Overall I've found this week to be incredibly challenging in terms of time management and things not going the way I want them to; I've fallen behind on my Bradgate work, my Village house and my blog as well as failed to complete my Gurus and Grasshoppers project.. and the worst part is? I wasn't even being lazy!
When it came to unwrapping my Farmhouse I ran into every complication possible when I was expecting none. If I hadn't had such an issue with unwrapping I would have kept to the schedule I set for myself and finished in plenty of time which was incredibly frustrating.
Although after the horrible unwrapping phase passed and I'd managed to get it to do what I wanted it to I began texturing which, again, I expected to be plain sailing. With the introduction of tileable textures and multisub materials everything took a lot more time and consideration as well as a lot of trial and error. This in turn resulted in me falling behind my own schedule, although I did feel like I could get it done in time for the deadline I just wouldn't have enough time for messing around with it and making it look good.
Fortunately we were granted another week for 'polishing', this would enable me to take more time with my textures and make sure they looked good.. Although that wasn't the actual intention of the week it was the best I could do with it all things considered!
I'm still quite pleased with my attempt at time keeping, although now I know I need to allow time for mistakes and any other complications. Because of all this I couldn't do all the work I wanted to do (sorry Gurus!) and ended up getting quite stressed but I feel like I've already been able to learn from my mistakes and for future projects I intend to push the concepts out a lot quicker so that I've got more time to trip up in 3D!
Next week will include my final piece and a review of that outcome rather than all my mistakes! Phew!
Friday 28 November 2014
Week 8: Visual Design
Bradgate Park
This week we went on a 'trip' to Bradgate Park which was beautiful despite the chilly weather. The aim was to gather our own references and first hand experiences rather than everybody using the same reference images straight from the first page of google.
I wasn't able to get any sketches done simply because my fingers were too cold to move! Although I did make sure I took pictures of anything and everything that I thought I may need in the future. I didn't worry about making a great photograph to show off I was more interested in just flat out documenting what was in front of me.
The trees in Bradgate Park were glorious and I was certainly in tree heaven- the different shapes and varieties had me stopping every five seconds to take photos..
Something that was pretty obvious when we got there was the autumn colours, and I tried to take down as much mental colour information as I could while I was there as I knew that the photos I took wouldn't replicate the richness of the colours.
A little later on I decided to do some colour thumbnails instead of just drawing from my photos. I tried to apply the colours I remembered and just used the photos as a reminder of colours and a prompt for visuals. I'm not 100% content with the thumbnails themselves but I felt like I was learning while I was doing them as I needed to apply what I understood about colour already and what I could remember from what I saw. I had to be careful with my oranges, browns and yellows when they merged with one another to make sure they didn't look muddy. With a few of my landscape ones I recognised that I really need to work on depth in the landscape- I feel like I have the knowledge of how to achieve depth but I need to apply it in my paintings and that requires more practice.
This week we went on a 'trip' to Bradgate Park which was beautiful despite the chilly weather. The aim was to gather our own references and first hand experiences rather than everybody using the same reference images straight from the first page of google.
I wasn't able to get any sketches done simply because my fingers were too cold to move! Although I did make sure I took pictures of anything and everything that I thought I may need in the future. I didn't worry about making a great photograph to show off I was more interested in just flat out documenting what was in front of me.
The trees in Bradgate Park were glorious and I was certainly in tree heaven- the different shapes and varieties had me stopping every five seconds to take photos..
Something that was pretty obvious when we got there was the autumn colours, and I tried to take down as much mental colour information as I could while I was there as I knew that the photos I took wouldn't replicate the richness of the colours.
I then managed to find the time to work on my Bradgate final. Considering the amount of time this took me and what I thought I'd learned I'm pretty disappointed with the outcome. Although I don't think its bad, I believe I could get a lot more depth in there and nail the colours better to make it look like harsh and cold winter light while still keeping the warm leaves and plants.
Overall its been a very busy week with not a lot to show for it unfortunately!
Sunday 16 November 2014
Week 7: Other bits and pieces
Gurus and Grasshoppers:
After producing a pretty dismal piggy bank for our first project we were given an extension to improve our work so I completely remodelled and retextured my piggy bank making it into a bumblebee:
I'm so much happier with the outcome and pleased with how well my 3D work is improving.
Studies:
I've taken it upon myself to try and do a study a day to keep my painting up to scratch and so I can keep learning.
I began with a tonal face study as I wanted to try and practice a variety of ethnic backgrounds and ages and genders so that when I come to my own character designing I can get a good variety of people and not just pretty girls with the same facial features.
