Maya Spring Assignment

With the deadline looming I am happy to say that I have finished this assignment on time, which is great for me so no dashing around in a hazy panic. I will admit that I found this assignment to be quite difficult, when it comes to Maya I am certainly not a natural but at least it can all be seen as a learning experience.

The model prior to being unwrapped. Not particularly exiting.

The unwrapped UVs of Finn. Not the cleanest unwrapping I know there are some artifacts of unknown origin. The garbled mess you see in the middle is actually one of his legs. Again, I have no idea how that happened but thankfully it had no effect on painting the textures.

Stages of Finn in the texturing process. Starting to look more like his concept counterpart.

The painted textures. Not the neatest but it did the job somewhat.

Lord. Those bloody shoes...

A front, back and side view of the finished model.

Now, as you ca see it is not perfect, far from it. I have made mistakes with UV unwrapping which came back to bite me in the arse. 

His shoes for start. Because of the way I had unwrapped the shoes it made it nearly impossible for me to steal a texture for the laces off of one of the concept sheets or even paint them on by hand without them becoming a horrible distorted mess, ergo I left them off which I know looks a tad jarring.

Poor UV planning on my part also made painting around the collar of the t-shirt and incredibly difficult task. The textured result is questionable at best. The t-shirt, thankfully, was very forgiving just being black with a logo and adding the face was a breeze, having added eye holey-bits on my model it was easy for me to size up and place the cut out face onto the texture map. 

Here's hoping I get better with time. Made with Maya and Photoshop as you know. About six/seven hours work.

More Life Drawing

Title is self explanatory. This is work from my last two life drawing lessons and by last I mean last, at least as far as course scheduled life drawing is concerned.

3 minute poses in charcoal.

1 minute poses in charcoal

Perspective practice in charcoal. It's not too bad I don't think. 

15 minute pose in coloured pencil.

15 minute pose in black pigment liner.

More 3 minute poses in charcoal.

1 minute poses in charcoal.

Practicing faces. Both at least look vaguely human, just not much like the model.

15 minute pose in Copic marker.

15 minute pose in pencil with Copic marker. Still hopeless with hands...

And that's that it seems for now. I like to think I've gotten better at life drawing over the last two terms, or at least I hope I have.

Frog Shaman

This is the final design I came up with for my anthropomorphic frog-creature-thing, a task given a couple of weeks ago as you know.  As you know with everything and anything like this; moodboard:

It's not particularly difficult to tell what direction I chose to go with my design is it?

The finished piece. An Aztec inspired frog shaman guy with feathery headdress and all that nonsense.

About two hours in Photoshop (I think). Overall I'm pretty happy with him but perhaps he's just a little flat colour wise. All well.

Personal Work: Fenrir

In anticipation for tomorrow's partial solar eclipse I have drawn Fenrir, the fen-dweller. In Norse mythology it is recounted that Fernrir would eat the sun heralding in Ragnarok, the Norse end of times. So whenever a solar eclipse came about the vikings would be convinced that Ragnarok had begun only to be left startled and bemused when nothing actually happened.

Bumbling and incompetent, this sun-sized Fenrir drifts through space attempting to eat stars completely oblivious to the fact that his mouth is too small. 

Inspired by the Norse legend as well as the actuality of the solar eclipse I drew a very spherical Fenrir. Look upon his splendor and weep.

How on Earth the Norse peoples of old could mistake what was clearly a very round object blocking the sun for a large wolf-god is beyond me but it inspired this picture of the Fen-Dweller.

Spring Unity Work- My Stuff So Far.

For our Spring submission for out Games Encounters module we have to make a game and submit it for marking. A straight forward process but by no means an easy one. The game is to involve flying and shooting with a score system and a menu screen. Myself along with the team I am on of three other people, so eloquently named Dancing Queen Studios, decided on a WWI-esqe space shooter with space-borne biplanes, The game's working title I believe is "Biplanes in Space".

I few early ideas scribbled down on Photoshop for the protagonists plane. The idea was the the plane would feature an enclosed cockpit,  a rocket engine and a redundant propeller. As one might already be able to tell this is not a particularly realistic game. 

An early idea for the final plane. Note large over-sized rocket engine. 

The final design for the protagonist's plane. The yellow colour was chosen to stand out from the background of space.

The main enemy plane was designed to be more angular and menacing compared to the protagonist's.

It features a pickelhaub gun turret to further enforce the fact that these people are space Prussians.

Also it is a monoplane which contrasts to the players biplane.  

The bigger, badder enemy plane that sometimes appears is a terrific tank/plane contraption featuring two cannons on a turret complete with Prussian inspired officers cap. The idea is that this foe appears less frequently than the other smaller planes but shoots faster and is harder to kill. However, its larger size makes it easier to hit for the player.

Perhaps the wings should be thicker...

A couple of shots of the untextured Prussian plane I made in Maya 2014.

