A lazy week hardly worth writing about

I've really slowed right down this week, pretty much because I've been lazy and been sleeping a lot.

 

I managed to finish the values of my centaur archer and have started to consider colours but its very slow paced.

 

I also did a quick cloud study just to do SOMETHING. Although I watched Mad Max this week so I intend to do some fanart soon!

Centaurs everywhere

This week I decided to take a step back and do some stuff just for fun; my energy was starting to run out and I'd been doing so many studies I just needed to draw again for fun. 

Ragnar (TV series Vikings) portrait

Statue study

The first of the Centaurs

 I've recently been watching Spartacus which is set in Ancient Rome and is mostly about Gladiators. I really felt like drawing Centaurs again as they were one of my favourite things while I was younger but I always lacked the ability to draw them how I wanted to. I thought it would be a fun idea to paint a centaur and give him gladiator style armour. This way I got to do a little reading and visual research and produced this. I didn't do an awful lot of concepting, which I'm kinda guilty about but at the same time it was just for fun!

Centaur 2

 I still had some different ideas and styles of armour that I wanted to try out so I just kept sketching!

 I then decided I wanted to make one into a more interesting illustration so here's a WIP. I think once I've finished this one I'm going to look into more Greek mythology and try and concept some of the characters from there. Fortunately a lot of creatures in Narnia and Greek mythology cross over so I can tie these projects into each other.

It's only been a week?

I find myself checking the dates of my last blog post because it feels like it's been so much longer since I last posted.

Picking up from where I left off; last week was pretty unproductive and I ended up getting stuck with art block and I was determined not to waste my time moping around not doing anything.

Study

Firstly I'll start with this study above. I've been really put off doing environments/landscapes for ages because they never turn out very well. I really didn't want to give up because I can't stand the thought of being terrible at it. Like really. So every so often I have a go at a study and see if I can do it. For a long time I was working on this study and it was looking very flat and just not right when something finally clicked, and I realised what I'd been doing wrong for SO LONG. My colours weren't de-saturating the further away they got. It was that simple. I really don't know why I just didn't get it.

Everything changed after I realised this, and I was buzzing with arty energy once more!

Male torso study

Practice

To see whether it was really true and that I had infact discovered what I was doing wrong I tried painting some more (keeping to trees for simplicity) and it still worked! Although this painting wasn't as good as I obviously wanted it to be I was overjoyed to finally see some progress in my environment pieces.

Photo study

I looked for some fairly simple photos to study because I didn't want to overwhelm myself too early, especially considering I'd only just got the hang of it.

Queen Jadis final concept.

Taking a break from environment practice I continued with my Queen Jadis/Narnia project! I really enjoyed the process and I'm rather pleased with my final outcome. I'm still debating whether I need to try and push my concepts further to get more strange and unique designs or whether I kept it quite reasonable to fit in the 'Narnia' universe? Still not quite sure yet.

Study

'Lexa' portrait

Changing things up again I thought I'd work on a quick portrait of a favourite character from the show 100. My work is still being successful!

Photo study

To finish up the week I did another photo study- still quite straight forward but its not trees!

I was so excited to have improved in my art I neglected to go into labs except once, where I sat there staring at 3DS max and getting grumpy. Considering my improvement, I'm feeling like my time will in fact be better spent working on my paintings and concepts rather than getting grumpy at 3D work. Although I realise its important to work on my 3D, when I'm in such a good mood for painting I don't think it should be wasted. Perhaps next week if I'm not feelin' 2D I'll work on 3D, but for now I'm just enjoying life non-art blocked.

First week without uni

This first week in which we have technically been set free from game art (although technically still sorta not) has been a bit of a shambles.

I went home for a long weekend after the final hand in and came back on Tuesday, completely out of the swing of things; without the structure of lessons and lectures I didn't know what day it was or what I should really be doing. I knew there were things I wanted to do but I was severely lacking in motivation which ended up in a mighty fine art block.

