Week 5

Individual Projects Begin

Sentry Guns, Iteration for the Nation 

A new project begins, the sentry turret. This time our brief is to design, model and transfer to engine a sentry gun. The blueprints and animation is set up. All we need to do is import and replace... or so we thought. (Freddy and the pivots from hell is another story).

We began by making a good old fashioned pinboard: http://uk.pinterest.com/cantondmuga/gunned-down/

Oh Pintrest the way you make my research easy and accessible makes my heart skip. My chosen theme was pastel goth and diesel punk. My idea was to create a diesel punk silhouette, then theme and mix in the pastel elements. 

From here we created reference boards and from these our first silhouettes. My first silhouettes were made from a bash kit created from my mood board, which was really good fun and a technique I hadn't used before. I could have iterated until the cows came home nothing was stopping me. However when I got to 50 reason stopped me, it was time for feedback

From the favorite designs of each person I asked, I produced tonal outcomes and started to develop them into something more pastel goth. Needless to say, not much time was spent on this after all those first silhouettes. At least i'm happy with the sheet and feel a lean towards which is the strongest design. Before I knew it we were knee deep in the turret project and I was on to colour sheets.

Tonal Studies, how will these be 3D

Colour Sheet

Final Design, and I'm very excited 

Next time on Freddy does game art, 3DS max and the day of the round shapes.

Week 4

The Film Room Post Mortem part 2

Once we got the ok, it was time to go into overdrive, turn it up to 11 and burn some midnight oil. Although if I was to redo this project I would have started once we had a film chosen and probably taken advice from tutors rather than relied on the dragons den method we were given, as we spent far too long deciding and not enough time working.

But then you never know what issues a project will throw at you, learning is a mixture of failing and picking up the usable pieces for next time and successes where you find a working method and roll with it.

Organisation would be key in this project, something we didn’t seem to realise until week 2. However once it was introduced we used many methods of keeping track of each other, our work and the group internal deadlines.

We used methods like: mood boarding the scene for assets, colour pallets, the waterfall timetable and an editable schedule to help us all add in parts that we missed and crack the whip on each other.

Now it was time to concept for my assets. A lot of them were front on or difficult to see in the view of the tent we chose. So for the trophies, the part I couldn’t see as well, I did the most iteration. In the end I used line orthographics to obtain the shape I wanted. I think my concepts are poor and if I had gone back I would have started them earlier so I had more time on them.

orthographics

Because of my concepts being poor, I decided to use the block mesh we had made, to create simple, visual, orthographics. These were used for presenting and helping understand the paper models proportions, without having too much topology in the way of the asset you are trying to measure.

From concept to model, the time to use 3DS Max had come. And I was ready. Although I’m happy with my models, there are parts looking back that I would change to fit the tent better that are a little off in engine. The candle holder for instance is correct in max, but in engine the camera used stretches the model too wide. Also because of my working view the globes holder is both too wide and the turner is too far down the holder.

Once I had unwrapped and textured it was a little too late to fix this because it was lit and set up in engine ready for presentation. There will always be an argument for if I had a bit more time. However I really feel that if I had of used the time I had differently, spent more time on concepting and getting feedback, then these where issues that could have been ironed out of our scene.

Models in engine

using masks for emissives

Complicated textures

Texturing was reasonably simple, but I was using a new map, an emissive map, which is a map that masks out the non-glowing parts of the texture so only the correct parts glow. This was simple but plugging it in, getting it to look right was another matter.

Introducing Freddy to complicated texture blueprints in engine was also not a simple task, but we got through and I now understand a lot more about PBR.

Least we forget the paper model, a hallowed construct of paper and love. This was something that we put a lot of effort into, although not much time and it somehow came out the other side looking pretty good.

I love it because it’s cute and it was a lot of fun to do together. However It was really successful too, it matches the scene well and we faced similar camera issues with the physical model as we did with the engine one. Because of the focal point of the globe, the lens wants to focus on it or the back, and not both. 

To create the photo of our model I took it on my DSLR, so I could fiddle around with differential depth and then composited two successful shots into one.

Overall I’m chuffed about how well we worked as a group, I’ve learned an incredible amount about engine, group work and most importantly I’ve taken on all these mistakes and learnt from them. I may have changed parts with time, I may have not produced my best work ever but I learned so much and I’m at uni to learn.

There is no failure in mistakes, failure is not learning from them.

Week 3

The Film Room Post Mortem part 1

Now the Project is over, I can present the film room project, a deadly viper assassination squad production.

