3D Animation and Rigging

This was fun to do. It was for us to learn how to rig and animate in Maya. The car follows a path that I drew. The cylinder moves around and is animated using bones. The ball bounces and is animated using transforms. I had a lot of fun with this. I am glad I learnt how to animate in Maya as I had been struggling to do it for a while.

3D Hand

This was to teach us how to model a hand from model sheet images. This was challenging as it is hard to switch between all of the orthographic views and model at the same time. I learnt a lot about this method of modelling doing this. This changed my view on the method and now I like it more than I did when I made the pillar.

3D Tileable Texture

This was to teach us how to make a tileable texture from a 3D model. from a top down perspective and cropped is a tileable texture. This was done by copying one side of the bricks to the other and placing new bricks around them. The final thing is rendered out and put into photoshop where it can be adjusted to the right colours and have textures overlayed etc.

3D Pillar

This was to teach us how to model from the orthographic views. It was relatively quick to do as most of it was modelled by extruding. I am not a massive fan of this method of modelling but I cannot deny that it is very useful to use if you need to model something accurately from side on images or model sheets.

3D Mushroom

This was to teach us how to model using extrude along path and the sculpting tools. It was also to teach us how to texture. The different shaped mushrooms were achieved using the transform tools and deform tools, which were fun to play with. I learnt a lot about Maya doing this.

Final Battle Arena in Unity

So when I put the statue into the existing battle arena in Unity. It looked good but the old arena still needed updating. In the process of doing this I had to update Unity. For some reason when I opened the project again all of the materials had broken and were not fixable. So I had to make a new project. I do not regret this choice as it meant I could start off with the new arena model straight away. I applied all the textures and animated the camera. This time I added in more lights and some alarm lights. I decided to make the ground have blended materials but there was no way to do this in unity without buying a software. I scoured the internet for a solution and found one. I downloaded a vertex painter with blend shaders and got a texture for the ground that I liked. However, for this blended material to appear in the build I have to place a duplicate of the ground object into the scene and not do anything else before building. If I change something after placing in the object, the material does not work. I have used emmisive maps on the crystals to make them glow for extra effect. Lastly, I added in a few sound effects and some music that I have used in a previous project. I also animated a few of the alien ships in the scene to add to the story a little bit and make the arena less static. I am really happy with the way the camera moves through the scene and I like how some of the story is shown throughout the arena.

There is a particle effect that I am really happy with for figuring out myself. On one of the spaceship engines I have made a particle effect for heat distortion. It has been made using the glass material shader and a normal map I made from some random generated clouds in Photoshop. I wanted to mention it because I am very happy with the effect.

Finally, I thought I'd show the final statue in Unity. I have used such a bright light coming in from the left because it shows the detail of the normal map really well and makes the scene more dramatic. I am pleased with the way it turned out.

3D Wagon

The wagon project was a tutorial made by our tutor. We had to apply textures to a premade wagon model using Quixel in Photoshop. I am not a massive fan our Quixel. I like the effects it has for textures and the quality of textures it produces but I do not like the process of making them as such I struggled to use it. I prefer making textures manually but I do see the benefits of using Quixel. However, I managed to get a nice wooden and metal texture for my wagon which I put on the model in Maya and Unity. This taught me about the different maps that I would need for a basic texture.

Personal Project: Rusting Metal 1

This project is something that I wanted to do because I have just finished writing a short version, almost a synopsis, of a story that I have been going over in my head for years called Rusting Metal. I started by doing the line drawing that you see below. However, I did not use this in the actual piece because I could not seem to progress it. In the second image you can see the current WIP. I intend to work the angle from the initial line art into the final but for now I decided not to. The dragon type creature that is in this is made of crystal. I had struggled to start painting the crystals but after looking at real crystals and other concept art I managed to render them nicely. So far, the dragon is what I have been mainly focusing on and I am very happy with the direction I am taking with this project. I intend to make the crystals look like they are glowing slightly but I am not entirely sure how, so for now I will continue rendering them as I have been. I can't wait to see it finished!

Art for Practice 3

So I have done some more art for practising various techniques and improving.
The first two were for me to practice form and lighting. I am happy with both of them but neither are in a finished state.
The third one was for me to try doing something that Anthony Jones had done in my own way.
The fourth was for me to try out using different brushes, practice form, and try and recreate the concept artist Matt Betteker's style. I am happy with how it turned out.
I will continue to practice art in a variety of different ways as I can see myself improving in each new piece.

