Week 11: Why didn't I do it better?

Not completely sure what to do this post about with the character project done so I’ll just reflect and show off the other character stuff I've been up to.

I’m not very happy with the way my character turned out. I don’t really think I spend long enough on the texturing and I am kind of regretting only using a 1024x1024 texture sheet, some extra details and better res texture would have been nice.

I could have also done with a kind of recap on rigging as being able to pose my character would have been a nice touch. Alas. I definitely learnt a lot about modelling with this project, especially on more practical and cleaner ways of low poly modelling.

Time management is probably where I fail the most, I am so bad at motivating myself to start something I don’t want to do (Especially with blogs.).

 I always tell myself “Yeah do your blog in a bit, just do some more drawing first” or the classic “You just need a coffee, go get a coffee first.” The reason I feel that I often under perform on the 3D side of the course is because of putting drawing and 2D stuff before 3D, whatever the 2D is.

I know it’s bad but my favourite way to spend my time is staying up until 5am or 6am painting and drawing, (working on stuff unrelated to the course.) I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to change that though its just too fun.

Anyway, I decided to do some more work on the character project in my spare time this week, working on some concepts for environments/in game mock-ups.

3D Paint overs like these are a great way to churn out concepts for environments with tricky perspective elements present in them. I didn't actually use 3D for the sand one which lead to loads of trouble along the way. 

(Actually I did use 3D for that one but only a small render of the character to have him the same proportions as the other image.)

Haven’t finished these quick ideas for the skeleton enemies yet but I will throw them in too. See this is what I mean I’m not going to get graded for this stuff but I spend way more time on it than my actual coursework. 

There is another image I did of some of his abilities but I can't find it. 

(Down to poor file organisation.)

Week 10, finishing up the character project

Modelling and texturing have taken up waaaay too much time this week, especially seeing as I am only doing one of the characters. I thought his big bulky shapes would be easy to model but I have had to start again a few times.

First time I started modelling him I began with a box that I gave multiple subdivisions. I also took advantage of the relax modifier to round off the edges of his torso. This got really messy really quickly. I kind of realised how bad I am at modelling with this project.

  Hi I’m joe, I have a degree 

can I please have a job?

Needless to say I started again shortly after this mess. Instead of going for the box modelling approach I used a plane to start with in the shape of his waist, this was so much easier and nicer to do I wish I had known about it sooner. So my final model looked like this.

This is before I retopologised the model, the polycount was around 2300 at this point but I got it down to 1800 for the final model, considering I was going for a mobile game standard of detail I thought this was a pretty reasonable amount to use considering this character would be played by the user of the game.

Texturing was actually really fun with this project, took about 1 and a half too days so I didn’t end up spending too much time on it like with other projects. I used a cool approach Mitch showed me last year for his face. I found suitable pictures and used the colours from them to inform my choices of skin tones. I also used a soft light layer of a really deformed face and painted over that. Fun.

Yeah he got a bit uglier than the original concept showed

Final render of him is below, I used marmoset for this which is really great for getting beauty shots of your model. I cropped him out from the distracting background though and gave it a few cosmetic tweaks in photoshop afterwards.

So with the character project finished I can start looking forward to Christmas and doing some shopping, Im asking for some nice art books.  Can’t wait to have some spare time to draw! Woohoo!

Week 9: More on Dichotomy

Over the weekend and at the start of the week I finished up the concept for the other character I am working on. I did end up going with a kind of rogue character.

I think my approach of designing one character to a finished concept first before starting the other has worked well, it has meant I have been able to focus on the dichotomous elements of them and build the second character around the design of the first. 

 (I totally meant to do that by the way.)

sketches

Value design

Final design for 'Luna'

She was meant to be more dynamic than the other character to contrast his big bulky appearance. So the final designs are a bulky strong man and a nimble rogue girl, kind of generic.

Despite being pretty generic, I wanted to make the characters read as if they work together, so I used the same colours for her as the male character, this is just an easy way of forcing people who see the characters to associate them with one another.

I tried to imagine interesting ways the characters could work together, in DOTA some characters like goblin techies look similar enough for us to associate them with eachother, they make a cool dichotomous duo of characters.

Sooooo I need to model one of them now, I'm gonna go with the man as I think he looks cooler. I really want to texture him and make him kinda gross and weird. I will have finished him by next week so I will post the finished model!

Week 8: Character Dichotomy

I am seriously excited to start this project, drawing characters is the most fun thing, and I get to do two of them! Started thinking of cool combos of people, animals ect its early days so far though so I just have a few sketches and mind maps.

Some reference, I never see the point of gathering hundreds of images at this stage.

Just a few well chosen ones is always far more valuable.

(I do have more research than this but it contains other people's art so I dont want to ost it without their permission.)

First idea was two athletes, one with huge arms and one with huge legs, really simple but full of possibilities. I started sketching out some characters in PS and had a load of fun with this guy though so I am probably going to go with him as one of the characters and another suitably different character as his partner.

Don’t have a solid design for the girl yet but Im working on it, been thinking if Pixar were to do these kind of characters one would be the opposite shape of the other,( ie  Carl and Russel from UP). So if I am going with a big muscly dude then I suppose I will do a kind of agile rogue character to go with him. FUN!

