FTG's art

Fawfulthegreat64 said:
Here's the first 3D work I made for school (prior to Wittgenstein). It's basically somewhat of a M&L OC. Designed to be a 2.0 of sorts to the Vacuum Helmet. The backstory gives it an advanced AI and the ability to reason, along with arms and the use of hover technology as opposed to rockets. Fawful built it to help him recover from the failure of the Dark Star plan (in this timeline he's assumed to have survived). But how well will this work out for him? Who knows. But it was fun to make.

Vacuum Helmet DX

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*claps* real fast
 
Elongated and curly stuff are pretty tricky to model, but the best way to model that sort of thing, in Maya, is to draw a curve, get a cylindrical primitive (basic shapes are called "primitives"), and then select both the curve and the cylinder, then select the face to extrude, and you'll have to create much more subdivisions to smooth out the shape. It sounds confusing, but I don't know if the program you have has a feature that enables modeling chords and stuff much more easily.
 
Revenant Archagent said:
What are the purpose of the goggles on top, I wonder? Do they lend him some extra sight?
If you refer to the yellow eyes, they are his source of sight. Well, for the helmet. Fawful could, I suppose, tap into its vision if he needs to, but they are primarily for the helmet to be able to see even when Fawful is not using it, as it's meant to be capable of operating independently as a minion as well.

Some of you may have already seen this when Moldo posted it in the fanart thread, but this is a mockup I made of a Paper Mario theme in SMM2. It was initially featured in my Top 10 Wanted SMM2 Features video, but really blew up later when I posted it on Twitter.
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Well looks like all my recent embeds from DeviantArt are now broken, apparently you can't hotlink the images with just the extension anymore, that long-ass string of gibberish after it is necessary for the image to display. I'd been deleting that part for cleaner links. So I'll have to update them at some point, meantime here's something small I just made: a Paper Mario styled P-Switch.

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Now that awards are over, I'd like to share some bonus stuff related to my presentation/behind the scenes.

This presentation became more ambitious as it went on, when I first began making the sprite portion, doing 3D scenes wasn't part of the plans. I was still figuring out where it would go from there, when I remembered that I had commissioned an N64-styled model of my avatar from MrPr1993 on VG Resource, and it would be perfect to use for the SM64 portion of my comic. This is the first time I've used said model in a project, and it's not rigged but instead, divided into pieces which I arranged individually for the poses. (This is also how Mario is modeled in Super Mario 64). Here's some of the renders from that.

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As I began making the SM64 scenes (which mostly used screenshots of HD video from YouTube for its environments) I thought perhaps I should go all the way and make scenes like this for Super Mario Galaxy and Odyssey.

Galaxy, thankfully, had very accurately emulated environments up on noclip.website, which was a HUGE help setting up these scenes. The Comet Observatory, in addition to looking almost perfectly like it did in-game, included NPCs such as Rosalina so I didn't have to make my own renders. (I did end up rendering Rosalina for the ending group picture). For both the Galaxy and Odyssey segments, I used BLOF's model. It was probably a bit too high quality for in-game Galaxy, but it was the closest I could get and at least matched promotional art and designs. I'm particularly proud of this render inspired by Super Mario Galaxy's cover:

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As I developed the Galaxy segment I was constantly thinking about how I'd manage the transition between Galaxy and Odyssey. Eventually I decided Luigi would be involved, but a scrapped idea would be that I notice the Odyssey flying by and stealthily hitch a ride, noticing Mario inside it. For New Donk City I also used noclip.website, though that model was rendered far less accurately to in-game so I had to use many filtering effects to make it look somewhat legit. Also, about when I got to the part where Mario is falling, I refreshed and found Odyssey had completely been removed from noclip.website, so the windows in the background in that scene, as well as the ending backdrop, came from actual screenshots I took in Odyssey. Though, the scene where DK gets hit by a barrel uses a previous shot I had already used in an earlier panel from noclip.website. As you might have noticed, the style of these panels took inspiration from the slide-based cutscenes in Mario vs. Donkey Kong. That's part of why they weren't animated, though most of it was time constraints.