Life Drawing

I should probably get into a better habit when it comes to posting my life drawing work so here some now:

Eraser and charcoal on charcoal rubbed paper.

This turned out much better than I expected.

5 minute poses in charcoal.

One minute poses in charcoal.

15 minute pose in pencil.

15 minute pose in Copic marker.

I was quite partial to this one even though the proportions of the bottom of the chair are quite the bit off.

15 minute pose in Copic marker and coloured pencil.

My personal favourite. I used the coloured pencil to highlight the lightest areas on the model. 

Apologies for the poor quality of photographs, my phone's camera is atrocious and I am a terrible cameraman.  

End of Term Maya Task

In this week's Maya session were we given the task of modeling a human-ish character named Finn (of all names). This work is to be submitted on Friday 27th March and we will be marked on it. We have to model Finn, unwrap him and texture him how we see fit and will be judged on our efforts. Simple enough...I hope.

The blueprints, as it were, of  Finn can be seen in front of and to the left of what are the model's feet.

Getting to work. Starting on the feet and extruding upwards towards the head

The headless, armless body of poor Finn.

A more human looking model. Complete with head and arms. After a little more work the amount of polygons will be increased before the model is unwrapped, making it easier to add textures.

Done in Maya 2015 as opposed to 2014 because 2015 is far handier for unwrapping UVs.

Frog Concepts

This week's Photoshop session was about anthropomorphism ("anthropomofhtfhtfhtfhfthfff" is usually how it is pronounced). Basically, the idea of adding human elements to something which is other wise inhuman. In class we were tasked to come up with concepts for anthropomorphic frogs with the intention of producing a more finalised design later on.

The moodboard. As one might expect it is full of frogs.

   My three finished concepts based off of some of the more interesting frogs on the board.

Number 1 being a type of frog elder or traveler or something. I don't really know, he's just a frog with a stick.

Number 2 is some kind of frog shaman.

Finally, Number 3 is some type of frog soldier or guard type person, complete with feathered helmet.

For my final design I might do a cross between Numbers 1 and 2. Some kind of staff wielding frog shaman with a Mayan-Aztec-Inca-South-American feel to it.

Concepts took about one and a half hours to do and were painted in Photoshop (but you knew that already).

It's Pronounced GIF!

This is a piece of class work from a couple of weeks ago. In class we were given two exercises to do. We were told using Photoshop's layers to animate some GIFs stolen off of the internet by our tutor, Steve.

The first of which was a simple GIF of one of Jabba the Hut's Gamorrean guards from Star Wars.

We had to make our own tweak to it however, adding glowing blue eyes to each frame. Which can be seen in the above.

Next was a GIF of a simple walking girl.

To this, however, we needed to add something else. We were tasked with giving the girl something like a hat or perhaps a weapon. I chose the latter, as can be seen, and opted for a nice spiked flail (not too spiked mind you) great for those midsummer afternoon strolls through the park wouldn't you say?

All in all I found the process fairy simple if not just fiddly a times, having to go through all the layers and rubbing things out and adding new things frame by frame. Tedious perhaps, but simple enough so I can't complain. 

Texturing Class Work- Directx 11

Today in class we did a spot of texturing in Maya with the help of Phil, the course's technician. The work also involved using Directx 11 which was also  a bit of a break from the norm.

The rather stark beginning scene seen here. It's quite simple. A barrel, a boarded up window, a wall, a guttering pipe, and a drain.

The lovely textured barrel seen here. Perhaps the metal hoops are a bit too light against the wood of the stave (the use of accurate barrel terminology is a thinly veiled attempt to try and make my self seem more knowledgeable than I actually am).  

The barrel sitting in a more textured environment.

A slightly more stylish view of the image above better showing the grated drain by the guttering.

Maya work: T-Rex

Over the course of the past few weeks in class we have been modeling a T-Rex in from scratch in Maya. The process is fairly straight forward: start with a cube and subdivide and extrude. Rinse and repeat.

  

The head under construction. It looks a bit odd to begin with but it's probably supposed to.

A side view of the same head, looking slightly more T-Rexy at this angle.I will admit that it took me about four damn tries to get the head right. 

Arm-less Hover-Rex is no less of a frightening killing machine than its cousin the apendidged ( I'm almost certain that that "apendidged" isn't a real word" T-Rex.

T-rex with the rest of the body extruded and shaped. Starting now to take shape.

A side view of the 'Rex near completion. Extruding the arms and legs are no walk in the park. Dodgy edge-looping on my end made for some quite awkwardly formed appendages. Thankfully they don't look too bad in this image.

Now this is a little different. In preparation for sculpting a model we had to unwrap the UVs of the T-Rex. Shown here is not my dinosaur but a pre-made one by our tutor, Robin. This one was used so that we could all be on the same page whilst doing this exercise.

The amount of polygons in the model were increased to allow for a smoother figure. Parts of the dinosaur were then cut out and unwrapped, as it were. This, as I said earlier, makes it easier when sculpting the model in another programme.