Week 9

Concepting and Modeling in sync

Final idea tonal 

final idea tonal

I wanted to use the fact that I had already got two strong ideas completed early on to my advantage, For this project i would model both characters as my stretch goal.

Ideas for patterns

Ideas for patterns

Colour concepts

Colour concepts

It wasn't long before i had the first attempts underway but i quickly found that the shape of a bell, or in this case poncho is not an easy shape to pull out of a cube. This led me to try many other shapes to find the easiest way of forming the ponchos for my two characters. In the end it turned out I will forever be the box modeler I started off as. In order to have nice quaded and looping topology, starting with the good old trusty box, is the only way I could make them.

Once the great poncho shape debate of 2014 was over it was time to move on with my life... I mean models and tweak the original designs to fit a little better in 3D.

This week has now ended in unwrap city, but texturing them is next weeks ordeal, good luck next weeks me...

Week 8

Character Project

I start this project on a high. My seminar on the dichotomous duo was really interesting; the part that was most informative was when we wrote an alphabet of words on a board as a contest. Then we had to find a dichotomy with one of these words and make a Venn diagram.

I chose sour and sweet as I had this image of an old divorced crazy lady and a little cute girl on her paper round, having a little bond over cats... Because cats are great. However because I felt that this could go into a colour palette and theme too similar to my sentry gun I changed this to leather and lace.

My investigation into a theme has led me down a tribal route. Looking into Peruvian and Mexican culture, high fashion and illustrative styles I could base my characters off. I found someone called Yao Yao and it's great, i'm in love with the skinny leg bulbous body look. I'm genuinely excited to use their work in a style guide and see how it converts into 3D.

It's funny how solid ideas repeat, even if it wasn't intended. I looked at journey because the more I looked under my theme and style the more it popped up. Low and behold the strongest of my silhouettes where visually similar to the shapes in journey. It may have been unintended but it does show how there is a defined difference between ripping off something and riffing off something. By using similar source imaginary I came to the same conclusion, and rather then panic and wonder what to do, I decided that this was great. I had found a style, a theme, made strong choices and produced strong designs. The fact that they are akin to something often seen as very visually strong can only be positive. This was the birth of Journey 2: Electric boogaloo, with horns.

The journey through game art continues.

Week 7

Sentry Gun Overview

This was a fairly simple project, the hardest part was taking all my melting pot ideas into one gun, I feel it worked out well in the end. The first part was research and I picked pastel goth and diesel punk as my themes. To make the work I took mechanical but rounded shapes, made a bash kit and started working. The outcome was suitably diesel fuelled and so I made the colours, details and feel for the turret more pastel goth. The whole thing turned out a lot better than I thought it would.
Next I moved on to modelling, this wasn’t hard but not as difficult as I had thought the blimp like back end would be ethier so all good there. The unwrap could have been better, I didn’t know how I was going to recreate my ideas so there are parts I would change. Eg: the separated ID’s could have left more space for my other parts and got more space themselves, however as is they could share the same roughness maps.

The poster i made for the graphic side of project.

Engine was a lot of fun and experimenting, especially with textures and my new toy the Lerp node.

I’m really pleased with most the topology on this project, I tried to get it to flow well and use my large 5000 tri budget efficiently all across the model. Some of the wires look similar and would share texture space, but I didn’t want smearing so I had to lay the over each other rather than reassign verts as I normally would.

My projectile was an eye ball, I’m really happy with how the normal map pumps up the veins, and it’s also really well fitted for my gun.

Using blue Prints to get the double barrel working.



Learning about lerps, I love lerps, I used several on the glass to give it hue and opacity (glass material above). Lerps are also what gives the gun a purple pearlesance and that’s perfect for the look of my turret. I feel it looks less toy like because of the lerps.

I also did a little paint over to show what I would change, in this case I would make the purple glow out the back reflect off the metal more.

I’ve really love learning about texture map and how I can use I’Ds in max to swap out and become engine textures, which are not part of my texture budget, so that’s really useful. I also love the way that Lerps work and I may have gone overboard with them. However I think if I went back once again my concepts weren't up to scratch and I should have shown my progression more. I got some feedback that my pivot was too thin (oddly balanced I think they meant) but didn’t have time to re unwrap and change that so that was a shame. I looked at my idea and changed parts and did a lot of working out with how I would create this gun in 3D, but I seem to not have shown these processes anywhere, nor have I shown how I went back into the albedo and added more details and scratches and decals. Which is a shame because it was a part of how this developed. Overall I’m happy with my result and it’s a project that I would like to revisit and add more too, eg: animated eyeballs flowing through the tubes like they were meant to, but I couldn't work out in time.

In engine shots of my pastel punk diesel gun

Week 6

Back on the Grind Stone

Modelling is love modelling is life

3DS Max is the main tool in my software belt as a 3D modeller and my relationship with this software has strengthened as the course has gone on. But none could have anticipated the struggles of low poly bat wings.

The Model

Nevertheless I have prevailed and me and Max have created my turret and it looks just like the silhouette, complete with cage pivot. I'm really happy with how the pivot translated into 3D.

As it was modelled I felt it was time to test my gun in Unreal 4; in hindsight I should have had it unwrapped but I was too excited. This showed me that my favourite part, the caged pivot, looks odd as a pivot when the gun moves. (Not to mention the 30 times I tried importing the mesh only to have the gun parts move in 3 different directions.)

My Topology

My attempts to make it look more suitable have failed, but I kinda like it looking off. The gun itself is a little weird and wonderful and maybe the insane pivot is just an aspect of that.

The best part of all this is the blueprint learning that has occurred through trial and error. It may not be an opinion shared but trial and error makes me clever. Every project I have a struggle with I learn and can apply so much more for my next assignment.