Week 10 - I survived!!

So that's the end of term 1 wow! The last 10 weeks have been a complete blur of crazy work and lots and lots of fun.  At Gnomon we usually have a few catch up classes in week 11 so the term didn't really have a definitive end it kinda trailed off instead.  It is so weird to walk around Gnomon now, there was such a buzz a few days ago with everyone frantically trying to get their finals finished or taking up large numbers of computers to render out really cool looking projects.  Now though it feels a little more like a ghost town, everyone seems much more relaxed.  I think I preferred the crazy buzz though! well in a few weeks we will have our next term intake and things will start to kick off again :D

This week we had another Gnomie birthday!! Happy Birthday to Danny! I had a lot of fun putting this cake together.  I think its probably the most colorful one I've ever made!  It also went well with the emergency supplies the Gnomon staff bring out for finals week.  There is fruit and yogurt but also lots of coffee and doughnut holes... I might need to detox over the next couple of weeks :p

Sketchathon is still going well.  This weeks theme was Insane, Zombie Engineer!  I am thinking of mixing up week 11 Sketchathon introducing some new rules we will see how it goes :D 

I finally managed to finish my Art History final! yay! It turned out OK in the end.  Not quite as neat as I would have liked but with the tools I had I am happy with the final look!

The stained-glass look actually worked!! I might use something like this in the future for a game level! I think there was something like it in God of War...2 or 3 where Kratos has to navigate his way through a maze and the perspective lines up differently depending on how you look at the level. Also like Fez I guess but yea a fun thing to play with especially when its there in front of you to move your head around.

I also got the LED + watch battery combo to work! I had used it before when I was concepting some cool Starwars themed drinks (red and blue LED's) by connecting the LED directly to the battery you don't need any wires or complicated circuits.  It does have a flaw in that you cant turn it off but these things can run for days on a 3V Lithium Ion battery so yay! It makes a cool night light too.

 This was my final for April's Figure drawing class.  The model brought in her pet lizard! who was super cute and really fun to draw! Honestly I think the lizard came out better than the person :p

I also went to Silva's figure drawing class final too which was the same idea, long pose focusing on rendering.  I definitely improved from my first attempt I just hope I can keep trying these out and getting better.  I'm still not so fussed on getting rendering to a very high level but I still want to get better so I can apply the principles to digital painting in the later terms.

We had an amazing talk from Shelly Wan. It was only an hour but she covered some amazing stories and examples of her work at Pixar!  It was really inspiring to see someone so talented and I hope I can apply some of the workflows she elaborated on to my own painting in the future.  I think my main take away was how important color and light play in telling the story from a psychological standpoint! One example she gave was how in the montage in Monsters University where Mike starts to overtake Sully the lighting flips from having Sully in the light to Mike taking the spotlight.  It's not something you actively pick up on but it helps to tell the story! I want to combine that theory with the stuff I learnt from April and the master copies I did from Watkiss when I eventually get to storyboarding. 

Finally got my Alien sofa perspective back! it really doesn't feel that long ago that I was working on this :p time flies way to fast here!

I got an OK grade but for me it was just a lot of fun to play around with the new perspective techniques I am learning and apply it to buildings I really enjoyed studying back at UWE.

 

We had another talk this week from Grzegorz Jonkajtys.  His talk was about integrating miniature sets into 3D animations.  It was an amazing presentation and even though I didn't care much for the final animation the behind the scenes look at the sets was amazing!! It looked a lot like what I would peak in on at the NFTS.  Pretty much it boils down to people using really random things to model with: spaghetti, Starbucks mint packs, buttons, super glue packs, pen lids etc.  Having a mind that can see those every day objects and know how to apply them to a set is really cool to watch!  Greg finished off with showing us some of his own work one of which I found absolutely amazing! its a little dark and its told from the point of view of the 'unreliable narrator' which is my favorite kind of story! Please check it out its only 7 min long but it will hit pretty hard, ARK.

I have my make up class for Perspective 1 on this coming Thursday but I think I am pretty much done with this project.  I would like to ask how one plots shadows the 'Perspective' way rather than the 'Viscom' way just to see if there is a difference.  This is my combined detail and plotting page its pretty rough but it has all the info.

Above is my clean plotting page which just has the calculated details.

And here is the final piece. We are still not allowed to shade so its pretty much all lineweights etc.  Drawing the rabbit characters was super fun!

So my story is that this is a church in which a large reliquary holding the ancient, original bunny.  The modern evolved bunnies make pilgrimage to this church to better understand where their origins and to ask for blessings etc.  Its kinda like cat from Red Dwarf mixed with Zootopia.  I had a lot of fun working all the details out.  Playing with the camera angle etc wasn't as fun but I can say it was a lot easier than the camera work I had to do for my Environment Modeling class last year.  Maybe I am getting better yay!

Lastly this is my Photoshop final.  It took a lot of work and I got some great critiques from my class mates! I am very happy with how it all turned out and I look forward to my class on Friday where I will get some more feedback and get to see what everyone else came up with :D

So back at the NFTS Sean taught us a very good project management system called Kanban.  This is a small piece of the Agile management workflow but I really like it! Its a pretty simple system but it helps you and others see what you are working on and if you have way too much or even too little work on your plate.  Other than the few post-its that fell on the floor this was pretty much my first term..... really fun but also a little crazy to see all in one pile :p I'm guessing I might need a bigger board for Term 2!

Week 9: First Week of Finals

Week 9! wasn't all that bad.  I was expecting some nasty crunch towards the last two weeks of this term but honestly the final projects aren't that much bigger than the previous weeks work. My approach has been thinking of them as week 9 and week 10 homework rather than giving them the intimidating title of 'Finals!!!' that word feels so terminal (though for the sake of keeping things making sense I call the projects Finals in this blog). I guess it is the last homework you will be doing for that class but its not the last piece of work you will ever do :p
Anyway now that I am starting week 10 and ticking off classes I can see the first break on the horizon, and it looks really good!

