Life Drawing

Just some of my pieces of life drawing work from this term (it's about time I put them up). Even though most of our course work is done digitally it is still founded in the essentials of art, which we impart study with life drawing. In these classes we replace Wacoms with charcoal. I hate charcoal, just thought I'd throw it out there.

Run of the mill 5 minute poses with charcoal.

Scribbly sketch.

Portraits with exaggerated curves.

Oddly enough, I am quite proud of my ink work.

I took a more illustrative approach with the ink, drawing with it more so than painting with it.

Just thought I'd throw this all at ya in one go. And I do apologise for the quality of some of these pictures, they were taken on my phone. 

Maya Assessment- The Temple

For the 12th December, just before we break up for Christmas we have been tasked with modeling a temple design based off of another temple model to see how capable we are at modeling and texturing.

 The basic, untextured block form of the temple, showing wireframe.

After most of the blocking out the finer details were added, such as decals and tiles around the roofs.

A near-top view of the temple showing some colourised detailing aspects.

A textured version of the temple with wireframe on. Textured with brick and roof tile images created for this exercise.

Off-front view of the temple. Note set of missing pillars near the front of the building.

Front view of the building with all pillars where they are supposed to be.

A side view of the finished temple.

And a nicely angled view (I think) of the completed building.

All in all I'm quite pleased with the temple, I does manage to look like the original temple we were asked to model (at least to me), and for that reason I am happy. Some of the texturing, I admit, is a little off, perhaps to do with the polygons in which they need to texture although it is probably down to the fact that UV mapping and texturing is not my forte. 

All well, for now I'm rather pleased. 

Unity Level Task

The eve of this projects hand in date is near and I felt it was time to post what new things I have added to my level.

The ruinous nature of the map hopefully encourages the player to explore and have a look around.

The top view of the level showing the start and the end.

Coming out of the starting room you find a sitting sphere, as you walk towards it it floats up and away (with a magical sound effect) towards the large temple at the end of the map.

The pyramid as viewed from close to the base. (Note ominous floating sphere on top. Or at least it's supposed to be ominous...)

The "Key" which the player can pick up. Although admittedly it doesn't open anything it adds some variety to the basic level; allowing the played to pick something up.

The big temple, which serves as the end of the level.

The golden door which leads to the inside of the temple. It slides open with an ancienty sounding stone door sound.

The end of the level inside the temple. The player pressed the square button as seen on the alter in front of the idol illuminating a floating artifact with a "sudden" sounding sound (the best way I can think to describe the sound). Note a familiar sphere from earlier, it seems to have lead the player to the temple.

Hidden in the deep underbellies of this level is its coding. Perhaps by far my least favourite part, but through will and perseverance. Most (if not all) of the code for my level was based on the code from previous class exercises. I'm certain that I would get lost trying to code it any other way... 

That's it. The End. Ta-dah!. Not expecting a BAFTA anytime soon... 

Fish Animation

An animation task from a couple of weeks ago. The idea was to rig and simply animate a swimming fish. This was done following a Lynda tutorial on basic deformation and rigging in order to teach us the basics of animation.

Ghost fish!

First a skeleton was whipped up and added to the mesh of the fish model.

During the process areas that were not wanted to be effected by the movement of a joint were "painted out" with a Paint Skin Weights Toll with the value set at zero.

When all of that was sorted out the the fish was simply animated by moving and adjusting the joints and setting key frames. Simple as really.

The finished fish with skeleton and rigging in place.

A shot of the fish some point into its animation process.

Quite fun and fairly easy to do. I hope animation in Maya stays this was, but I have a niggling feeling that it won't...

(It also appeared that my fish was just plain white while the one in the tutorial video was a nice blue a yellow colour. A shame really. I wonder why?) 

The Skeleton

With our week's classwork being based on the proportions of the body and how it can be altered to make characters and creatures look more exiting our homework was also suitably body based. We were tasked with studying the skeleton and it's mechanical nature (ie. its joint structure). First off we had to do studies of key areas of the skeleton before finally doing a front, side and back view of a skeleton complete with labels of bones and joints.