Fortunately, I managed to kind of try and get over it and force myself to do other productive things like re-organise all my social media things:

https://twitter.com/HazelTheHobbit
http://hazelbrown-art.blogspot.co.uk/
http://hazelthehobbit.deviantart.com/
https://www.artstation.com/artist/hazelthehobbit
https://www.pinterest.com/hazelthehobbit/

I just wanted to clear things up a bit and make things such as my twitter a little LESS personal. 

Once I'd done this I decided to re-do one of my old studies that I did at the beginning of the (academic) year. 

September 2014

April 2015

 It was incredibly motivating and also interesting to see the areas I improved on; I actually used my original line sketch and changed it a little around the waist and voila! In colour too!

As I mentioned last week I started dabbling in a Narnia personal project and I managed to do a little bit of work on that too: 

(Preview)

For the rest of the week I think I'm gonna allow myself a bit of time off watching films and playing games and then I'll finally get myself going into labs again to re-do some of my projects from this first year. Exciting stuff!

Week 27: Final hand in- success!

Final zombie truck

So this week marks our technically final week of first year game art! It's been emotional. And fast.
I'll cover this week firstly and then go into more depth on the year later.

The second part of our Toyota project was to produce additional zombie modifications. I'm really not sure whether I struggled with this project because it was the last of the year and I'd ran out of energy or whether it's because its so far out of my comfort zone orrrr whether because I just don't like cars.

Wireframe

Either way, I think I enjoyed this project the least. By far.

"Overall I’m not very pleased with my final model. I can’t really say I enjoyed this project, I think it’s been very far from my comfort zone.

Since there was other work set during this project I ended up leaving it quite late and didn’t spend a lot of time on it, but I do feel even if I spent more time I would have arrived at a similar model.

After hand painting textures for quite a lot of projects changing back to photo textures was quite hard for me to adjust to and I think my work is hindered because of my lack of practice.

I also feel like my final design may have been a little ambitious- I was stuck between doing something quite boring and something a little ‘cooler’. Except all the cooler things are a lot harder to model, especially when you have to consider how they’d work."

I don't really think this is the cherry on the cake for all that I've learned, and I find that incredibly frustrating.

Overall, the year has been fantastic though. I've learned so many things and feel like I've really progressed and improved. Fortunately university has fueled my desire to learn rather than make me lazy, which I'm incredibly proud of!

 

During this last week (as a treat to myself) I attempted an illustration for 'The Magician's Nephew'- the first in the Narnia series. I really enjoyed painting it and it saved me having to come up with an idea for a painting from scratch which usually put me off doing my own personal concepts. I definitely intend to keep doing things like this and summer is the perfect oppourtunity! 

I'm going to hopefully keep in the habit of posting weekly throughout the summer so don't go anywhere!

Character project post-mortem

For this project we had 5 weeks to concept, model, texture and rig a low-poly character to fit into the village level. We needed to use ourselves as reference and follow the style guide to create a character in our likeness. We had a tri-limit of 4500 with the 500 being for props, two 32bit 1024x1024 texture sheets and a 512x512 for accessories. I decided to do a mayor’s wife initially but later changed it to daughter.

There are quite a few things I feel worked well such as:

The final design: It took a long time to reach the final design because I needed to change a lot of things; I started very early on and did a lot of concepts looking at quite rich dresses since the Mayor was going to be rich. I did a lot of development on these designs but later on found that I had restricted my ideas quite early on and hadn’t really explored enough. This resulted in quite a boring design. I received some feedback and decided to take my designs back to basics again and start pretty much from scratch. With the advice I had been given I was able to create a much more interesting idea that I really liked. 

 

My final concept

Texturing: I really enjoyed the hand-painting process and felt like I made it look nice as well as fitting it into the style guide.  I really liked the way I painted the folds into my fabric making it look a lot more detailed than it is.

Finished model

Style guide: I feel like I managed to keep my design and model within the style guide. I was a little concerned about the colours of the dress but I think they still work okay. My character looks positive and cheery and has just enough stylisation to fit into the level.

The face: I’m really pleased with the way the face unwrapped and how I textured it- there were no awful warpings or seams.

The flowers alpha: Although its only a small addition I’m really happy with the flower alpha that I made for her hair.

