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.

My first round of silhouettes

 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:

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.

Next round of contestants.

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'.

My final design and model.

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.

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.

Some of my thumbnail drawings.

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.