Blanchitsu in 3D: Attempt 1

John Blanche paints his fantasy and 40k wargames miniatures in much the same way as he paints his traditional art - which is to say, with a uniquely fantastical and fucking brilliant style all his own.

Blanchitsu: the dark art of slapping on the paint, ending up with a model that captures the spirit of raw, grungy unreality. With lots of checker patterns and saturated colour thrown in for good measure. What follows is my first formal attempt at harnessing blanchitsu in low-poly 3D.

I chose a simple item of armour for this purpose, an orcy (or [space] orky, if you prefer) pauldron. Very light on geometry at ~100 tris - several surfaces were deleted prior to unwrapping to save time. Weapons of choice were 3ds Max 2012 and Photoshop CS5. Note that these are unlit scanline renders, so this is exactly as the object appears with just its diffuse texture applied.

Wireframe + ambient occlusion

Above we have the geometry with visible wireframe and nothing but dark 'n' dirty ambient occlusion in our texture. AO adds a hell of a lot to even very low-poly models, and in the spirit of blanchitsu, dark 'n' dirty is what I want...

Slap on the paint

Basic colour, texture and decals have been added beneath the AO. I've painted in the highlights, worn away the decals a bit and added bolts. It'd unnecessarily increase the poly count to add geometry for bolts this size. Also note the texture seam visible at the center of the image, around and below the lightest corner highlight. I'll deal with that later. My pauldron looks half decent at this stage, but not very "John Blanche" at all. Let's try to fix that...

Blanchitsu?

And there we have it. I textured the living hell out of the surface (by hand - image overlays would never give a suitable result), slapped on some old gore and grime, and bumped up the colours' saturation. Finally, I painted out those texture seams I mentioned earlier.

Blanchitsu in 3D, or not? I'm not sure. My second attempt will probably be in the form of a shield, which should give me more opportunity to experiment with stronger, saturated colours and painted decals. I also need to work on making metal look more metallic - my pauldron looks a little too much like stone, perhaps, although a specular map (or even a carefully painted alpha channel for envmapping in a game like Neverwinter Nights) would of course work wonders in that regard.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Citadel Combat Cards

My complete scans of all six original decks of Citadel Combat Cards are now available for download here.

Each deck consists of 36 cards (1 cover and 35 cards) as transparent-backed .png images. I'd appreciate being linked back to if you share these scans or use them for some other purpose. They're presumably © Games Workshop and/or Top Trumps.

Intro

This page will primarily be a repository for my low-poly 3D art, writing, and fantasy miscellanea.

The majority of my previous modding and blogging experience is with Neverwinter Nights (a D&D3 CRPG); it's rather a pity I quit that game some time ago, since I'm a much, much better digital artist now than I was whilst actively modding it. That isn't saying much! I ought to go back and re-make my public NWN content, although I'm not sure the community is even still alive.

I aim to make any completed game assets presented on this page available for download and free use, along with some textures and maybe even some short tutorials as well. Other RPG stuff is likely to be presented with PnP-style roleplay in mind, the only sort I care to pursue nowadays.

Please comment, critique and request [game models, stories...] at will. Enjoy!