I’m thinking I may need to start posting weekly updates. It seems there are some weeks that much of my time is spent learning some new tool or technique and so I don’t have a lot of project progress to post about. That has certainly been the case this week. There has been some really fun stuff happen around here and I’m just chasing one squirrel after another. Fortunately, they all seem to be going in roughly the same direction.
A couple of the projects I have in mind to work on will make use of one of the many game engines that are available to, what else, make games. There are a handful that are really well known by some of the game enthusiast, players, that is. And then there are others that I suspect mostly developers know about. I’ve been researching these for a while and sort of waiting before I jump in since most of them have had some sort of license fee or subscription fee and some sort of royalty as well. The subscription costs of 3 of the bigger engines has come down over this last year and on Monday of this week a couple of them came down significantly, including the engine that I have finally decided to try to learn.
I had finally decided I was going to go ahead and sign up for the roughly $20 a month subscription for the Unreal Engine. The royalty of 5% wasn’t going to be a big deal for a while. So I was all set and ready to take the plunge this week. Then Monday afternoon I read the lovely news that the subscription fee has been dropped and the only cost is the 5% royalty. Awesome!
The end of last week had me putting in my order for a Wacom Cintiq 22HD Touch. And then spending the weekend all a quiver in anticipation of such an awesome new tool. Anticipation that was heightened Friday afternoon when I received an email from UPS notifying me that a signature would be required for delivery of said awesome tool. Oh, and that it should arrive on Tuesday. I have a really cool manager at my “day job” and I was allowed to work from home that day so that I could be available to provide the required
signature. The timing of the UPS driver could not have been much better. He dropped off my Cintiq 15 minutes before I was to finish work.
Awesome cool Cintiq arrived and once it was assembled I had to test it out. Ok. First I spent nearly two hours deciding which of my monitors I was going to give up in favor of the Cintiq and then I had to decide which side of the desk it was going to sit on. The short answer to that is that even though I am right handed I put it on the left and kept the monitor on the right. I did have to dig out the desk though as it had stacked up with a variety of project notes.
The first program I decided to test it with was Photoshop. I use this mostly for painting in it. So I pulled it up and shifted the program to the Cintiq and got to sketching. I used the brush tool and chose a pencil style brush with a black swatch. I started out pretty soft. But I got what I was hoping for. Better control of the brush and where it is hitting the page so that when I pick it up and move it, I know I’m putting it back down where I intend. It’s much faster since I don’t have to think as hard about it. I also used the blend brush with a 
4% mix and not very saturated. This got me a nice blender with little extra. I did have to clean it a couple of times. I found that using a white swatch with this was really nice as it kept the blend from getting too dark. So here’s my first sketch using my new Cintiq.
I was so good. I did not stay up to 2:00am playing with the Cintiq. I did go to bed at a semi-reasonable hour and I even went to my “day job” today. But tonight I decided it was time to test out the Cintiq with Zbrush. That was fun. It works like a champ. It took me a little to identify what the side controls would 
do in Zbrush. Only because I was too lazy to pull up the configuration to find out. I like the side controls a lot. My hand is already there and for the sculpting process it lessens the need to have one hand on the keyboard. As an aside, I love the control bar on the back in Photoshop as well where it acts as the zoom tool. Way awesome. So I messed around in Zbrush for a couple of hours tonight. Here is what I came up with. It’s made from a default sphere using mostly the move brush, the standard brush, the clay build up, and the smooth. It has be subdivided a couple of times but I haven’t re-topologized it so there is some stretching still. I kind of like it. I may go back to it later and develop it more.
And one other thing for this week. You might remember my Pumpkin project from back around Thanksgiving and early December when I got in that package of inks. Well I finally got that project finished. Here 
is a shot of it almost complete. The Pumpkin is done in acrylic inks in the stippling style and the background is done with Prismacolor pencils.
So that’s the week so far. I have more done on the Mannequin and now that I’ve got an idea of how to model the next part I hope to have an update or two on that soon.