"You can always find a distraction if you are looking for it" - Tom Kite

In the creative world sometimes it's hard to stay focused on the work or a project.

There's no real trick in how to avoid distractions. It just requires some discipline (ooo look a squirrel).

If you have been following this log you will have noticed loads of ideas seem to start but perhaps not materialise into a finished product.

My focus is not always on my artwork, sometimes I too am distracted. (Often by plans of world domination !)

Previously I told you about my old files recovered from the archive, and my plan to resurrect some of these old projects. But new ideas or jobs do tend to get in the way

They just pop up!

Whether it's modelling guns, chess pieces or evil mushrooms !

They all just fight for my attention.

I will endeavour to maintain focus going forward and complete some of these project as promised.

Until another idea hit me......

..... or I see something shiny !

Following on from the ‘Skin Detail Brush Pack’ and the 'Eyes Brush Pack' for nomad sculpt. I'm again pleased to announce the release of a 3rd brush pack. 

The Nose and Lips Brush pack are a new set of sculpting brushes that you can use as a spring board with your character design sculpt so you can unlock your creativity even faster.

The pack contains:

• 12 Nose sculpting brushes
• 10 Lips sculpting brushes
• 12 Nose alphas
• 10 Lips alphas
• 1 installation instructions file (pdf)

Also included as a bonus 3 blank head templates available as .obj & .stl files to import into Nomad to get you started with your character sculpting even quicker.

All brushes within my Nomad Brush packs are of course fully customisable, and yours to do with as you wish under a standard license.

The pack is available through my website at: https://gary-force.artstation.com/store/gr5oW/nose-lips-brush-pack-for-nomad-sculpt

or on my Artstation store: https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/gr5oW/nose-lips-brush-pack-for-nomad-sculpt

For those of you who use my brush packs I would love to hear from you / see your creations. And of course if you have any feedback or would like me to continue developing these then just drop me a message.

All the best

G Force

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt" -  Maurice Switzer

I have lost my voice. So for the time being Log is on hold. Stay tuned for other work.

"Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing he can't afford to lose." - Thomas Edison

Over the last few months i have experienced a existential crisis in the sense of I seem to have had a lack of time.

Although time is constant, of late I don't seem to have had enough Time. Time is also money, and I don't seem to have much of that lately either!

When I look back on my time, I can see I have been engaged in jobs that would, at face value, seem to take no time at all, but they have in fact used up a lot of my time!

I don't feel I wasted time, but when I look back on how I spent my time, I realise I needed more time than I had.

I tried to make time by doing things that saved time in my spare time, but these took a long time, and in the end it became a race against time to make sure I did things on time!

As time marches ever onward in to the new year, I will endeavour to manage my time more effectively and make up for lost time. There's still lots I want to do and share with you, and although time flies I realise I have all the time in the world. there's no rush. I will get round to things.

All in good time.

"Knowledge is the treasure of a wise man" - William Penn

While moving over to my new Samsung Dex setup I have been collecting all my old files from my desktop PC together. I have also been going through old disks, and hard drives.

Although tedious, going through scores of files folders and wondering what files like 'K752.jpg' were... (it was my dog!). It was a useful thing to do because I found treasure like no other. A lost arc-hive (ahem).

I managed to find an entire library of OBJ files that I have created or collected over the years. Also bits of old 3D  projects that were perhaps never completed.

I managed to find myself a OBJ previewer app so I can scan through these things a bit quicker. But its given me the opportunity to perhaps bring these into Nomad and give them a new lease of life and this is something I will be doing in the coming weeks.

There are a lot of files and documents to go through so I have top men working on it right now.

'top men!'

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
― Albert Einstein

Creative people are often asked, "where do you get your ideas?"

Most people can't answer the question. I get my ideas from a dusty box I keep in a cupboard, surrounded by armoured fighting spiders.

In truth the answer is bit more intangible. I actually get my ideas from anything, anywhere at anytime. I can't help it, and I don't want to stop it. I just allow myself to be open to it.

I let the idea come to me and if I'm lucky I manage to jot it down somewhere before it gets away from me and goes back into the dusty box, perhaps never to be seen again.

The box although said as a joke is partly true. I do in fact have dozens of sketchbooks and files of doodles and ideas that I scribble down and say "that's cool, I'll get to that later"

I never get to that later!

That's why the box is important. So I can in fact get to these 'glimmers' later and bring them to life somehow.

Music is often inspiration for me. Any piece of music. I was listening to Deep Purple's "Space Trucking" at a volume that would make your eyes vibrate loose. And the image I had in my head straight away was of a truck / big rig blasting off from Earth with a crazed rock astronaut at the wheel.

I made a quick sketch and then filed the idea away in the box under the category 'later'.

I think this is maybe one I may want to try as a combination between nomad (for the ship) and sketchbook for the scene.

I'll of course share with you how the idea progresses. If I can get the idea back from the guardian hedgehog death squad!

"What is your pleasure sir?"
"The box!" - Hellraiser

For my next experiment with nomad I wanted to try to experiment with lighting.

I wanted to push the lighting and rendering capabilities of nomad just like I'd pushed the textures and painting last time. The aim again being to equal what I could achieve in maya but on the tablet.

As per my last experiment I thought I'd do a simple sculpt. In the last one I had created a dragon scale sphere. So the next  sculpt made sense being a box.

But what to do.

The more I said to myself "I need a box" the more I heard the line from Hellraiser come to haunt me.

Hellraiser, for those of you who haven't seen it, is a great film. It's one of my favourite horrors. And Douglas Bradley gives an amazing performance as the charcter Pinhead with some amazingly terrifying dialogue.

