Saturday 29 November 2014

Week 9 - Character Artistic block

This week was a slow starter; the weekend was spent overcoming the artistic block mentioned in the previous post. But it was time well spent in terms of self reflection, i soon realised that the feedback given wasn’t so negative. I took most of what was said and re-evaluated my work against it, I soon realised how flawed the design was right through to the initial sketches.  I took a handful of the silhouettes from the start of the project and went in a different direction with them. Instead of focussing on what i wanted the final outcome to be, instead i looked at the shapes i was forming and how the shapes related to each other. I experimented quite a bit with this, not rushing in to anything, I soon settled on one of the characters designs I just had to come up with an interesting design to go with it.

The design of the second character was awkward, it took quite a while trudging through various silhouettes and finding something that matched the other character. Anything I came up with that fitted with the other character, was also in itself quite non-descript.  So when deciding on which design to further I really had to think about what the silhouette really was and how it functioned in the world.






To do so I did lots of research in to the way animals worked and their internals, I realised that the silhouettes I liked were all quite animal like and resembled bear or ape type animals. This proved difficult, no matter what I really did with the silhouette it always lost what made it interesting, its mysterious nature.  So I decided to leave it for a little while and work in to the design of the other character as I was quite certain that i would model that one. I started drawing over the top of the silhouette, the character soon turned in to quite a young girl in a large coat that filled the rest of the silhouette. I soon iterated on this and the character eventually started to change to a more Eskimo like design.  At this point I knew the character was going to be a young girl, so i started a base mesh in max. I started with the face; I used a slightly older face for reference with the intention of making it look younger and slightly stylized at a later date.  


There is not a lot of time left on this project and I’m quite worried about it, I need to finalize the design, finish the base mesh, unwrap the model, texture it and hopefully rig the model. So not too much, you know? 

Saturday 22 November 2014

Week 8 - dichotomy

This week marks the start of another project, the dichotomy project. I'm going to be honest with you, before this project I had no idea what dichotomy meant. By definition it means " a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different". So it's basically a fancy way of saying opposites.  We weren't given too many limitations, in fact none at all providing it can be justified, for example researching tri counts for various systems etc. I decided to forget this for now and jump straight in with designing and research.

I started the project the same way as the last, do some quick research on Pinterest and had a flick through some art books looking at character concepts. I was pretty sure after a few pins that I was going to do a sci-fi character, I've since realised this was the wrong thing to do but I'll talk about that a little later. I started by sketching, just basic doodling really, as I was quite rushed by the time frame we were given; our tutors were expecting a finished design in about three days. I soon settled on a basic design, a scifi girl and her robot. I tried to create dichotomy using shape, angles and size and obviously one is a robot and one isn't. I then went on to think about individual parts of the character, starting with the face and working my way down to the outfit and eventually the robot however I never really got around to designing the robot.

Towards the end of the week of the week we presented the work we had done so far on the project, having a presentation this early straight after the hand in of another project was incredibly stressful and requiring such a large list of work was a big ask. I feel if we were given a little more time to finalise our ideas we could have perhaps justified them a little more. The presentation went disastrously, I knew this the entire build up to the presentation. I figured my idea was quite weak but I didn't expect to be told to start again, I left the presentation more confused about the aim of the project than when I walked in. I wasn't the only one that felt this, I spoke to my peers and most of them were also told to restart.

After rethinking my approach and discussing the project with my tutors I began to think about the project again, I aim to start again from the very beginning and maybe grab some of the silhouettes from the previous attempt and work into them. One of the main things I was criticised for was having an image of what the character(s) will look like before I start designing them. So I will think about the general shape of the silhouettes. I will also avoid deciding on a genre for the characters and decide this later once I have an interesting pair of silhouettes.






In conclusion this has been an up and down week for me, it started positive by handing in a project and I was quite looking forward to the first character project. In all honesty I am feeling a little discouraged about it all however I am sure it will pass by next week and I'll be back at it again. I am surprised by how I'm  actually finding myself with more enthusiasm for characters in comparison to environments. If you would of asked me at the start of this course which I would prefer to do I would of said environments in a heartbeat.