I also began to venture into colour and I hope that I'll be able to get more creative with my studies as the time goes on!
After producing a pretty dismal piggy bank for our first project we were given an extension to improve our work so I completely remodelled and retextured my piggy bank making it into a bumblebee:
I'm so much happier with the outcome and pleased with how well my 3D work is improving.
Studies:
I've taken it upon myself to try and do a study a day to keep my painting up to scratch and so I can keep learning.
I began with a tonal face study as I wanted to try and practice a variety of ethnic backgrounds and ages and genders so that when I come to my own character designing I can get a good variety of people and not just pretty girls with the same facial features.
I also began to venture into colour and I hope that I'll be able to get more creative with my studies as the time goes on!
Week 7: Visual design
This week in visual design we were set our new 'Village' project and given a fairly strict style guide to work from. We were put into groups for this project so that we could all be assigned a different building to go into one level.
We got together and randomly assigned buildings I then emailed the list to the people that weren't in the class at the time. I got the farmhouse and after some very early research I already had a pretty strong idea of how it would look so I figured that concepting would be quite easy.
For this project I decided to learn from my last in terms of I wish I'd have done more research on the subject matter so that when it came to my own concepts I'd have a better understanding and therefore produce better ideas.
I created a mood board so that I had all the useful images in one place rather than all on my pinterest but I also put some people in traditional costume and other aspects of 'farms' so I could keep in mind the general 'farmhouse' vibe.
I then did some studies from some of the images. I find drawing things forces me to look harder at the images and think and understand how they work rather than just glancing over them.
To begin with I started drawing out various ideas with the original base shape in mind. I thought starting here would be better than starting with silhouettes as this project doesn't rely as much on a strong silhouette like the rock did, plus the 3D elements can't be seen from a 2D silhouette.
I really liked the idea of a wooden/plaster building with a little brick bit coming off the side which could be used for things like pigs or storage or something. Instead of just settling with that idea I decided I should keep on developing it to get a stronger idea.
I experimented with a stone base and an elevated top but while doing research I had actually read that the richer people had stone bases as well as glass windows so since my house is a farmhouse that isn't generally associated with richness I thought I better leave that idea.
By the end of the week I had managed to get my model this far and I'm quite pleased with my progress! I'm planning on getting more details and information in there when I next work on it but overall it hasn't been a bad week in terms of productivity!
We got together and randomly assigned buildings I then emailed the list to the people that weren't in the class at the time. I got the farmhouse and after some very early research I already had a pretty strong idea of how it would look so I figured that concepting would be quite easy.
For this project I decided to learn from my last in terms of I wish I'd have done more research on the subject matter so that when it came to my own concepts I'd have a better understanding and therefore produce better ideas.
I created a mood board so that I had all the useful images in one place rather than all on my pinterest but I also put some people in traditional costume and other aspects of 'farms' so I could keep in mind the general 'farmhouse' vibe.
I then did some studies from some of the images. I find drawing things forces me to look harder at the images and think and understand how they work rather than just glancing over them.
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| First round of idea generation |
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| Developing ideas |
I experimented with a stone base and an elevated top but while doing research I had actually read that the richer people had stone bases as well as glass windows so since my house is a farmhouse that isn't generally associated with richness I thought I better leave that idea.
It was when I had got this far that I considered silhouettes- they aren't massively different but I wanted the shape of the roof to really give a good impression of the building and make it look quite reserved and soft rather than a big towering and sharp building.
After the silhouettes had influenced the shape of the roof as well as the addition of the chimney I was able to refine these ideas further into something I was really pleased with.
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| Colour testing |
When I had got to this point I decided to start modelling while I was in the labs and carrying on with things like this while I was at home as the colours only effect the texturing and I needed to make valuable use of my time while I had the opportunity to use 3DS max in the labs since as I have a mac I'm unable to use it at home.
Tuesday 11 November 2014
Week 6: Visual design
A little bit late as per usual but I finished my Guild Hall painting and I'm really pleased with how it turned out!
With all the projects going on I've found it pretty easy to forget about or neglect my finals but better late than never.
I felt quite motivated to make this good as Chris said he'd be looking at them and possibly sending them forward to the GuildHall themselves if they were good enough and I'm quite eager to impress...
I actually tried a different painting technique with this painting because the photo I got gave me the shape information but not the colours I wanted- I took the picture around 6 or 7 in the evening so it was pretty dark with everything illuminated by street lights.
In order to achieve the colours I wanted and give myself some artistic license I put an underlay of a red and blue to achieve the warm and cold colour bases and then built up on top of it which gave me a lot of pinks and purples which I wouldn't have chosen to use myself but they worked really well on the painting.
