CRAB TANK

Crab Tank in action.

 M2-TIGER in action.

M2 TIGER. Will try to put this guy in an environment/action shot like the CRAB Tank if i get a little time this week. Target was to make a smaller two legged weapons platform in this universe, somewhere in-between an ED-209, The Moose and a baby MGS REX.

Crab-tonomous military vehicle done for fun.
http://benmaurodesign.com/SPACESHIPS-VEHICLES

Gorilla Exo Soldier.

Gorilla Tank Model Kit

My Gorilla Tank kit finally arrived! Looking forward to putting this together in my spare time and taking some nice shots of the final assembled unit. :)

Still a few units available here from Industria Mechanika:
https://industriamechanika.com/…/86-ben-mauro-s-gorilla.html

Call of Duty

Finally got approval to show three Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 images done back in 2014. This was for a stealth fighter VTOL seen in the game, was fun working back and forth with Treyarch on this! Hopefully i will be able to show a few more things at some point if/when more stuff gets approved.

Reference packs for designers

 Some recent high res photographic reference packs i started selling for designers, all photos are taken by me with a Canon 6D, all images are around 5,500 pixels wide and are great resources, ref or photobash material for personal or professional use. Enjoy and have fun!

2D/3D Environment Design

Video is live! :)

Another free tutorial video going over the creation of a set design in ZBrush and rendering in Keyshot the paint over in Photoshop. Video will be up in a few hours. :)

Early Keyshot exploration.

Film Pitch Work - 2012

Some pitch work from 2012 that Eduardo Pena and i worked on that we still have not been paid for, here were a few designs i did, glowing eyes and all....not my call.

Cambodia 2080

One 2014 resolution: Environments. Always been a neglected part of what i do, i always enjoyed drawing isolated detailed things that can be built above anything else. Definitely harder for me to do more painterly/loose concept paintings, but after seeing so many fantastic environment painters at the MB workshop and friends in LA, decided its time to hit the nail on the head this year.

To start, going through my old Edgar Payne book and doing compositions based on his basic composition principles, this one was supposed to be the "Grouped Mass" design. More to come!

Live Action PATLABOR

Massive Black workshop demo from Fri, some sort of live action take on PATLABOR, one of my favorite animes...... can't go wrong with old Mamoru Oshii! :)

3D blockout in ZBrush + Photoshop paintover. Keen to do a few more shots if i get time, take more time planning/modelling/finishing than i had time to in the demo, would have liked to group all the pieces on the model to get better base material render out of Keyshot to paintover in PS instead of just all grey that i started with here. Everything came down to the wire and ran out of time but was fun stuff regardless, glad everyone had a good time, will figure out a way to get the files to everyone that attended the workshop. Look forward to the next one! :)

Finally got around to uploading the layered file, the DL link can be found in the store section of my site. Enjoy!

http://www.artofben.com/Store

Initial 3D blockout from ZBrush.

Gorilla Tank

In-Class demo from this week. Painting up the final 'gorilla robot' in a clean version more like a Bradley tank also did a quick digital camo variant but maybe i will post that later. Probably a bit overkill from an illustration/focal point standpoint but the main purpose is just to showcase the model/design in an environment.... will get to some more fun illustrated stuff soon.

You can view the development and work in progress on the model for this in my ZBC sketchbook:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?149695-Ben-Mauro-Sketchbook/page11

In class demo from this week. Most of the demo's so far have been showing how to use ZBrush to create detailed finished art over a slightly longer period of time but this week i just wanted to demonstrate how we can quickly block out some basic forms/design then do a paintover using photos/painting to get a finished production illustration in a few hours.
 

So here was that really blurry guy way in the background on the first illustration next to the soldier fleshed out a little more, some sort of smaller carryall type bot..... i call him the CHIMP. Might go and do a more refined 3D/Keyshot version of this guy after i refined the design more in ZBrush working everything out to the same level as the Gorilla or higher. We'll see how everything works out over the next few weeks.

A robot sketch i did earlier this year during Khang Le's demo in AUS, not related to the more realistic gorrila tank robot i did in class but thought i would share instead of letting it collect dust on my HD.

Warmups

Some more warmups and things, sort of a realistic take on a slightly future MGS/Eva/GIS/Appleseed inspired humanoid SWAT robotic soldier for the military, i imagine it would be completely autonomous and/or have some soldiers mind downloaded into this vessel so a team of these guys could be extra lethal with years of combat training augmented by a superior body. Haven't put my designs in environments in a while...a bit rusty to be honest. Mostly 3D with some refinement in Photoshop on the transition areas between the artificial muscles and the robotic areas. Pushing myself to build more detailed/refined hard surfaced stuff in 3D this year after seeing what guys like Vitaly/Furio/Fausto/Gavril/Fields have been smashing out lately...definitely takes a while to get into but seems to be speeding up. Should have much more to share later this year.

Some little teaser images i did testing out Keyshot before going in and detailing the model more (you can see how rough the model is in these images). 

Spent a little more time on the model based on where the paintover went and did some more finished renderings out of keyshot, this is mostly straight out of the program with a little PS work on the decals etc (though you can do that in the program). Could have taken things further, but that's all the time i had to spend on it this week (and probably all the time i will have for a while). Mostly a technical exercise getting some new processes for building complicated hard surfaced designs and rendering pipelines down for class next term, took a bit more time than i would have liked messing around with each program and figuring out how to get both to work together efficiently (on a laptop!), but i think for future designs it will be a really effective combination to create some highly detailed renderings very rapidly, when you see your design looking photoreal in real-time in the keyshot viewport.....its very addicting.

 Grey renders of the model, still not super detailed but fairly resolved for a concept, would definitely like to push the level of detail much further on future designs. 

 Polygroups on the model before exporting to Keyshot. I am doing everything on my macbook pro so i needed to use decimation master a lot to get the polycount down as much as possible, though i ended up building parts of the lower legs separately then merging them (and not dynameshing into one mesh, i think because i was only planning on doing the upper torso so it was detailed ahead of time then decided to do the full body last minute) so the parts of the body are a bit more dense than i would have liked but i just didn't plan ahead as well as i should have and time had run out so i just had to deal with it. A note to myself for future work when doing this sort of thing.