY thank you so much, glad you’re all excited, that’s the biggest compliment an artist can get. The books are all printed and about to get on the cargo ship for their trip to the distributor, so we’re still on schedule for October!
PAINT?? No it's alot more like a drawing if you used a touch screen and stylus but definitely not paint, not even close they are extremely different mediums.
Afraid I can't, I don't use rental only software, so my final copy of max I own is 2022. That said, I believe the script should still work in 2024, so give it a try and see if it works.
This is actually the first video on composition I've managed to find that breaks the rather abstract themes down in a way that I can apply practically. This is a HUGE help, thank you so much for the work you put into this!
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the video. I do my best to provide something a little more practical, even if the video is on a pretty subjective subject :) Glad you feel it worked!
"case by case basis", yes that's the problem with intellectual property law. in other areas of law, rules are relatively simple, and applying conclusions from past cases to a new one usually works. intellectual property law is complex and detailed, and past cases have very little predictive power to new cases.
You cannot copyright an "exact replica" of the mona lisa or other public domain work. You can only copyright it if you've transformed it in a creative way.
I asked a lawyer and he said you cannot copyright a character. You can create your own works that use that character. If your work draws substantially from an original copyright work, then it likely infringes. If your work is substantially your own creativity, then it likely does not infringe. (I think a character can be trademarked though, so that can still limit what you do with them, but I don't know the details.)
Great stuff Neil, as always. Quick question as I'm just learning Gaea, what exactly is that final node plugged into your seamless node? Is it necessary to export the final mesh and textures? Thanks!
Thanks Greg! So that node is a ColorFx node, which does color correction. In this particular case I added it but never changed any of the values, deciding instead to do my contrast / brightness etc modifications in earlier nodes. So you can feel free to ignore it.
@@ArtOfSoulburn Ah cool, ok gotcha, thanks for that. One more quick question for ya, I have my seemless node set up just as yours, set to export, but the mesh doesn't export as seamless. Wondering if there is something simple I'm missing! Thanks again Neil..
@@gregsemkow So you have the righclick a node and set it as the node to export. Sounds like your disp map is being exported by an earlier node, try and figure out which node it is, right click, turn off "Mark for export", and turn on "mark for export" on your seamless node. Then check the correct node is now showing up in your build tab in the upper right. Hope that helps.
Sure, you can either take a screenshot in gaea then paint over, but personally I'd export it to a full 3d program like max or blender, light it, and paint away.
Here's a tutorial discussing it. Basically you only use the highpass to create a luminosity layer: www.neilblevins.com/art_lessons/brightness_var_tileable_texture/brightness_var_tileable_texture.htm
This is helping me a lot! I'm "self-directing" with some little projects to use in my portfolio, and this template and info in this video has been invaluable! Thanks so much
So in this case, highpass mostly finds the edges of your shapes. Give it a try in photoshop, make a set of black circles, run highpass, and see that it makes the edges of the circles white. Then the threshold make the images more contrasty, then blur causes that pattern to spread.
Hi neil, I have 2 channels to recomend on shmup design. one is The Electric Underground: Quite a controversial fellow but has very interesting insights on shmup design. Also the SHMUP WORKSHOP by youtuber Bog Hog, I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I regularly check their uploads. There is some elegance in design in old school shmups that I find super interesting. Hope it helps in any way, and good luck with your project!
What wasn’t mentioned here was that a strong composition sorta keeps you eye in the work. Meaning you dont have line or lines guiding your eye out of the frame. A lot of modern art suffers I feel from this. Including the works shown here.
That concept is spoken about in another one of my compositional videos here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MX59j9yhezw.html This one is purely on categorizing types of compositions.
