scotteaton

Dec 092016
 

Demo sculpts from my Facial Anatomy workshop at Blizzard and UnbisoftThe growing collection of demo sculpts

I’m recently back to London after a long trip to the West Coast (LA, San Francisco). The first stop was Blizzard Entertainment for a four-day facial anatomy workshop. For the uninitiated Blizzard is the juggernaut game developer behind the hit franchises World of Warcraft (WoW), Overwatch, and Starcraft. From their fortress-like campus 100 miles south of LA in Irvine, CA, they run a digital empire built on monsters, magic, and well… fun.

Sculpture in the Blizzard Atrium dark magic at work here, me thinks a levitation spell or something

My job was to level up the artists’ facial anatomy and portrait sculpting skills. The workshop broke down into two days of facial anatomy lecture and two days of portrait sculpting in ZBrush. The content will sound familiar to anyone who actually reads the posts on this website (and doesn’t just looking at the pictures, like most), because I ran a similar workshop for Ubisoft very recently. In fact, you’ll recognize one of the heads rendered above. I added a second head (my Blizzard demo sculpt) to the menagerie this time.

Sculpting facial expressions in ZBrush during Scott Eaton's Facial Anatomy workshop sculpting expressions

Even though we were studying facial anatomy the artists also got a chance to draw and study from the Bodies in Motion site. We drew from quite a few Motions, less for full-body poses but more for examples of skull structure and head/neck articulation and anatomy in dynamic poses. There were some great drawings from the room full of talented artists.

Drawing from Bodies in Motion, head and neck studieshead studies from Bodies in Motion

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Nov 072016
 

Digital Portrait Sculpting - Scott Eaton at Ubisoft Quebecdemo sculpt from the Ubisoft workshop

I am recently back from a week-long workshop at Ubisoft’s Quebec studio focused on portraiture and facial anatomy. The week broke down into three days of facial anatomy lecture for twenty of their artists (animators, riggers, concept artist, character artists) and then finished with an intensive two-day portrait sculpting session in ZBrush with just the character artists.

Scott teaching facial anatomy and portrait sculpting at Ubisoftartists sculpting away, and me, the shadowy figure in the corner
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Nov 062016
 

click for larger

The Venus of Cupertino, my iPad docking station, is just back from a busy week at the London Design Festival. She received countless oogles, smiles, and appreciation over the four days. She was even chosen as the top design at the festival by a prominent online design & lifestyle magazine.

Now that the Venus of Cupertino is almost all grown up, most future posts and updates on the Venus project will be found at: EATON.london There you can follow all the gossip, blogs, & tweets. And of course you can order her there as well!

Nov 042016
 

Drawing from Bodies in Motion - Aerial Ropepclick for larger

aerialropemotion

Friday morning drawing. Up early and browsing BodiesInMotion.photo and found this pretty epic sequence – Aerial Rope. Good inspiration for a bit of figure study. Each image sequence (aka Motion) is a collection of crisp, high-resolution frames (15-20 megapixel) with tons of detail for close up study – hands, faces, muscles, deformation, etc (you can find a composite from the high-resolution images here). I’ve attached the preview GIF so you get a better idea how motions are previewed at Bodies in Motion. This was a two-coffee drawing, done on the iPad Pro so I could record the drawing session, timelapse below.
 


Oct 122016
 

Gesture drawings, 1 minute posesclick for larger

Timed studies from Bodies in Motion. One minute poses using the site’s timer, great for forcing me to capture the gesture of the poses quickly (toned afterwards). Site is launching in a couple weeks so join the mailing list if you haven’t already…

Sep 262016
 

Form and anatomy study from Circus artist at Bodies in Motionclick for larger

I am really enjoying drawing/studying from the material in the Bodies in Motion library (and looking forward to seeing what other artists do with it). This drawing is of an aerial performer, Stephen. He has quite a few sets in the Bodies in Motion library, and honestly, he possesses the perfect body for studying heroic human anatomy. There are countless lessons that can be learned from studying even a few of his images.

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Sep 222016
 

30 second poses from Scott Eaton's Bodies in Motion30 second sequences from BiM

Not long ago, I had twelve artists from Natural Motion (of Morpheme and Clumsy Ninja fame) into Somerset House, my home away from home, for a four day anatomy workshop. At the end of each day we would take about 20 minutes to draw from the Bodies in Motion library.

drawing study with Natural Motion.sketching from BiM

We made extensive use of the timer for gesture drawing. It can be set to 10fps, 1fps, 30sec, 1min, 2min, or 5mins, and ticks down to zero before flipping to the next frame of the motion sequence. We had it set at 30 seconds per image and we were all drawing frantically trying to keep up. Anyone who goes to life drawing regularly knows this is challenging, but it’s great practice to help capture the essence of a pose – balance, gesture, rough volumes – quickly, without being drawn into the details. Here’s a timelapse of my scribbles (Procreate on Ipad Pro):


timelapse of a sequence of 30 second poses

Sep 132016
 

value study from the scott eaton's bodies in motion library

Here’s a quick value study from Bodies in Motion. I’ve been testing the site getting it ready for launch and sketched this out on the iPad Pro while browsing sequences in the library. Overall things are looking good and we are ironing out bugs for launch (though I have quite a bit of content still to upload)!

drawing on the ipad pro using split screen - bodies in motion and proreatemorning coffee, the big ipad, and Bodies in Motion

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Sep 062016
 

ca-tm-default-image

I recently finished a series of three facial anatomy workshops for the artists at Creative Assembly, the award winning, Sega-owned studio responsible for the long-running Total War franchise as well as titles like Alien Isolation and Halo Wars 2. Like most artists designing characters for games and visual effects the bar for creating realistic faces is exceptionally high and a functional understanding of the construction of the face is very important to achieving believably with the form and motion of the face. The goal of the workshops was to help the Creative Assembly artists develop a fluency with the anatomical forms and structures of the face so that they can work more quickly, accurately, and creatively, while avoiding the common mistakes many artists make in their portraiture.

Artists busy at work reconstructing faces - Scott Eaton's Facial Anatomy course.

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