Andrew Dowell

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” - Albert Einstein Morning all, Sometimes in life, you just need to know when to let go. Holding onto what you believe is right and sticking to your guns is commendable but often due to stubbornness and a lack of clarity. To understand the bigger picture sometimes you need to make smart moves, this doesn't mean it's the right move but if i can project you forward then it's got to be benifitial. So with that in mind, I've made two big changes. Forget what I think I know and start again. The other one is to abandon my first robot hand project as it was going nowhere. A few hours in Maya and I'm back with a new model. Exported and imported (in parts) and boom, we have a model. Now to introduce my five new best friends. Duplicate, DynaMesh, Zremesher, Divide and Project. In that order. You can take any shape of booleans and merge them together correcting the mesh and keeping the original shape whilst...

Back into the grinder. As the wolves grow closer to the door it's hard to remain positive and when you can see little value in what you can offer. As the industry changes so do expectations, artists are required to know more and have a larger skill set and provide a better quality of work. I know that this is self-fulfilling suicide as now one artist can do the job of three or four whilst remaining on the same salary and a shorter time frame. You need to be a god damn wizard just to get into the game. So, I need to take more productive steps to learn more software to a higher proficiency. Maya, Zbrush and Photoshop to name three right off the bat. The shape of things to come will include a lot of late nights, early mornings, family sacrifice and a lot of coffee. Adventures aren't meant to be easy or everyone would be doing it. Model training 101. The Robot arm. Below is an image I resourced from the internet. It's got a nice range of design elements and will require differe...

Welcome back. Another exciting week and a lack of work due to another Typhoon. Luckily this one isn't as strong but it's gonna hit us straight on. But, Typhoon Megi isn't strong enough to stop me. Lots of cool stuff happening so let's get into it. A few years ago I really enjoyed a video game called 'Remember Me', clearly, from the same Deus Ex mold this game's core feature was to allow players to rewind scenes and change other NPC's memories to effect the scene in play. Straight out of Ghost in the Shell, this game not only had a great story, fantastic visuals but also a nice game mechanic.  It's actually very revolutionary and raised the bar for in performance and quality. Like a lot cutting edge games which help drive game engineers to excel, this one also slipped under a lot of people's radar. 'Rage' is another one to check out. It used incredibly diverse textures, a new realistic physics engine, could run at 60fps, had ...

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth." - Alan Watts Hayao Miyazaki has always been a creative inspiration and a hero of mine. Although most people in the west have no idea who he is, they will at least know some of this work. Studio Ghibli is an institution, an idea that will never fade or die, even though the company has closed. Today I watch this video, ' The essence of humanity ' and would recommend it to anyone interested in storytelling, animation or exploring the human condition. I love books, I don't have much time these days for novels but usually get a chance to catch up with audiobooks whilst cycling or at my desk. I have always made it a matter of fact to buy a few art books every few months. I've been quite particular as a few years ago these were expensive but thankfully they've declined in price over the years whilst the quality remained high. I started posting a few blogs about my books but I'm not...

"If you can't join them, beat them." - Me As I learn more, I also discover it's not only important to keep a record of your final work but also your process and specific settings. This metadata is not only useful for oneself, but also for others. As my blog starts to develop and define my processes, interests, and artwork, I clearly need to set out a format to keep things together and relevant to what I'm doing. Simply put, I will attempt to keep my blog going at least once a week and in this layout: 1. Quote 2. Updates and Industry news 3. Artbook Review (If any) 4. My Work (Process, results and software settings) 5. Lost Worlds (Progression) Last week I posted some renderings of some finished modular spaceships I had made in Maya. I was pleased with the results as its was an organic experiment within a quick timeframe to see what sort of results I'd receive. I hadn't included any process notes or images to document my project. I will rec...

A few weeks ago I started on a small procedurally generated spaceship project. With the excitement of No Man's Sky I was enthusiastic to see what I could do with my 3D skills. A few hours later I had about 25 different parts, and started randomly attaching them with locators. I had decided that using a locator socket was a good idea to avoid any misplaced parts and at least try to get something fairly acceptable. The results were horrible. The ensemble of parts looked like a Mary Shelly novel, far from the idea of creating over three thousand different models (I'll let you do the math). I was frankly annoyed. I left the project to work on something else and naturally started thinking about what when wrong. It was the human element. That's what was missing or maybe more sophisticated accertane generation; but the point is an artist not only brings the technical skill of several years but also the lifetime of memories, creative inspirations and imitations to the table. This r...