Tuesday 23 December 2014

Week 12 - 14 christmas

The Christmas holidays are here, everyone has gone home, its absolutely freezing.

I have a plan for this holiday, i aim to build up a some pieces of work to fill my portfolio with. Whether i do or not is a different question, but we will see. I realised that this year we won’t be doing any form of vehicle project, so i thought it would be a good idea to try a vehicle over Christmas.  I settled on doing a classic bike, a modded triumph Bonneville. I wanted something with a lot of the inner working showing so i can really go to town on the pbr textures. I Started by finding some good orthos to work with, this proved difficult as the bike i wanted to model was modded and has thousands of variations but i managed to peice them together. I knocked the model out quite fast but unwrapping was a pain due to the many individual parts. I started the texturing process and also imported in to unreal to test the textures. I also purchased quixel suite towards the start of the holiday as i didn’t have any functioning normal map software. During this i tested out the 3D viewer for photoshop. Its a cool idea however i it doesn’t really work that well, the pbr application isn’t quite up to scratch in comparison to unreal.


The other project i planned was actually a collaboration project with a friend of mine, Emily Kelly; a fellow DMUGA pupil. We wanted to do a fantasy based environment over the 3 weeks, obviously we only have 3 weeks for the Christmas holidays so it will be a long haul project.  We just wanted to do something that would really further or 2D work. So along side the 3D bike project i was painting lots of thumbnails to help design the environment. I Had no idea if the project would go very far or when it would be completed but it was a fun project with lots of potential. I haven’t really had much time to practice my 2D skillset this year, the course has definitely took a turn more towards the 3D side of things;Which i actually quite like, i do tend to get on with 3d more these days in comparison to 2D.


I found the environment idea generation to be quite awkward at first, its not something we have really done before, we have sketched plenty from real life but we haven’t really been taught how to generate ideas for outdoor areas. Luckily however, the internet exists and Feng Zhu has some great tutorials on this and also i picked up some stuff on photo bashing. Here are the thumbs and moodboards i threw together for this. 

Saturday 13 December 2014

Week 11 - Character post mortem

The marks the end of our last project of 2014 and also the half way point of my second year here at DMU, its very odd to think that we only have 2 more projects left this year. Soon it will be FMP time and that is a very scary thought indeed. This project was the first (and apparently the only) character project of the year, this project was the first project in a good while that really got my stress levels up, We had some serious time constraints during this project and we had literally no down time after the sentry gun hand in. I basically had to have a finished design for 5 days after the sentry hand in which was a little ridiculous, the design i managed to pull together was then completely torn apart when presented to the class meaning i had to start again anyway so it felt like I wasted a week

This project was a love hate affair for me, i didn't really like any of my design work but i really enjoyed the later elements of the process. I absolutely loved modelling the character and texturing was also quite fun, unwrapping wasn't quite as enjoyable but it wasn't too bad. I feel that i kept the design simple enough to execute well but it didn't really fit the brief well enough, the characters i designed weren't dichotomous at all. I feel that the dichotomy element of this project was a silly addition and this project would of worked a lot better without it.

I feel most of this project turned out very well, the final outcome really shows that and i feel it is the best 3D work i have done so far. I will definitely be putting this piece in my portfolio, i feel it showcases a lot of the skills i have learnt since starting out in the first and when compared to my gladiator project the jump in quality is substantial. After finishing this project i feel really inspired and compelled to look in to doing more character work after the project finished. I really want to learn zBrush as it is essential for character artists in industry, I will maybe plan a project in the near future where i can learn zBrush whilst developing another character for my portfolio in the process.

Again, during this project the main issue i had was in the early stages of development, i had serious issues with the design process and trying to achieve what the brief set out to do. A big issue was communication, lots of people look at your work and all say different things and give different advice, I guess at the end of the day I learnt how to look at criticism, how to listen to it and select the important parts and do what feels best; a fair majority of the crit i received was in fact correct and very helpful.

All in all, I oddly enjoyed this trainwreck of a project, it was a complete mess from start to finish  but i really got a rush from it. The final outcome looked the part and matched the concept and i will totally be able to use it in my portfolio, i may even model the second character but for now i plan on enjoying my Christmas.

Saturday 6 December 2014

Week 10 Character final

This week started a in a rush however luckily, we were given a surprise extra week on this project. THANK GOD. I was getting incredibly stressed; the extra week will be the difference between my project being good or bad. Over the weekend i finalized the girls design and painted a final painting and also finished the base mesh, i also started the unwrap which i soon finished within the following day. Before i start texturing i really need to figure out my tonal values and colour schemes, of course i can do things like the face and hair etc but before i can really get in to the clothes i need to sit down and figure a few things out. I left it for now and moved on to the second character.

At this point i looked back at my secondary design , i decided at this point i didn’t have much more time to work in to it so i just settled on what i would turn the silhouette in to. I decided a bear would fit best, i know i could of done something more creative with it; which was a shame but i was just out of time. I eventually decided on a polar bear type character, i never really took it any further than that as i wanted the time to really get the first character mesh looking good. If i have any time left at the end i will definitely work in to it.
Now the only thing left to do before texturing is figure out a colour scheme that fits the character. To do so i put some basic values on to the albedo and took a couple screenshots to do some paint-overs with.  I eventually decided on a darker colour scheme sticking with blues and browns, during this process i sadly never really tried lots of variations. All the colours were quite similar. Again if i had time i would of spent more time on this section.






Towards the end of the week i started to rig her, this was the work experience of my game art life. Disclaimer, i have rigged a couple models before and like to think that i know what i am doing but this was a whole new level of horrible. For some reason 3DS max just crashed every few clicks, so to rig the character id have ro rig a bones worth of stuff saving every few clicks and then move the bone to test the rig; every time i let go of the gizmo max was guaranteed to crash. After hours of work i get a really rough rig working. I tried many things in an attempt to fix it but it was just something up with that max file in particular. I may revisit the rig when it comes to getting the piece ready for my portfolio. All i really have left to do now is texture the character to completion.