In quite a late stage of concepting I decided to change my concept idea because it wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to and I’d received some good feedback on what needed changing. I feel like I essentially wasted a lot of time because I ditched a lot of concepts but I did learn a lot from it. 

Some early concepts that I ended up having to ditch.

What I would do differently:

Neater topology: I feel like I could have used my topology more effectively and therefore made it neater because I think it’s a little messy; this gave me a few troubles later on when it came to unwrapping.

Better rigging: My rigging was a bit of a shambles because I didn’t understand it very well and hadn’t left myself enough time at the end to properly learn and understand it.

To conclude, there are certain things that I would start, keep and stop doing from this project. I would:

Start: Practicing topology more- more research into the topology I’ll be creating before I start.
Keep: Time management- generally overall my time management was quite effective but there’s still room for improvement.
Stop: Being lazy and leaving things at a bad standard because I can’t be bothered to fix them (eg the lower skirt)

Week 26: Essays??? Writing????

This week has been filled mostly with presentations and writing. No pretty pictures.
Well I lie a little bit, but there has been a lot of essay writing..

Cute little Hobbit hole

In accordance with my vow to start painting more creatively and because the sun was out I painted a hobbit hole with lots of flowers.

Final concept work in progress

I also decided on a final concept (FINALLY) and should be ready to model next week.

The beginning of the week was our presentations on our 'zombie apocalypse survival plan'. My feelings about this topic aside, the presentation itself wasn't too bad. I definitely rehearsed it a lot more than my previous one so I'm guessing that's the way forwards.

I'm thoroughly pooped from writing essays this week though so this post is only going to be a short one!

Week 25 and my Easter holidays

Final Toyota pickup renders

So I neglected to do my end of term blog post for the simple fact that I forgot to put my final renders on googledrive.. Life without a memory stick is hard.

If there's anything I've learned from doing this its that VEHICLES AREN'T MY THING. I wouldn't go so far to say as I've struggled with this project but I certainly haven't enjoyed it and have felt very inadequate in the ways of car knowledge. I'm not sure whether it's been the transition of stylised to photo-realistic or whether it is because I just know nothing at all about cars but something hasn't sat right. I'm definitely a hand-painted texture kinda gal.

My Easter holidays were actually pretty productive in terms of personal work (I decided to take a break from everything Zombie- except the Walking Dead season finale)

Herbert James Draper Study

Photo study

Albert Bierstadt- Among the Sierra Nevada mountains study

Mood board for my personal project

I've also started a personal project which is a 18th century French fashion future. So basically, the future which has reverted almost entirely back to this flamboyant fashion. Although it wasn't directly inspired by the Hunger Game's Capitol I can see similarities. Since I'm going on visual design rather than original project ideas I think I should be okay!

I'm challenging myself to design (almost) every aspect of this 'world' so I will be working on interior/architecture/environment as well as character and costume. So far so good! I hope I'll have a fancy dinner hall to show off soon! 

Week 24: Painfully unproductive

This week was certainly pretty slow-going. The amount of time given for this project made me lazy, and days ticked on where I didn't really do much work on it.. or anything else of that matter.

Fortunately I made some progress on my concepts, trying to add some looser and more interesting ideas.

More zombie concepts

I think the only productive thing I managed to do this week was a couple of paintings:

My first non-study in a considerable amount of time

This painting was originally starting out as a study but I decided to push myself and do something more challenging and put in a lady wearing it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it gave me some faith in my own abilities.

Bouguereau study

 I've started to consider focusing on character art since that is my strength at the moment, but I still want to improve on other areas so I'm leaving it a little open for now since I am only in first year!

Noticing I was behind on my truck I decided I needed to get my act together, and after a weekend at home to recharge my batteries I started working again!

A day's work

I think this project has certainly showed me so far what I should and shouldn't do with an extensive amount of time, and I'm going to remember this for every project we get after this.

Week 23: Toyota pickup

This week we were set our final(?) project of the year; a Toyota pickup truck which we will then be zombie-fying. Being an avid fan of the Walking dead I was pretty excited to get started on this project.

