Cyborg Project #2 - Developing Ideas

I have taken the ideas from the initial ideas that I had and made some more rough designs. I am really liking the direction I am taking with this. I think that I will make a few more roughs using ideas from all of these. I like the general style of the top left guy but really like the spines of the bottom one. I really like the different style of the guy on the left and the way the machinery is almost keeping the creature imprisoned.

Cyborg Project #1 - Initial ideas

For the summer break we have been set a project. The project is to design a cyborg. First, design the cyborg in 2D. Then create model sheets to make it in 3D. Finally we must texture it using Photoshop and Quixel. I am very excited about this project. When I first heard the brief I thought of the 'Gievers' in Maze Runner and the Alien Wolf creatures in Transformers 4. I think I will design something along these lines but I have many ideas that I will also try.

To start off, I collected some imagery and compiled a moodboard. I will use more images than these for reference as I design.

Now that I have some idea of the styles I want to experiment with I decided to do some quick roughs. These are not very refined but helped me to eliminate some of the ideas I had. I thought about doing a humanoid creature but decided against it when I realised that it could end up being quite generic, which I don't want. I tried doing these lumbering type creatures which are interesting but I'm not sure if I want to continue developing them.

The next lot of sketches I did were for me to decide what sort of creature I wanted to use as a cyborg. At first I tried a frog like creature but changed my focus to look at lizards. I also decided to focus on the head as I was finding it hard to come up with one in the individual roughs. I really like the head ideas but now I need to find a body to fit them. As I based the heads on snakes and lizards I thought I would try bodies with long tails. I will continue developing this idea. 

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.