But one of the main characters in the film is the box itself, the gateway to hell. And thats were I decided to go with this sculpt.

I started off with box itself, just a basic cube which I ended up painting with one of my alpha brushes to get a wood effect.

For the gold etching of the lament cube, as its known, I had the perfect reference. The dvd boxset of the first 3 films.

I decided to take a picture and use it as a reference image in nomad. Then on a plain with a high subdivision I used the mask tool to mark the cut out elements.

Next I inverted this mask and used the scale tool to raise the etching further. Finally the trim tool allowed me to cut this to a thin surface. And with the 3 different etchings I resized them over the base cube.

That sounds a lot easier than it was, in truth it was hell!

Next by comparison adding some cubes for walls and the floor was quite simple.

But now for the real challenge, the lighting. In the films when the box is opened a bright blue light shines through any cracks or gaps in the walls. This was the effect I was aiming to recreate.

So I thought "on the film set, they had holes in the wall and big lights shining through". So clearly the simplest and best way to get that effect was to cut holes in my wall and put the light behind.

This would create some cool shadows and some nice highlights. And yes, it does look cool.

A secondary light added a bit more depth to the piece overall as did turning on some of the other render settings such as depth of field and ambient occlusion.

The final result. Well I feel it speaks for itself. And it was my pleasure sir.

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush." - Jil Sander

If we are all completely honest with ourselves, as digital artists we're all addicts.

We're all addicted to collecting new brushes.

(Hi, my name's G Force and I'm a brush addict ... it's been 3 days since my last download)

Seriously I have hundreds maybe thousands of them. Some I've probably never used! But when we find a good one we like then its, Ooooh yeeeah!

Well, while playing about with Nomad sculpting on my tablet I thought I'd create some of my own alpha brushes. To start I'm using only my Samsung Galaxy tab and the Autdesk Sketchbook app, but you can use any drawing app you choose.

For Nomad the size you want to set your canvas to 1024 x 1024 pixels.

Next I shall go to my background layer and fill this with a solid black.

Then using any brush I like I will create a shape or texture. So for this example I'm going just create some simple cross hatching.

When creating alpha brushes the rule of thumb is black is transparent white is opaque. Or in 3D terms black is flat white is raised. Simple enough. And the grey tones are the levels in-between. Then just export as a png and you're done!

So this is a great way to create textures quickly and easily.

So for example some of the textures I have are animal skins or tree bark photos. These can make really quick edits to your 3D work.

I must confess I went a bit crazy the other night and spent a few hours going through ALL my photoshop brushes and using this technique went on to create a library of about 800 alpha brushes.

(I'm G Force and I'm a brush addict ... you've gotta help me man! .... I just can't stop!)

“I would say time is definitely one of my top three favourite dimensions.” - Randall Munroe

I have enjoyed 3D modelling over the years. Products character design, I've played about with most things during my career.

I've been using Autodesk Maya for years. As with most creative software you get hooked on what you use first and the Maya interface was always something I liked. I find it less cumbersome than other 3d packages out there, but each to their own.

When Autodesk introduced Mudbox I got into digital sculpting and I really liked that too.

So when I decided to switch to my Samsung Tablet (insert plug for the previous blog post here). The 3D side of things was something I thought would have to say goodbye to, or it would have to stay on the laptop.

That was until I discovered Nomad.

Oh my god its bloody brilliant!

(G Force is not paid to endorse Maya, Mudbox, nomad or any other products connected with or to any other corporate entity... unless they would like to......Please Pay me !)

Nomad is a 3D sculpting software available for Apple and Android.

I had played with other Android apps that allowed either 3D modelling or sculpting but couldn't say I'd ever found something that would come close to the experience I got from using Maya. But with Nomad the sculpting experience is great.

(Insert shameless plug warning here)

I also have to say that considering its 'only an app on a tablet'. The quality of the work that I can produce seems exceptional.

I set myself the task of trying to 'break the app'. If I could produce a sculpt of a similar quality and texture to what I could achieve in Mudbox then I'd be sold.

I set about sculpting dragon scales on a sphere. Everybody loves dragons, (apart from zombie snow monsters).

The poly count of this sculpt is about 1.5 million. And I have over a dozen layers of texture and paint on top of that and this thing still kept going. Its ridiculous!

I'm going to keep on exploring nomads potential over the coming weeks and months and see what I can really do with it but I can see this becoming another key weapon in my creative arsenal.

“I like physics, but I love cartoons.” - Stephen Hawking.

So when I thought about doing this blog it was going to be just a written thing. Just some of my thoughts and ideas as I went along.

I also thought it would be a good idea to show some 'behind the scenes' stuff. So screen captures of my work or in progress stills.

But besides that there wouldn't be a lot of graphics here. 

I'm not really a fan of talking to a screen (and you're not really interested in what I look like ... are you?) So 'vlogging' isn't really for me.

 But we do live in an interactive world. So I decided I would create a character to do the blog for me.

Meet Log

He started out as a graphic created in Adobe Illustrator. I prefer Illustrator for this stylized kind of artwork. And being a scalable vector graphic made sense.

Using some face elements that I already had from old animated characters it was simple enough to bring him to life to use as title cards for the blog.

But then, as these things do, another idea hit me.

With just a few more tweaks. I could create a character to go into Adobes Character Animator.

This would then allow for a more interactive blog experience. I could throw these on YouTube easy enough and I don't have to sit infront of a camera. (I also wouldn't have to worry about lighting or tidying this dump).

All I need do is write these blog posts down, record them as a voiceover. Few tweaks and Boom! Helllooooo video blogging.

People still may not look at them but who cares, this is more fun!