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!