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!