In comparison to the photograph I think my GuildHall is a little off perhaps in proportions and maybe perspective but regardless of that I'm really happy with the outcome :)
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| Painted in Photoshop |
With all the projects going on I've found it pretty easy to forget about or neglect my finals but better late than never.
I felt quite motivated to make this good as Chris said he'd be looking at them and possibly sending them forward to the GuildHall themselves if they were good enough and I'm quite eager to impress...
I actually tried a different painting technique with this painting because the photo I got gave me the shape information but not the colours I wanted- I took the picture around 6 or 7 in the evening so it was pretty dark with everything illuminated by street lights.
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| My reference picture |
In comparison to the photograph I think my GuildHall is a little off perhaps in proportions and maybe perspective but regardless of that I'm really happy with the outcome :)
Week 5 & 6: Game Production
The past two weeks have been so busy I decided I'd plonk it all in one post to summarise the two week project: Stylised Rock!
This project intended to introduce us to working to a certain style and theme as well as a different way of creating textures (painting and not photomanip textures).
I was really eager to start the project because it was a fun theme and gave us so much more leeway to design exactly what we were going to model.
To begin with we had to use Pinterest to begin to gather reference and inspiration, a few of my peers got together to create a joint board so we brought in a wide range of rocks and gems to inspire us before we narrowed down our designs. Doing this we were able to bounce ideas off each other as we pinned which was fun as well as incredibly useful.
Once we had done this I began to create some basic silhouettes; just blocking out some interesting shapes was a really good way of starting from scratch and getting some interesting ideas that I may not have thought of just through sketching.
I uploaded these silhouettes on facebook and got a range of feedback and decisions of which rocks worked best. I then took a selection and developed those further:
I found this to be a really good process because I changed bits that I would have just left and actually found some better variations on the original.
Out of the second lot I chose a few of my favourites and started to consider tonal values and what would actually be going on inside the silhouette.
The next stages from concepts to finalised idea got pretty muddled as I took one version quite far but changed it the night before I planned to model it in a moment of weakness.. Although I prefer the final idea I think I should have changed my design earlier on when I had doubts rather than 'oh I'll see if it looks better if I add colour'.
Overall I'm really pleased with what I have produced. I feel like I've definitely improved since the previous projects and I really enjoyed hand painting my rock. I do feel like I could have got a stronger design if I spent more time pushing it further rather than settling because I felt like I needed to get onto the modelling. There are certainly a few things I could have done better such as making better use of my geometry which would have given a stronger shape to texture.
This project intended to introduce us to working to a certain style and theme as well as a different way of creating textures (painting and not photomanip textures).
I was really eager to start the project because it was a fun theme and gave us so much more leeway to design exactly what we were going to model.
To begin with we had to use Pinterest to begin to gather reference and inspiration, a few of my peers got together to create a joint board so we brought in a wide range of rocks and gems to inspire us before we narrowed down our designs. Doing this we were able to bounce ideas off each other as we pinned which was fun as well as incredibly useful.
Once we had done this I began to create some basic silhouettes; just blocking out some interesting shapes was a really good way of starting from scratch and getting some interesting ideas that I may not have thought of just through sketching.
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| My first round of silhouettes |
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| Round 2: Silhouettes |
I found this to be a really good process because I changed bits that I would have just left and actually found some better variations on the original.
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| Next round of contestants. |
The next stages from concepts to finalised idea got pretty muddled as I took one version quite far but changed it the night before I planned to model it in a moment of weakness.. Although I prefer the final idea I think I should have changed my design earlier on when I had doubts rather than 'oh I'll see if it looks better if I add colour'.
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| My final design and model. |
Thursday 6 November 2014
Week 5: Visual design
This week's visual design was pretty straightforward- we had the day cleared of timetabled lessons to go and visit the Guild Hall to do some sketching.
I really enjoyed the couple of hours we spent at the guildhall, the structure of it was interesting and quite challenging yet fun to draw- a lot of the beams were wonky and it was quite difficult to make them wonky in the drawings while still looking right. I also drew a couple of details such as chairs to change it up a bit.
As well as this we were told to draw people in a busy place for life drawing.
I found this pretty difficult simply because people walked really quick so I got minimal time to get the gesture right although I did find it got easier the more I did. It was definitely good practice because you learn what parts are the most important when sketching people quickly.
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| Some of my thumbnail drawings. |
As well as this we were told to draw people in a busy place for life drawing.
I found this pretty difficult simply because people walked really quick so I got minimal time to get the gesture right although I did find it got easier the more I did. It was definitely good practice because you learn what parts are the most important when sketching people quickly.
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