Week 4 : Post Mortem and Moving On

   Yesterday marked the end of the Film Room project, with presentations and hand-ins. Since then we've had a good chance to look through our work, celebrate our achievements and make resolutions for the future. Honestly, at this point, I feel more excited about Game Art than I have before and I can't wait for the Sentry Gun project.

   If I'm brutally honest, I think our presentation yesterday could have gone better. Probably just by better preparation next time, instead of leaving it to the night before. I was so nervous about it, but then again, I'm always nervous about presentations. I hope that goes away someday.

   These are the other objects I initially textured, but didn't post on my last blog. Ironically, the one I was least looking forward to (the rug) has turned out to be on of my favourites and I'm actually really pleased with it. I'm not incredibly happy with the wall assets, but they look quite good in the scene, because they're small enough that their lack of detail doesn't really matter too much. 

   I also textured the wall, which I thought would be really difficult because of the tree paintings, so it wasn't like I could do a simple tiled texture. To be honest it wasn't too bad, I had a little trouble with the normal maps, because they could have done with being tiled, but there was a ridge around the top of the wall that I needed to include. Later on though, I made two separate bump maps that Mark helped me to get working in engine.

   Before this project, I had never understood lightmaps. Throughout this project though, by going through a lot of trial and error, redoing light maps and learning light map density FINALLY, all is clear. Well, I don't know about that, but it's definitely better; at least I understand it now.

   Also, towards the end of this project, we realised we hadn't built any curtains, so I undertook the job of making them. At first I tried sculpting in z-brush to get the folds in the fabric. I kind of thought that maybe I could hit two birds with one stone, as I had never used z-brush before and I thought this would be my perfect opportunity. Lucy guided me through this, so I feel a little more enlightened about the program and the processes involved, but still quite a lot of me is befuddled. 

   Anyway, that didn't work too well, because I ended up changing the model after the scalp, which had an impact on the normal uvs I had baked. So in the end, for times sake, I just build a moderately low poly model instead, which from the  distance the camera shoots it does quite well. 

   The lighting was quite tricky to get right in our scene, because even though it looks like the only lights are coming from the two lamps in the picture below, we needed to add a lot more to illuminate our scene right. You can see on the characters that a light is illuminating them from in front of the shot, so we added a directional light outside to point in aswell.

   This is our scene in comparison to the film scene. There are a few things wrong with ours, for instance, the back room is too light in our scene and the back wall is too wide. The colour is also slightly off in ours. Because of post processing, we found it quite difficult to pinpoint the colours sometimes, but I think we should have maybe tweaked the colour of the lighting.

These are just some pretty renders :D

   In conclusion, there's a lot I would fix next time, one being that I would use my time more efficiently, so to have more time in engine to perfect it. Saying that, I'm really proud of my group, and myself. I've found working with them a really enjoyable experience, which I don't think would have been as good if it wasn't for the support we gave one another. The next project coming up is the Sentry gun, which is going to be awesome! Can't wait!

Week 3: It's coming together..

   It's crazy that we've done three weeks of our second year already.. The time left on the Film Room project is rapidly draining away, but.. I think we're doing okay.

   On monday I was finishing off bits of modelling and starting off the unwrapping of the objects that I had built. The unwrapping, for the most part, went relatively smoothly, apart from the chair, which was a bit annoying and fiddly.

   I started texturing on wednesday, and continued this through to the weekend, alongside other things that needed doing for the project.

   On thursday we did another 'Dragon's Den' style presentation. I don't know why, I felt a lot more nervous than usual this week, maybe it's the feeling of the project drawing to a close.. or whatever. 

   Anyway, the presentation turned out to be very helpful, as it helped us realise that our scene was more out of perspective than we had initially thought. 

   See what I mean? For instance, the chair on the side looks massive! It was pointed out that the horizon line was way too high, and the camera setup was wrong. We all saw it immediately, although we hadn't seen it before. After this we went to the labs and Mark did an awesome job of tweaking the camera in the scene in 3DS Max, which already looks so much better! We cal all really see it coming together nicely now and it's so exciting!

   These are some UE4 screenshots of some assets I have made for the scene this week. I'm so pleased with these!! Unreal makes things look so prettty!!! We love you PBR!!!  The rest of my objects I have textured over the weekend, and haven't yet tested them in UE4, but I will when I get back into the labs. 

