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.

Steampunk Homework

The task at hand for the last two weeks was to come up with a steampunk design of anything we wanted be it character or vehicle, animal or weapon, animate or inanimate, the choice was ours. As with any design task, say it with me; moodboard:

With the moodboard in mind I came up with an idea for a character of a steampunk lady gunman person. Because I'm highly original that way.

So I sketched some ideas out both on Photoshop and in my sketchbook. See if you can guess which ones were drawn where.

I was partial of my idea seen in number 3 of the gunman wielding two pistols rather than a sniper rifle sort of weapon. I was also drawn to the idea of the character having a face mask similar to an early camera.It was different and I thought that it could add to the piece. 

My final design. The character features the camera inspired face mask-thing as well as two revolvers inspired by the British Webley revolver.

The final piece took about four hours in Photoshop (I think). I don't thing there was any part of this piece I found more challenging than another, it's just a little tedious here and there, but what isn't I suppose. 

Lava Monster

The homework task this week was simple: design a lava-monster-thing.As with anything I began searching for anything lavay which could help me with the task at hand. The moodboard itself:

With all this to help me I scribbled down a few thumbnails hoping to develop a good idea or two.

I wanted to do something with concentric circles. Why? Because they look cool.

I was quite partial to my final two designs, number 4 and number 5. Although I was very fond its ethereal and almost angelesque (if that's a word at all) nature I forsook number 4 for 5 as I was in favour of 5's monolithic structure, especially the huge megalithic block which sat on its shoulders and from which its head was also attached.

The upper torso features a more prominent red hazy-glow from the lava to help separate it's head and shoulder-block-thing from the rest of the body. 

 The finished piece, the monster seen here standing in a pool of its own leakage.

In all the process of painting the finished piece took about three hours. I chose to stick with a deep red for the lava for stylistic reasons with some yellow-orangeyness going on near his eyes and mouth to draw the views eyes. 

Mudbox Workshop

A few weeks ago we had an Autodesk Mudbox tutorial by Tony Mayor, a man with expertise in the area of  3-D sculpting.

The first thing given to us was to experiment with the different different tools that Mudbox offers on a poor, unsuspecting cube. This was the result:

The "Eldritch Cube".

We were also encouraged to experiment with the texture stamps Mudbox offered.

Textures seen here on another poor, unsuspecting cube.

We were then shown how to make are own stencil textures in Photoshop and were encouraged to play around with that function.

A simple black and white stencil made in Photoshop.

The stamp being used to decorate (I use the term loosely) a poor, unsuspecting sphere.

We were also shown the painting functions contained within Mudbox. It's fairly basic even primitive when compared with the likes of  Photoshop but useful for throwing colours or even textures onto an object.

Seen here is the UV channel of a poor, unsuspecting sphere with textures and a smattering of colour thrown on.

With the basics down it was now time to model something proper, or at least decorate something with the skills we learned. To do this we were to work on a poor, unsuspecting T-Rex.

The work in progress.

The finished article, sporting a somewhat rhubarb and custard inspired colour scheme. Perhaps not much in the grand scheme of things but I was quite happy with how my "Fabulousaur" (yes that is what I named it) turned out.

Just a picture of wrinkles I used as a stencil to work on the above.

Overall I was quite impressed how easy to grasp the Mudbox system is and how natural and intuitive it is to use. In many ways it can be seen as the yin to Maya's yang.

 

Lizard Dude

At the beginning of the term we were given the task of painting and finishing a sketch of some lizard-warrior-guy-thing from an online tutorial by Feng Zhu of FZDSCHOOL on YouTube. The task was fairly straight forward: paint the lizard guy using skills and hints taken from the videos and finish him off with lizard skin textures.

There he stands in all his glory. Perhaps not my most inspired work but I was fairly happy with the outcome. Using photo-textures like the scales seen on his head and shoulders are a cheap and easy way to quickly add detail to a piece.