The idea of the studies was to sketch and try and learn about key areas of the skeleton using as many sources as possible. It was whilst in the midst of doing these drawings that I found myself thinking that surely all areas of the skeleton are key areas of the skeleton. Surely?

Next was the front, back and side view.

I learned from this exercise that drawing skeletons is not particularly fun. They are very technical and I found it hard to keep the proportions of different parts correct to one another. The rib cage and pelvis being particularly demanding.

All in all it seems like the key lesson here is practice drawing more skeletons Quinn.  

Tank Assignment

With us practicing and trying to understand perspective during class our homework given was suitably perspective based. The idea was to come up with a concept for a tank and to draw it in a perspective view. Easy right? Err. No.

Moodboard. Naturally.

 After shotgunning a moodboard together i got to drawing out some silhouettes of what I hope are fairly interesting looking tanks. I had a lot of fun seeing what shapes did and did not work for tanks and I was quite partial to the idea of a tank with large wheels like the giant land movers you see in large quarries and strip mines. However, number 8 was the one that became my favourite design. I think because it looked long and sleek. 

Note number 3 for obligatory Iron Cross.

With my favourite chosen, I got to work on this:

I used a whole array of photos from tanks to easily, but I think, effectively give it a tanky feel. 

But now the real fun began. I had to draw this tank in front three-quarter view perspective. 

Insectoid Character Design

The task given to us, a couple weeks back, was to come up with an "imaginative concept" for an insect-ish character which could be used to discuss possible art directions in some hypothetical future game. We needed to: compile a moodboard, do some sketches, work up further your three favorite sketches, do a front and left blueprint style view of your chosen character design and then a final three-quarter view piece of your final design. With two weeks to work on it this was our most demanding piece of concept work yet. So without further ado, moodboard:

With the moodboard to help me I got on with some sketches in my sketch book.

After scribbling down a few sketches I was quite clear to me which ones were my favorites. So it was off to Photoshop to see if I could work the concepts further.

God bless layer via copy (my preferred way of producing symmetry in a piece). .

Front and profile mugshot(ish) style pics as required. Getting everything in line was a pain.( Note presence of smaller abdominal claws which were subsequently dropped from the design as I felt that they didn't and much to the creature and just got lost in the thorax detailing.) 

Although I was fond of them all, ever since I did a sketch of 'im in my sketchbook there has always been a special place in my heart for "Super Mantis" (called so because of his size, not as an indication of any super powerful aspects).

I used a leather texture on his shelly part.I don't think it looks half bad really.

The final picture. I must admit that drawing this (not so) little fella was a complete and utter nightmare. Trying to get his thorax and shell look right in a three-quarter view was eye-gougingly

stressful but after a while I finally got what I was looking for. I'm quite happy with how the colouring came out but wish that perhaps I could have made i a little more interesting, replacing the need for black outlines with shade and tone. But, alas, I was quite frankly losing the will to live with this piece after trying to get the line work to look right and am still rather happy with the out come.  

Maya- The Turret

Over the past few week our class work has revolved around building and designing a gun turret which could be used in a game. Using simply square blocks I got to work assembling what eventually became this:

As you can seen not too much detail, at least not at this point but all was well for the time being it did, indeed, look like a turret. I say "all was well" because when I tried to texture it with a basic checker patter there was something definitely off.

Something had gone askew with the polygons inside the turret body warping the appearance of the texturing on the outside. But not all was lost, thankfully there were models provided to work from if we wished so I (unfortunately) had to abandon Warpy McSkewy and set off to work on a pre-provided model.

Our job then was to take the base of the turret and embellish our turrets with panels, rivets, spheres, greebles and nurnies (nurnie , stops being a word very quickly after saying it a few times. nurnie, nurnie, nurnie...). The result: 

 The turret base all kitted out.

The turret base made all lovely and shiny and detaily and what-not.

Achieve with normal and bump mapping.