   Alongside building the scene for engine, we've been building a physical model to be handed in with it. We got together last sunday (having already previously worked out and cut out all of the walls for the main structure), to put together all of the pieces for the model. 

   We got the main model built last Sunday, and had a lot of fun doing it too! We spent a lot of that night laughing; I'm really glad our group get on well, it definitely makes things easier. 

   We started off by securing the walls with pins, so we could make sure it looked good standing, then we secured it with tape as well afterwards.We also got to start building the assets at this point, however some were the wrong size and had to be remade.

   We continued building it in the labs on friday, but sadly this took much longer than we had initially hoped and we ended up spending most of the day on it. Below I have tried to recreate the shot as best as possible, but I think I need to use a better camera and try taking it from further away and zooming in, so I can limit distortion. It's not immaculately built, but I'm quite pleased with how this turned out because I've not had much experience with building architectural type models before. Hopefully this week we'll get a chance to test lighting on it to get the lighting similar to the actual scene.

Happy Times Building Models!!!

   This is some of my work from life drawing this week, which I am enjoying immensely. Recently I find life drawing so relaxing and fun, it's like some sort of magic stress therapy. We started by doing the usual 2 minute poses using continuous line and opposite hand.

   Then we moved on to the main bulk of the session, where we worked in colour. (These images below are my thumbnail sketch of the model, and sketches of people in my class, which I did in the last few minutes of the session I had free.

   I'm not entirely happy with how this one went, but practice is practice. I definitely need to work on watercolours, because I tend to work too slowly and make the paper all furry. I think that the use of colour worked quite well, the brown made the body look very warm in contrast to the cool blue/grey of the background.

   To finish this blogpost on a high note, I have finally watched Moonrise Kingdom and it's a really adorable quirky film! I enjoyed it a lot more than expected, so I painted this film still as a little personal piece. It's not perfect, but I really enjoyed this. I've been fairly demotivated recently, so to produce a personal piece that I'm actually happy with is a good feeling!

Week 2 - Film Room Project and Working in Groups!

   This week has been pretty good, on the whole, if a little confusing at times. On monday, we started knuckling down to properly work on our film room project, which has been awesome so far. We had previously decided on Moonrise Kingdom as our film of choice, so last weekend I created some concepts to help us along.

   This is a paint over I did of the scene so we could see a vague idea of what the scene would look like without the characters in it. The carpet was ridiculously difficult to do because of the pattern on it, so I think texturing it may prove tricky, but we'll get there.

      I looked at the room and made a list of the assets we would have to build. From here I went on to draw up some concepts, just so that we'd have a better idea of what we were building. This was easy enough to do when it came to the sofa and the tables etc, but there were some objects which were so difficult to see, we sort of had to just make an educated guess at what they were. I've already found that doing this has helped me whilst building some of the assets, so I'm glad that I decided to do it.

   Amanda has done some great concepts too, to help her with building her objects. We've all undertaken different assets, and have comprised a planning sheet with each persons tasks on it and have agreed a timescale to work by.

   After doing these I sketched a few thumbnails of the room, to get better used the perspective and overall look of the room that we'd be building. I then sketched the room as a 3d object including orthographics to help when it comes to building it.

   This is a white box plan that Lucy had done in 3DS max, to help plan out the angle and view of our scene.

   Whilst Amanda did a paint over to block out separate areas and assets, which also brings more of a focus on perspective.

   In Mondays game production lesson, we were taught how to make perspective lines so we could build the scenes from our images accurately. This is the block out that Mark did, which has been so helpful. We've been using it to help with building our model out of kappa board too, because it has been helping us get convert the dimensions accurately. We're hopefully going to get together soon to finish building this, so I will update this blog with it then.

   We heard later on in the week that we might have to change our idea completely and even though we were really hoping we wouldn't have to, we made some more mood boards of possible films we could do instead just in case.

   This is another Wes Anderson, a thoroughly brilliant film. Seriously, if you haven't watched it, please do. Some of the scenes in this are absolutely gorgeous in my opinion, though have rather a lot of objects in some cases. This could have proven tricky to complete on time, but I think perhaps a lot of the work would have been in the texturing.

   These are some film stills that Amanda found, some of which I think would have been fantastic if we had a longer timescale, because of the amount of assets and detail in them. They are very colourful though, so they could have been quite interesting to do.