Our group started by looking into films and rooms we liked, many were colourful, high contrast and busy rooms. We soon realised most would be very challenging.
We created a mood board of the rooms we liked, the rooms we thought were reasonable and the films that had good art direction for us to study.

However it became clear after our first pitch that the rooms we had chosen may have been too busy and too complicated for the short deadline we had.

Our very first moodboard

My revisited moodboard

Our next pitch was in 1 week so we had to get working quickly to find the room that would be colourful, have good lighting and also be simple enough to model in just over 2 weeks!
To get the ball rolling I made the above mood board of films and rooms I liked. I then set off the rest of my group to do the same and cracked the whip so we could decide and get some concepts and white boxing done for our second pitch.

Speed runner

Broken Embraces

My paintovers

We all did over-paints of scenes to decide which were the most effective without people and which still had really good composition after removing actors.

I started with tonal studies to find the scenes with the best lighting and composition, it really helped find the rooms that were boring without colour.

I really like the staircase but we all decided the tent was the most visually appealing to all of the team. 

This was our final mood-board for our second pitch, it shows the back-up rooms including our final choice, the tent from The Royal Tennebaums.

Week 2

The Studies Continue

The Deadly Assassination Squad Presents 

As a group we decided to keep the team name from the Kill Bill pitch, I decided it take this further.

The group project on the .... tent scene is in full swing. We're mostly on track for our own deadlines and everyone is still enjoying the work. I'm more behind than the others, as I've had some extra things to sort out this week. I still feel motivated and like everything is possible. All systems go as they say.

Unfortunately my daily painting efforts have been thwarted by the dragon that is 3DS Max, although my understanding of Max has increased ten fold and I'm really enjoying modeling, I just don't have the time to do both. This has lead to the rise of Pintrest and the cool shit Wednesdays board. 

Due to not having the painting time, I've started a Pintrest board based on our cool shit Wednesdays talks on the course. I've been pinning away all the fashion, nature and cool shit I've found and then using it as reference for painting at the weekend. This week's attempt was based on totems, native Americans and shamans to create a quirky and more original character concept.

I'm happy with it for a 2hr study and I hope to make this a twice a week investment of time rather than the daily I was able to do before.


Here's to the group work living long and prospering.
Here's to Cool Shit Wednesdays.

Week 1

Farewells and Fresh starts

Grouping together

After a long summer of merriment and seeing family I'm back in Leicester continuing my journey that is Game Art. My first week had been such a mixed affair with the final farewell of first year and news that diffuse and specular maps have been superseded by albedo, metalness and roughness. I'm happy to see new changes and learn about how the industry adapts. I feel it will make me more capable of adapting in industry when these changes roll around again because I have dealt with them while still learning.

Here's to fresh starts, I've even set myself a daily digital painting challenge(even if it's only an hour a day). Seeing the improvement in my visual studies is really motivating as I'm becoming more of an artist by the day.


Not to mention albedo maps don't need shadows baking in, which is great, because I didn't understand that part very well anyway. However that is not to say I haven't had a little struggle getting my head around U4 and the new material maps. Hopefully as the next few weeks go by with a little practice and a little 3rd year nudge of help I'll have the new system cracked.

My first week's work has been interesting, fun and engaging but mostly interesting. I've had two group projects this past week; as my main aspiration is to become an art director I have tried to enthuse, motivate and get the best work out of my colleagues as possible. 

Group work

PBR is love PBR is life

I think my 3D group work could have been more organised but my peers looked to me for advice on what style, scale and job they should do. I noticed they asked me to check things for them even though I didn't ask to have things to go through me. I think they felt comfortable with me taking the reins and organizing our work. I'm really encouraged by this because it means that I'm already on my way to learning the key skills needed to manage a team.

I think it's really important as a team leader to not be over aggressive with your methods; people should be able to bounce ideas off of each other and feel like they can contribute to the project. The best way of leading isn't always to get on people's cases but to be passive to the work flow of an artist, encourage the best work out of them as a working group, rather than limiting them to your own thoughts.

This more passive leadership is happening with my visual studies film still group work. There are strong characters in my group (including myself) with all these great ideas already. There is little point in narrowing their ideas with what I think, ultimately that could take out some of the passion for the project. Instead we have lots of bounce meetings where everyone gets to pitch their ideas and I really feel our current idea is so much stronger for this.

Revised Moodboard

At first we had thought about Utopia or Kill Bill. Everyone was happy with these but after a talk with the lecturers, we've kept looking and we've gone for the tent from The Royal Tenenbaums. 

My over paint of our scene

As you can see it's quirky, simple, quaint, full of colour and interesting lighting.


Here's for another great year.
Here's to farewells and fresh starts!