Our first task was to model and texture the pickup in its standard form. We have been given 3 weeks to do this as well as doing our zombie concepts alongside. I wasn't overly concerned about planning my time very well; my initial plan was to spend a day modelling and see where I was at so I could test the waters so to speak and then work out my workplan from there. After two days I had almost finished my model with just a few details left to add in.

Considering we have so long for this project I decided that I was allowed to work on a whim for now; when I woke up in a painting mood I decided to give myself the day at home concepting my zombie version and painting things- convenient!

First few concepts

Concepting was actually quite different to what I expected it to be. It was suggested that we work over the example model and start with some rough sketches before moving onto photobashing. I originally had a lot of ideas floating round in my head, going through all the zombie films and shows I'd seen and working out what you would need in your truck. Although when I started with my sketches a lot of the little bits and pieces weren't really relevant since I was working with bigger shapes and structures, not all the food and weapons and blankets and bags you'd need to survive the apocalypse!

I decided to break my concepts down into sections; survival, defensive and attack. Survival was going to be a truck that would last a long time, so it had to have a mix of defensive and attack but also needed to be full of supplies-something that isn't easy to show off in this early stage. Defensive was more about making the truck more fortified so no zombies could get in. Attack was obviously going in guns blazing and ramming down the zombies. Looking at my ideas so far I think they're all pretty bland and I could have thought about the practicalities a little TOO much too early on, rather than reeling in a cool design later.

I want to set my Toyota in 'The Walking Dead' world which gives me a pretty good style guide in itself. I want to avoid anything too extreme or unbelievable as well as stay away from the comedic and overly violent.

So far judging by these designs my choice of style guide could effect how 'cool' my pickup might look so I think I might try some wilder designs and worry about the realism later on down the line.

But so far I think I've got a comfortable amount of time to work with! I'll be finishing off my model on Monday and hopefully start unwrapping/texturing it while I work on my concepting in my own time.

Week 22: End of character project!

The end of this week marked the end of the character project. I've learned so many things and I think I've definitely impressed myself with the work I've produced.

Final texture and model

Final model and texture with wireframes

Unwrapped texture

I've already written a lot about my model over previous blog posts so I'm just gonna insert my reflective assessment to save me typing it all out again!

" Overall I’m very pleased with my model and texture, especially considering how much of a struggle I thought this would be. I learned a lot through the process and feel like I could do the whole thing a lot better if I started from scratch again (unfortunate time constraints).

I spent a lot of my time concepting going in the complete wrong direction and it was only during the last week or so of allocated time for concepting that I actually decided to go back and change my original idea to something more appropriate. I think my issue was I knew that my original idea wasn’t very strong but I kept pushing it further in the hopes that it would just ‘work’ after I’d put colour on it etc.

Although I am pleased with my final design I wonder how much further I could had developed it if I hadn’t spent so much time developing in the wrong direction.

The topology of my model isn’t the strongest; I had difficulty getting it right for the face and I always seem to be quite messy when it comes to modelling and since I know texturing is more of a strength than modelling I think I get lazy and leave things as they are hoping that the texture will sort out my faults. I feel if I had used my topology more efficiently I could have a better model and nicer textures.

Since some of my modelling was bad my unwraps weren’t as clean and tidy as I had hoped they would be, leaving myself some nasty seams and overlaps that I spent a lot of time going back in to re-model and unwrap (time that would have been saved if I modelled my character more carefully in the beginning).

Rigging turned out to be a bit (a lot) of a shambles. After many attempts to do it while I was mid-way texturing I kept abandoning it because I ‘didn’t get it’ and it ‘wasn’t going right’. I’m not sure why I thought anything would change if I left it till last! I really feel like my rigging let me down because I was just so lost with it and didn’t leave myself enough time with it, despite knowing it would be difficult.

As well as this I neglected to model an accessory, despite having one in my concept. Part of the time I simply forgot and then the rest of the time I thought ‘I’ll do it later’, which ended up leaving me with no accessory!

Although my model and my texture are of a relatively high standard (for me) I think it’s definitely overshadowed by my awful attempt at rigging."

