2-D Project: The Finished Piece

The finished piece about halfway through. It shows the Lord Admiral with and arm mounted cannon holding the head of a defeated enemy commander.

The finished piece finished. There's a lot I like about the picture. I'm quite fond of the gun and its blue-wispy-plasma-esque smoke. I also like the expression on the Admirals face for there is no other expression to have on your face when you are holding the bloody head of an enemy; your gun held aloft victoriously.

The shading, however, is a little lack luster and despite my efforts I could not get it to look anywhere as clean and refined as my earlier front view image. I'm also not that good at shadows. Something for the future that I should learn to wrap my head around.

In the meantime I'll keep it in mind to try and give characters simpler armour because its very easy to make complex armour look bad, with simpler armour there's a little more leeway. 

2-D Work- Oh God! There's More!

The onslaught of artwork continues.

I am not particularly good at turn-around views. My problem is that the front always comes out great, the back is never too bad but the side... Well look at it yourself. A large part of my problem comes from trying to find out a way to joint up the details that can be seen on the front and back views.

It worked out (somewhat) in the end but in retrospect I may have made his armour a little simpler.

The "plates" you can see in the armour are superficial. They serve a purely aesthetic role and are representative of neither points of flexion or underlying Voi musculature.

A quick sheet I did to attempt to demonstrate how Jurisdiction armour moves and flexes.

It is not like conventional plate armour in which metal plates move over one another to give a degree of flexibility nor is it like leather or fabric which has a slight stretch and crease when moved.

Jurisdiction armour is what I like to think of as "superstate" armour, not quite the "solid state" nature of plate armour nor quite the "fluid state" of cloth (liken it to in quantum computing when a qubit can be both a 1 and a 0 at the same time, Jurisdiction armour is both a rigid solid at the same time that it has a degree of elastic flexibility).

Put perhaps more simply the armour is solid when still and capable of moving when "told" to by the wearer. The Jurisdiction are sufficiently advanced technologically that "hard" and "inflexible" are not mutually exclusive concepts. 

The fact that I need to explain all of this is probably a good indication that I should have gone with a slightly simpler armour design.

2-D Work- The Lord Admiral

With some exploration done on the variation of Voi I set about to start my design of the Lord Admiral.

An earlier sketch of the Lord Admiral in his undersuit with ceremonial officers headdress.

The Lord Admiral in his armour, slightly more painted up.

The Lord Admiral without his hat and a more interesting prosthetic eye. I don't think the headdress added much to the character and made him look him look more like a space-sous chef than one of the highest ranking members of the Jurisdiction admiralty.

A key feature of the the Lord Admiral is his idiosyncratic prosthetic left eye.

I explored a few different ideas for the Lord Admiral's left eye with some slightly more bizarre (and more goat like) eyes. I eventually settled for the right topmost one because there was something about it I found "off" and slightly unnerving. Perfect for the Lord Admiral. There is also something eye-patchy about it, because it doesn't look like a proper eye.  

My one-sheet with information about the Lord Admiral (including his really weird name) and the wider Jurisdiction.

2-D Work- Project

For my 2-D character project I decided to do an alien naval commander simply titled The Lord Admiral.

 My moodboard to help establish the feel and technologically advanced aesthetic of the Lord Admiral.

A quick paint up of a Voi, the type of alien the Lord Admiral is. The subject pictured is not necessarily the Lord Admiral.

Ear explorations. My favourites are 1, 3 and of course 9.

A few sketches and scribbles in my sketchbook trying to get a bearing on the form of Voi and in turn the overall body shape of the Lord Admiral.  

Explorations of Voi under armour suits which allowed me experiment with and elaborate on the Voi design aesthetic. Concentric circles are a mainstay motif in Voi designs.

Owing to their great technological advancement Voi can readily alter their fur colour and patten them with "tatoos". Elaborate prosthesis are also utilised by soldiers and engineers who may become injured in their line of work. 

2-D Work- Robot Paint

Today's class involved us trying to copy a value painting of a robot to the best of our abilities. We were give two hours to do so. The result:

Ta-da! A rohbut!

2-D Work Begins!

For our first 2-D specialisation class we were tasked with drawing designs for both a room and a character with 50 or so minutes allocated for each. The results are as follows.

The room is some sort of cellar or dungeon or something with satanic stuff in it. Yay.

My character was some sort of disgruntled alien commander with a very stiff cape. Yay also!

The Tassle That Never Was and extras

When I first began my project I came up with ideas for Tassle that were a little different than what I finally chose to do.

I did quite like number 6's armour-dress-thing but it probably wouldn't have worked for the main character of a game.

These were the first set of thumbnails I did for Tassle. I combined aspects of the second and third sketches to create a more finalised concept. 

This was the result, note the silvery and strongly geometric designs.

There were two reasons why, already into the project, I chose to redesign my character. 

The first reason is that I though that the complicated geometric armour would be too difficult to model. Of course you could just call it "challenging" but I had no interest riving myself insane with difficult and demanding geometry.

The second is that I just go a bit bored of it. I don't know why I did but now even looking back at it I recall thinking that I could just do something different, something that wasn't along the lines of the first thing that popped into my head.

Now some extras.

This is a screen shot of one of my models of Tassle. I had to abandon it and start again because of geometry problems way above my pay grade, which was a shame because it didn't turn out too badly.

Gold and shiny! This design was done with a gold foil texture to make you think wealth.
which the Edwards certainly have

This one was toned down a bit more.

These are the designs I drew up as the symbol/logo for the Edwards Corporation who de jure own Tassle. It's just a circle with some liney nonsense and a barcode design beneath it and it can be seen as the background for the synopses write ups.

Summer Project

I can't remember the last time I posted something on here but I'm quite sure it was close a thousand years ago. Over the course of our summer holiday we were given the task to design, model and render a character for a (nonexistent) sci-fi game. The character had to be a cyborg and have at least two arms and legs. Simple enough. I thought.

 I looked at different designs for different types of cyborgy and mechanical things by many different artists. I had it already in my head that I wanted to do a human cyborg but one that was not a built-like-a-tank killing machine or a multi-appendaged mechanical spider queen. What I wanted to go for was something with less glamour like a servant type or ship pilot or someone part of a ship's bridge crew. I eventually went with the latter.

For our project we had to do a little bit of world building to set the scene for our characters. We had to devise a synopsis of the narrative as well as develop the appearance and traits of our character.

 

With the stage set set it was time to thumbnail Tassle, the name of all names I chose for my character. Personally I think it's a sweet, simple and endearing name and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I chose the name whilst looking around my room trying to conjure up something suitable and spying the tassels on my bedroom blinds. Nothing whatsoever.

Taking inspiration from my first and fourth thumbnails I set about to paint my character.

Now that I have my nice painty-uppy picture of Tassle I had to get to work on the back and side view to use as reference when modeling him.

These are said designs. I took the best side of my front painting and mirrored it for use to model the front view. Trying to get things to line up on the side view is not worth the time it takes and can break even the strongest willed individual. 

Next, of course, was the modeling done in Maya 2015.

Some perhaps not so hi-rez pictures of the low-poly model. 3D modeling is not my strong point point so it took me a good few tries to get the armour on right and I made a few alterations on the fly to the look of it keeping in mind the some of the detail was to be added on later with Mudbox, such as the eyes.

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.

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.