Perspective Environment

I have no idea why this wasn't posted before now. This was the second project we had to do. It is a one point perspective drawing coloured with watercolours. I have always struggled to use watercolours but I really enjoyed this one! When I was drawing this I felt like the scene was a bit empty so I added in a helicopter and some guys shooting at a runner. I am not sure how I feel about the runner's pose though. I also think that I could have done the lighting much better but as I mentioned, I do not really like watercolours. Overall I am happy with how this turned out.

Life Drawing S19

This is the last session of life drawing. Looking back, I would say that these are some of my best yet. I think my favourite of these is the one of his back when he is wearing a dressing gown. I am really happy with the shading. This session had to be done with a clothed model because someone had complained about having to draw a nude model in life drawing. While I, and most others, found this to be a bit stupid I did find drawing clothes to be fun but most definitely challenging.

Life Drawing S18

I feel like I have really improved with my shading after this session of life drawing. It was definitely a challenge to draw the model lying down because the distance was hard to capture. I enjoyed drawing the environment around the model but I was a bit slow to get a silhouette of the model done and then go onto the background.

Life Drawing S17

This session of life drawing had us look at drawing the model while they were walking round, like frames of an animation, and looked at the perspective circles on the floor again. Last time I found drawing the circles hard. However, this time I didn't mind them as much and I think I got the perspective pretty accurate. I find drawing a moving model hard because I like to take time doing the drawings and I find it difficult to drawing an entire model in a few seconds.

Life Drawing S16

This session had was interesting. We had to try a variety of things such as drawing from memory and not looking at the paper. It still surprises me how good my left hand is at drawing. The last image here was very interesting. To try and give the impression of depth to the drawings we had to use a warm colour pen for close areas and a blue for the furthest. I found this a real challenge but I did enjoy it.

Speed Arts

It seems I never posted these two speed arts. The first is of a face and was for us to practice techniques to speed up. The second was for us to practice doing things from the furthest to the closest. I used a brush with opacity to do the first one and I used a hard full opacity round brush for the second.

Art for Practice 2

This painting initially started as an entire dragon but when I couldn't decide on a pose I liked it just became the neck and head. I also decided to practice lava with this dragon. I had intended for the dragon to look more scary at first but then the form of a smile came out of it and I went with it to end up with this.

Blob and Whale Boy VD-S23

This session of Visual Design got us to look at lighting to start. We were given a silhouette shape and were told to light it. I decided to do a shiny material blob. 

Then we did another speedpaint. This time we started copying from a small blurred version of the image we were speedpainting to help us ignore the details and block everything out. Then once we had everything in basic form we looked at the high res version of the image. I did not finish the paint but I am happy that I managed to get most of the proportions correct. However, I struggled on colour and lighting.

Spaceship Forms VD-S22

This session of Visual Design was a precursor to the homework. We watched a video on how Scott Robertson designs spaceships. Then we had to create roughs for a construction vehicle spaceship. We had to do two types of spaceship. Some hard angles and some organic shapes. I really enjoyed doing the hard angled spaceships but the organic shapes I did not. My favourite ship of this lot is the bottom left. I'm really happy with the shapes that came through on it.

Environment Composition VD-S21

This session of Visual Design was for us to look at the composition of concept art. We watched a video to start which talked about methods like 'The rule of thirds' and 'The golden ratio'. Then we had to do a speed art of a house but in a larger scene from our own imagination and based on the rule of thirds. I really enjoyed doing this as I find it fun to try to replicate the style of someone else's art. The first image is the original image and the second is my take on it. Although I did not finish the image fully I feel like I did the composition of the image quite well.

2D Group Game Boss Concept

The boss went through many different iterations before we chose the ball design you can see below. I even took a design all the way to pixel art before changing my mind. The idea behind the first set of designs was a swarm of hive mind based enemies. The second set was an idea for several separate parts of a boss with a central piece. The third set was for many turrets which would be part of a boss. The fourth was just some random designs I was playing with that were partially based on cameras and Glados from Portal. The last was the initial idea I had but rejected due to the immense task of animating and coding it.