Shape design ideas

We also have to model one or both of the characters, I think I will prioritize modelling the big guy first as I think he will end up being the stronger design somehow. I was thinking of adhering to mobile game specs, so around 2000 polys per character and a 512x512 texture sheet. 

Week 7: Turret complete!

The turret project finished this week! I have once again learnt a lot of 3D techniques and maybe gotten slightly less bad at texturing. (That's a big maybe though.) We had to import our turret model into Unreal and make it spin around to follow the player.

I think the actual model of the turret was quite successful, I worked in a different way to how I usually would by making a rough high poly model in 3DS MAX and then got rid of the excess geometry that was eating up unnecessary tris.

You can sort of see that the topology worked well on a basic level from this sceenshot.

Having had a grand total of 0 hours working with blueprints, even copy and pasting the pre-done blueprints from the teachers was a bit hard for me. I can't say I want to learn it either. I know it wouldn't hurt to learn it, but I don't really feel that it is worthwhile for me. It feels like programming, which makes me shudder.

How I see blueprints.

I imported my turret okay though, although I don't think I have had enough practice with PBR yet. The normal map could have done with a little more love, as in places the model looks lumpy and not very metal like.

Final turret in engine.

I should definitely allocated more texture space to the grenade launder part of the turret, as the tubes look quite low resolution compared to the rest of the turret. Over all I think its a bit saturated and doesn't really capture the 'police' aesthetic I was going after.

One thing I did have fun with was the poster we had to create for the turret. This was only set at the beginning of the week, so it sn't particularly polished, but it adds a nice little bit of story telling to the asset.

I just want to paint and draw stupid stuff at the moment, hopefully the next project will accommodate this desire.

Week 6: More turrets

The turret is kindof shaping up, I went through the process that Mike talked us through to churn out a 3D paint over of the turret concept I have so far. I Abandoned the designer turret route for two reasons, being that I thought I didn’t have enough directions to experiment with in the design of the turret and that I don’t want to prioritize being different and ‘quirky’ over simlpe and strong design.

Strong design, in my opinion, often trumps technical ability. I often see amazingly rendered robots and characters that look fantastic, but have nothing interesting when it comes to their design. Just another space marine rip off. 

So with that choice I chose to create a non-lethal Police turret. I watched a ton of cool videos about sand bag ammo for shotguns and found a lot of pictures of the London riots from a few years ago. These are really cool references.

Colour iterations

3D paint over

This took way longer than I thought it had and to be honest I am not too happy with the result, I feel like it doesn’t have enough interesting colour relationships and I should definitely have gone through more iterations in the silhouette stage as I kinda think the final design isn’t very striking or fun.

Ahh well, I have a base model to work with for when I start modelling this. (which I should be doing right now.) Not sure how this will look in engine but I’ll definitely try to add some cool scratches and signs of wear to it as I think that would suit it being used in riots.

)Bad picture but some of the ref I had when doing this)

Apart from working on this and eating loads of sweets I have been doing some personal work too, I’ll just post some pictures, I’ve been having loads of fun indulging on stupid ideas.

Dreamboat

Cosplayer

Week 5: Sentry Gun

We were set the sentry gun brief this week, I'm definitely excited to start as I have been wanting to do a more concept heavy brief for a while now. With my personal work I don't usually draw many hard surface things, so a turret is somewhat out of my comfort zone, however, I think I can learn a lot from tackling something im not used to doing.

sooooooooooo coooooooooooool

I have been looking at producing a more stylized design for the turret, looking a lot at team fortress 2's art direction and concept art. I think that it is a prime example of how concept art can be used to make a truly unique game.

Strong shapes are what we were told to focus on when thinking about the silhouette for our turret. The sketches below are some of my ideas so far. Im thinking possibly a designer turret for a stylish home defence mechanism, or a discreet sentry gun that can double up as a coffee table. 

fun so far, gotta do more though

I have also started some whiteboxing of my turret to help me get a good idea of how the final thing will look, I will post that in next week's blog when it is finished though. Keeping it blocky at the moment. I can't say im looking forward to putting the turret in engine as I have still had hardly any experience using it so I really dont know how im going to make something move, let alone look any good, but I will probably just cry and do it in the last 10 minutes before the hand in.

I have had some time to play a weird game on my friend's dreamcast called 'Pen Pen'. It is kind of like mario kart on acid but still a lot of fun, here is a picture of some of the characters. 

Week 4: Film Project is over

We finished everything. EVERYTHING! I haven't been this happy in so long. This project has been a learning experience, and quite a painful one at that. From having to re-do assets 2-3 times, to getting to grips with Unreal Engine, we've been busy lets just put it like that.

Well here is the final beauty render in engine, I think you will notice the fine modelling and texturing skills displayed by the Statue in the background. Believe it or not that actually took me over a day to model.

I have to thank Stuart for the huge amount of time he spent on the lighting for this final shot. I can't say I was much use as I am a complete beginner to Unreal 4. I have watched tutorials on the basics, importing assets and setting up some simple lights in a scene, but he really pulled it out of the bag for this.