Saturday 15 November 2014

Week 7 - sentry gun final

This marks the end of our second years first solo project and its been a fun one, I really had fun with this project, despite the design process being a little rocky, It was a nice introduction back to the design process. We were tasked with designing a sentry gun and placing it in to an Unreal Engine blueprint. I felt a little unsure about this project at the time as it had been a while since I've designed something. We only really did a handful of design projects last year and the work I did over the summer didn't really include much design work, i did a few design pieces but i never really took it to 3D, never mind to engine.

A focus for me for this project to really focus in on each key element and try and refine it, As I said I have never really taken something from scratch and carried it all the way through to game engine before so it was quite exciting but also a little scary as i had a lot to learn in a very short space of time. I feel I am really getting to grips with PBR as it seems to be coming natural now when i sit down to do some texturing so I aimed to really try and nail various material definitions. Working with tri budgets again was also a concern of mine as it was something we didn't have as much consideration for during the last project.

I feel the overall design of my sentry gun turned out well, however i am really not sure how as the initial design process really didn't click with me and I actually got to a point where I was completely stuck with my design. I did however find that i was being a little overcritical with the design, i got so fixated on the process that at no point did i ever sit back and look at my design objectively. The design was fine and with the time frame we had it totally ticked all of the boxes required by the brief. I then went on to model the turret, keeping in mind the tri count. The mesh i used in the end actually started out as a whitebox but after a day i soon reassessed my time frame and decided to start adding details etc. The next issue I encountered texel density of the unwrap, i had lots of separate parts  but actually found they all needed individual bits of the unwrap as it had lots of unique elements. I tried to prioritise but looking back on it I have found that maybe i should of just left a little more time to iron this out as it was too late by the time i noticed it.

I have heard along the grapevine that the next project is actually a character project so i am incredibly excited for that. After this project i really aim to work on the initial process and look at the designs i come up with a little more objectively. I will also leave a lot more time for the 3D side of things, I was really cutting it short during this project so i will plan my time a little better, i will spend more time on my unwrap and really focus on getting an even texel density on my UVs. Something else i will aim to do for my next project is try and really focus on making it a portfolio piece, portfolios are something i will need to start thinking about this year so the earlier the better i guess.

In conclusion, whilst this project didn't quite fulfil what I aimed for it wasn't a complete mess and turned out looking pretty good in the end. It will probably be a project I put in my portfolio if one of my future projects doesn't quite fit the bill or goes a little wrong. I am actually quite tempted to do this project again at the end of the year as it will be a good test as to what I learnt, I now that's a long way away but I am just thinking it would be an interesting experiment and would probably look considerably better.

I am really looking forward to another character project, i have been itching to get my teeth in to a good character project since the start of the project, its interesting seeing how i progressed over the past year. Originally i hated drawing people now its the only thing i want to draw. Well, lets see how i feel about it after an entire project of it

Saturday 8 November 2014

Week 6: Finally Making Progress



The week started out a little rough, I got a little stressed as i had still not really finalized my idea by the start of the week, I even tried adding parts in to the bash-kit. I actually, more or less, created a secondary kit and combined it with the first, this broadened my ideas and created some variation. This unfortunately took the first half of the week to put together, which meant i was running out of time. I had a week and a half to finalize the idea, white-box, model, texture and put it in to engine. By all means i think its achievable but ill have to cut back on some sections; as soon as I finalize the idea  wont have the time to alter it too much. I do however want to allocate a fair chunk of my time to texturing as i feel that the texturing will be key to selling the overall feel of my project.

 From here i put together a quick plan, I had found a few ideas i liked, but i wasn't 100% sure on them. I decided to iterate on these a little by adding and subtracting different elements and re-incorporating bits of the bash kit, i feel that this really improved my ideas and i really like a different element in three of the 4 i chose to iterate upon. So i quickly put all of these together and decided to go with this as my final design. I used this idea to create a very quick whitebox of the model, which i used to do a paintover to finalize the details of my design.

I feel the design as a whole was working quite well, it fit to the theme that has slowly developed over the project. Things that maybe need changing are the legs, I love the way it is wearing traditional Japanese footwear but I feel the base of the legs are too small. I. Think my favourite part is the gas tank on the back of the gun, however I have no idea how I could pull that off in texturing, I will have to try experimenting a little next week. I'm quite looking forward to the texturing phase, I just hope I'll have enough time to make it look good and model and unwrap it to a high enough standard too. The next week will be very stressful, I hope to have the model unwrapped by Monday , the mesh is mostly finished, just needs a few finishing touches.