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Fun fact: the image I grabbed of this scene for the credits GIF has Pauline's face icon left in: a layer I forgot to hide. You can't really see it due to the low resolution but that's definitely a goof on my part 😂

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Here are some screenshots of setting up the renders:

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Some of the renders were irregularly posed to get a certain effect from specific angles, such as this one where Mario's neck is distorted weird from other angles.
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Giant Mario
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And finally some transparent renders.

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You might recall in the "have you made a Mario OC" thread I teased a character that I hadn't fully designed yet, a benevolent counterpart to Dimentio. Well...

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Just as Flipside and Flopside are perfect opposites, so too are the two mysterious jesters. One we all know, and in this headcanon he is the malevolent jester with Flopside origins, Dimentio, who has a pointed nose. However, a similar jester originating in Flipside is peaceful in nature and was a prominent figure in the Light Prognosticus. (Not to be confused with Merloo, an implied character that seems to have Dimentio's abilities). Flipresto, in contrast to Dimentio, is honest, noble and benevolent. He uses softer, peaceful colors and the use of diamonds and circles from Dimentio's design are swapped.
 
In this mockup, I expanded the Mario group art found on Nintendo's official Mario portal to better reflect the expansive universe that hides behind it. There's still a lot more I could add but I'm getting to the point where I have to do lots of rearranging to make space for anything new so lol

This could also be seen as a very belated follow-up to the Super Mario Universe concept I was posting about all the way in 2015 before I was banned. The logo I added is a reference to that.

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Kind of a smaller thing (which kinda harkens back to the old trend of "frankensteining official artwork together") but I was thinking about how NSMBU introduced an enemy that is literally a Spiky Tromp with a different name and design. I feel like it only happened because the Spiky Tromp was original to the Paper Mario series and as it's no longer 2004 a MP5/SM64DS scenario apparently isn't an option anymore. For reasons probably BS. Regardless, I edited together a Spiky Tromp in 3D to imagine what could've been.

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The funny thing about the Fawful and Cackletta ones are how it doesn't look so different from the originals. It's a pretty great effort, even if it's not a perfect rendition of 2D Mario artwork. If I might pinpoint the reason, it might have to do with how the shading is perhaps a bit too clean.

In this mockup, I expanded the Mario group art found on Nintendo's official Mario portal to better reflect the expansive universe that hides behind it. There's still a lot more I could add but I'm getting to the point where I have to do lots of rearranging to make space for anything new so lol

This could also be seen as a very belated follow-up to the Super Mario Universe concept I was posting about all the way in 2015 before I was banned. The logo I added is a reference to that.
This is a very nice arrangement of characters, and I like that it explored pretty much all the unique Mario games. One inclusion that I found strange is Mr. L, only because I don't think Luigi and Mr. L are separate entities. Meaning that, unlike the Babies and Dry Bowser, in which they do appear alongside their originals separately, Mr. L is out of place since Luigi is already there! Besides, you already have other Super Paper Mario characters so it's not like representation is lacking.

Thank you for reading.
 
Thanks for your input! In regard to Mr. L, I included him because A. i found a good render of him (made by the same person who made the Dimentio render) and B. his personality is distinct from Luigi's so I felt it was worth representing, also if Nintendo ever decided to use RPG characters I could see him being a separate character in spinoffs in the same vein as Dry Bowser. As for the artwork in general, I'm open to adding more characters in the future (Gooigi will probably be one of the next ones added, as honestly I should've added him at the same time as Hellen if I had thought of him)

For the Fawful & Cackletta, I largely stayed true to their original artworks, though for Cackletta I expanded it as the pose provided that I was referencing was not a full body image, so I actually frankensteined together pieces from other artwork to make my reference, including upscaling part of her sprite for the closed cape part. It looked pretty hideous but all I was going for was a general pose. I'd show that if I had it on this computer, but I just got to Tennessee for Thanksgiving so I only have my laptop. Fawful I mimicked the pose in his artwork, though I altered the curves a bit on his cloak to make it appear more expressive (always thought his original artwork was pretty stiff).
 
Something I'm intrigued with your digital art is: how do you achieve the shading of the colours? It gives the pictures a nice texture feel, but it's also something I haven't been able to do myself.


The Paper Mario drawing reminds me of the art style of Wuppo: its crude line art alongside some nice rounded shading.
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Thank you for reading.
 
That particular piece was done in Paint Tool SAI, as with anything else I've done in a similar art style. I just use the brushes in that program.
 
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