This week was also review week in which I received some really positive feedback on my model/texture as well as ways to improve it. I was also told I was working at B level at the moment and if I keep improving I should be on track for a first. I know grades aren't everything but it's nice to know your hard work is paying off and you're not quite as awful as you thought you were!

Study of Frederic Leighton-Pavonia

I managed to do a quick study at the end of the week and I'm really happy with how my digital technique is coming along- just need to start doing my own stuff!

Week 21: Texturing

This week was pretty straightforward as it consisted of getting my head down and texturing my model.

We learned the basics of rigging but I decided I'd leave that till after I'd got my texture done as I knew that was going to be the most time consuming and important part.

I'm very nearly finished my texturing and I'm pleased with how its turned out so far although I have bumped into some issues which I think could have been down to my thinking of 'a good texture will cover up bad modelling'.. which is wrong is seems. I wasted a lot of my time because I had to go back and change my model and then re-unwrap to make it easier for myself (which I ended up scrapping because I'd got so far in my texturing it would actually hinder me more to start again for little gain).

I've learned a lot so far and have in fact learned a lot from this, I like to think I'll give modelling my own personal characters a go in my free time.

Week 20: Modelling

This week marked the beginning of the daunting task of modelling my character, something that I'd managed to forget about when I got so caught up in the concepting.

I started by essentially wasting(?) a whole day attempting to model the face and getting the correct topology which ended in my going home frustrated and with nothing to show for my day's work. Although the next day when I came into labs I took a different approach and finally did it right! I tend to find this happens on every 3D project I do, so I should probably start accommodating more time for it.

I wasn't 100% sure on things such as deadlines as things had been changed around so much and I'd lost track so I decided to just work as fast and effectively as I could and it paid off.

Front view of finished model

Back view of finished model

I'm pretty pleased with the way the model turned out, especially considering how awful I thought it was going to be.

Even the unwrap went well!

There are a few bits and pieces I need to work on but I've decided to slow down for now and wait till I can get a tutor to look over it and check everything is okay before I trip up and make a mistake later on!

Life drawing

I also produced one of my favourite drawings in life drawing, focusing mostly on foreshortening. I feel like I managed to capture the foreshortening in the leg really well as well as have enough time to put some detail in the drawing.

This week in critical studies we were told to peer assess each other so we teamed up and assessed each others work so far. I actually really enjoyed giving in depth feedback to a peer because I felt like I was confident in the advice I had given them from what I have learned since I have been here which shows how far I have already come in just a few months.

Week 19:

Last week was pretty disheartening for me in terms of feedback but I was determined to improve on it and find out what I did wrong.

I think the most important advice I was given was that I didn't make enough dramatic changes between concepts which was certainly true, and that I should try to make my character look more like a main character than a NPC.

Some re-iterations on my previous final concept.

I decided to try and follow the advice and worked into my 'final concept'. I got some interesting directions that I obviously hadn't considered before.

Colour variations on the new design

Quickly moving on I started working on the colours (after I'd done some value work of course) and even started to come up with an idea in my head for the character's personality; the dress was starting to look very young so I instantly changed to the idea of 'Mayor's daughter'. I then needed a reason for her overskirt to be tied up in such a way when I figured she could be a girl who enjoys going off on walks and picking flowers, pulling up her dress like this to reveal a shorter underskirt stops the mud from ruining the hem of her dress!

Facial variations

Since I also didn't include any face stuff in my first submission I figured I should probably start working on that too. I wasn't quite sure how to work on it because I didn't particularly enjoy looking at my own face for an extended period of time...
To combat this I simply traced over a photograph of me and then worked in the colours and accessories. I felt like the flowers in her hair would give hints to the idea I had in mind for her.

My final concept

After a few tweaks I arrived at my final concept! I'm really pleased with it especially after everything. I'm still waiting on feedback so I can make sure I'm definitely and then its onto modelling.... save me.

In the spare time I've had I managed to work on something quite different; League of Legends splash art repaint:

I'm ever so pleased with the outcome; its the first painting in some time that I've actually put over 3 hours into and I feel like it really shows. Its given me the confidence boost I needed to do my own (relatively) original works more often!