   I also thought of a scene from Back to the Future 2, in Cafe 80s, which I actually really liked the idea of. It's a really interesting, fun looking room without the characters in it. I think though, it may have been difficult because there are a lot of little things included in the background on the wall which could have been difficult to texture in. It turned out in the end that the tutors were happy with out idea of Moonrise Kingdom, so we won't have to start again. We were quite happy about this because a few of us had already started modelling. Our tutors did point out, however, that texturing may be quite difficult, because instead of being a wallpaper, the walls are all different. Because of this, we are trying to get the modelling finished as quickly as possible so that we have plenty of time to texture.

   After our critical studies seminar, we put together a work distribution plan, together with deadlines for each thing to be completed. I think this will help us greatly when it comes to organising ourselves and dealing with the stress, because we can't afford to stray from it.

   To finish off this weeks blogpost, here is some work from my Life Drawing session this week. Wahhh I'm actually really missing the 3 hour sessions from last year, 1 and a half hours feels so short!    These are some of my warm up sketches from this weeks lesson.

   This is my final finished piece from this week. We were working this week by rubbing out 

charcoal ground, then sketching in with charcoal again. I used to despise this, but I have gradually grown to rather enjoy it! I do feel that this could have gone better though; I would have preferred more detail. 

   I thought this session felt really short and it saddened me, so when I got home I did some more quick life drawing sketches. This is something I try to do fairly regularly, using websites such as http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/ and http://www.quickposes.com. 

                       

   I also tried to revisit the technique we used in the lesson. It may be in part due to the fact I was working on A2, not using an easel but I have got the proportions incorrect on this piece. I strayed from using just charcoal and a rubber for this one though, and also used a white and a black conte pencil, which I think worked well to add a bit of extra detail that I initially didn't achieve.

Summer Work: Harley and Hells Angel

   Cue guilty shame here, as I had meant to update this blog over the summer with the work I had been doing. I really did mean to, it just never actually.. happened. I drew a lot over the summer; it was great to actually have so much time to draw and do studies and stuff. I did at first anyway; I got a job midway through the summer, and being in everyday of the week made it difficult to do as much work as I wanted to. Even so, I did a pretty fair amount, and I thoroughly enjoyed the summer project for Game Production that was set.
   For my summer project I chose the Harley and Hells Angels project. I loved the idea of loads of them so it was really difficult to pick what to do, but I was really excited to start the Hells Angels project, so that's the one that I chose.
   I started the project by doing some research into who the Hells Angels are and what they look like. From here I knew I was going for a tough, strong, mean kind of look for my character. Someone that my dad works with owns a Harley, so I got plenty of reference pictures for the motorbike from them.
   These aren't all of the concepts I created, but these are a few of my favourites from the project.

   The concepting part of this project was so much fun, for the character especially. Looking back now, I could have done more to make him more unique, new and different. If I get some time I'd like to come back to these concepts and do some further experimentation into what he could look like, to aim to make something distinctive.

   I loved every part of modelling (who ever thought I'd be saying that?!). Even rigging, even though I could still use some practice with fine tuning that. My only real regret with this though is the disgusting seams on the hands and fingers. I have since found out how to unwrap the model to fix this though, so this isn't a mistake I will be making again!

   The bike was probably the most stressful thing to build for me, but this may have been because of trying to do it once I'd come back from work when I was already in no mood to do it. Over the summer I got a job working for my old college, enrolling new students onto college courses, which could be stressful and scary at times, especially if you got a grumpy rude student. So needless to say, some days when I got back my general mood could described just with the word 'no'. On the upside however, it was my first job, and I think it did a heck of a lot for my confidence towards communicating with others, and taught me a lot about staying professional at work.

   Despite being stressful, it was fun too. I had no idea how to texture metal (not that that would be a problem now, not with good ol' metalness maps!) So I put a flat colour where I wanted it to be shiny, and put a Ray-trace on the reflectivity map in the Material editor, so when rendered it would have a very nice reflective quality. I wouldn't use this method now, but I was happy with it for solving the problem at the time. 

   

   This was the street corner I built as a backdrop for my character. In honesty, even though I liked it at the time, I look back now and can't help think that it's a little bit, well, boring. I do think it's stand alone proof of progress from the last building piece I did, so I'm happy that I at least feel like I'm improving.

   These are a couple of renders I did with the Hells Angel and bike against the background. I rigged and positioned the character so that he would have a more natural stance than the T-pose he was in before.

   I loved the contrast of the second render, so for a bit of fun I did a very quick paint over. My Hells Angel now has a bit of a situation with the undead so it would seem!