Seeing as there was no tri-count or texture budget, we kind of went overboard, even the papers on the table had a 1024x1024. It was over kill, but the end result looks great and I think it all paid off in the end.

And here is it, the nightmare asset from hell. I wanted to call it quits after the first attempt resulted in an inaccurate swirly mess of geometry. I learnt so much about modelling from this asset alone, more so than the other simpler assets I worked on during the project. 

I suppose the struggle is part of the 'fun'. If it takes 10 times to make an asset, you'll probably learn 10 times as much than if you just lucked out and got it right first time.

Anyway I never want to look at that room from Xmen again, I haven't even seen the film, and now, thanks to this project, I will make an effort not to.

I think the turret project is next, which sounds cool! Looking forward to working on my own project for a while, hopefully it will be as fun as it sounds!  

Week 3

Been working at home for a few days, really meant to be working on some film room assets but I am having too much fun with this project. I had the idea over Summer but am only really just starting to sketch it out. Working title is chaser and it’s still early days, just having fun with the characters at the moment

My team would probably be really angry if they knew I was having fun drawing characters when i'm meant to be modelling a box (yes that is actually one of the assets I was assigned.) but I need to keep this work up or I won't have any decent skills by the time I graduate. I want a concept art job so Im going for it full steam ahead. 

I hope you uderstand I'm not trying to dismiss the course, I just dont want a job as a mediocre environment artist or a 3D modeller, plus this kinda fun stuff keeps me sane I suppose.

As you can see its early days yet, and this project will probably go the way of all others and get boring in a weeks time but at the moment im enjoying it.

The film room project on the other hand I am already bored with, I’m really not finding the task of meticulously replicating a film still very engaging. We had to do a cardboard replica of the room in Friday’s lesson, the idea behind it being that we can understand the space we are building in reality before finishing it in a computer but really I just felt like I was wasting my time.

here is our masterpiece: 

Had to really take a step back and evaluate my life after this lesson.

I really want to spend more time concepting and drawing but am struggling when this is what I have to work on. Its not all bad though, our level is shaping up and I have been using marmoset to test out my textures for a few of the props I have been working on. I can’t say it looked like metal, more like the contents of a student toilet.

I will post some actual screenshots of the room so far next post I promise.

Week 2: Film Room Project

With the asset swap project out of the way we were assigned a new project on Monday, with the bone chilling task of: ‘Choose a still from a movie and recreate this as accurately as possible within your group.’

Apart from last week, this is the first time I have worked in a group for a project like this, and I have only just learnt the basics of PBR so I can’t say I’m looking forward to the next few weeks.

We were looking at Balin’s tomb from Lord of the Rings for our room, it is made out of fairly simple geometric shapes and has lots of fun assets in it, like damaged walls, lots of debris, weapons ect

Lord of the Rings is also one of my childhood favourites, so the prospect of working on recreating this iconic scene for the next few weeks was very exciting.

We had a review however, and we were told it was too typical, which is rather true. Finding a smaller room with more interesting lighting became our next objective, and we decided to go with the submarine room from Xmen.

I know I am going to be so sick of looking at this room...

I think the lighting will look really good in Unreal 4, but we may struggle with some of the more complicated shapes. I wasn’t completely happy with the choice to be honest. 

Xmen (Or most modern super hero movies come to think of it) isn’t a film that stands out for it’s amazing art direction but I didn’t say anything as we really had to get started with the work. Not really too sure how I feel about having to mindlessly copy a scene piece by piece, no idea what the learning objective is but hey, I suppose its just practice with PBR.

Scared and cold is how I feel at the moment, especially because our boiler keeps breaking.

By Friday, we had assigned ourselves roles and were working on modelling our assets, we did a white box of the room to establish the scale of the area were working in. 

Pretty ugly at the moment...

Week 1: Asset Swap

First week back in Leicester and I am now settled down in my cold and dirty house. The boiler should have been replaced over summer but Sulets apparently ‘just forgot’. Our first project is just a week long group project to concept and produce a small room with a certain amount of assets in it in engine, a roast pig, table, chair, tankard, shield and barrel.

I had 30 minutes to concept one of the assets, I did the pig. (also the tablets aren’t working on the school computers so we had to use a mouse.) I wanted to make it stylised but realistic in terms of texture.

Learning how to use PBR is tricky, completely baffled me at first but I think after some extensive research I will be able to use it. (sort of)  I had only really just gotten used to texturing using the old way, but I suppose the games industry develops faster than I thought.

I tried it out on this barrel but as you can see, I struggled to achieve a realistic look on the metal and it became a reflective chrome texture. I think PBR’s potential is far greater than the old diffuse/ specular approach but I really am going to have to practice to get myself used to it.

Also I am going to try and use this blog differently to last year and include more analysis of my own work, as well as reflecting on the course. Last year I kind of rushed it in the last few weeks which didn’t work our very well. I also try to spend a lot of time on personal projects so I will post some of those up too.

Some recent studies from life, got a model skull before summer from a friend so you will probably see that in a few of my studies.