In figure drawing we went a little deeper into rendering.  We added a 4th value to work with and refined our previous work on the 4 edges.  I am still not a great fan of rendering I honestly think my work looks much better in just lineweight form :( but I appreciate what an important factor lighting is for a shot in a film or game.  I hope over the next few months I can find a style of rendering that works for me.  I don't want to go hyper real with my 2d work I mostly want to build a system I can use to quickly tell a story or convey a character.  Our next class will be a 3 hour pose so we will all have to take our work from a blank page to a fully rendered image.  I am feeling more confident now that I have completed a still life and another Watkiss study but I do wish there was a little render button on the side of the paper :p

I love doing these Watkiss Master Copies! his stuff just looks so cool!

The Sketchathon theme this week was Farm Girl, Dancer and Confession.  This was a pretty tricky theme but we all came up with some cool concepts and we had our first draw for first place this week between Stephanie and Richard.

My Perspective Final is chugging away.  I have refined my initial sketches and plotted them out with a little help :) The perspective has changed a little, by angling the camera differently the shot now looks much more 2point perspective rather than the typical 1 point interior look.  Much harder to plot but in the end it looks way more intriguing.

This is the first pass at blocking in the major forms.  There is a tonne more detail to add but I think I am liking the overall look.

The second half of our homework this week was to design a ski slope for our randomly chosen animal.  The animal in question has to be skiing or snowboarding on their food source.  I didn't want to be predictable so I went with mouse rather than bunny for my animal but as you can see I still added a few bunnies into my drawing :p 

Here is my Viscom Final!!  This was a blast to work on!  I pretty much followed the same approach as I did for my Bunny character but this time we got more time to refine the idea and a whole week to work out the layout, tone and shadows.  Since I was going to add this piece into my Photoshop Final I modeled it in Maya.  It didn't take long but it feels really good to actually model something you have designed from scratch! It feels very different to modeling something that was a kitbash of photos, like I did for Devon's class.  It also feels drastically different from modeling something from someone elses concept art.  So yay!  I have an original model now :D

So here it is the Three Axis Cheese Acquisition System 3200. A vehicle for trained mice elevating them in the food-chain!

This is the detail page showing the interior of the cockpit and how the net gun works.

Here is my final usage page. I went through a few ideas but after a quick consultation with Angela I came up with a cool storyboard of how a mouse would go about using this device to ensnare a cat and steal a plate full of cheese... Gnomon is awesome!

 My Photoshop Final is starting to flesh out.  Our final class was cancelled so we get an extra week of polish! woo!  I still have a tonne to do but at least the 3D assets are integrated into the scene now and I can start texturing everything and eventually add some cool finishing touches.
We also got to work on making our own brushes which was supposed to be a week 4 homework but our teacher pushed it back to now.  I was initially worried we were just going to skip it entirely but having that homework this late actually helped a lot since we can cater our custom brushes to what we will need for the final! clever!
So I built a scratch brush, a dust brush, a cool custom UI element brush and a debris brush.  Of all of them I am quite proud of the scratch and dust brushes, the others are kinda hit and miss with their effectiveness.  I may keep building custom brushes as the need arises and if I get a decent enough collection I'll add a download link to one of my future posts.

Anyway next up is week 10! I have 2 classes that have been pushed onto week 11 so its not quite my final week but I am really in need of a break, this has been an intense couple of months!

Week 8: Onward to Finals!!

This week was so much fun! We started a bunch of great projects, had a few fun talks and I saw Zootopia!! which just overtook Tangled as my favorite Disney Movie!

OK, I still haven't gotten my alien invasion perspective assignment back so first off we have my perspective hand in for the drag race between a balloon animal car and a cactus car.

So the cactus car snatches a sneaky victory from the balloon animal car while the pit crew bunny removes a troublesome thorn.

So many ellipses! :p didn't realise quite how many I would have to plot before I got about half way through the block in.  Oh well at least now I can plot ellipses in my sleep.

Here is the very quick block in for my Photoshop final.  I spent a couple of hours figuring it all out but I am pretty happy with the overall composition.  I am going to be replacing all of the columns and rings with my own Maya models.  The droid is also going to be replaced with my Viscom final design, work smart not hard ;)

Here is the rough version of my Viscom Final.  I originally came up with about 10 ideas in class but as Mark was talking through some previous examples and cautioning us not to do high tech glasses or light-sabers a few of my ideas got crossed off :p I took my favorite 4 and then went with the bottom left concept for a reconnaissance ship.  I then had to create a few thumbnails visualizing the; beauty, detail and usage pages. (yes that is a mouse piloting the ship)

Figure drawing was really fun this week.  In Aprils class we covered the basics of rendering! yay! We covered 3 value shading and edges.  I think it will take me quite a long time to figure it all out but at least I have a decent framework now.  In Silva's class we moved on from torso anatomy to arm anatomy focusing on supination and pronation.  This means studying what happens to the forearm when your wrist is turned inside or outside.  It was kinda complex but fun to get a little more anatomy preparation before next term.  For homework I went back to the basics a little and focused on hands, feet and heads again.  I haven't yet done my assigned homework but I have till 7:00pm tomorrow to get that done :p

This is what I was doing instead of my official homework!  April had me looking at some awesome artists, like John Watkiss, as reference to get a better grasp on drawing the head and rendering with 3 values.  I might have gone overboard trying to do this master copy but I think I have learnt a bunch of stuff to do with shading.  We will see when I try to do my hour long studies for homework tomorrow.

Ray (one of my class-mates) gave me some tips too this week and omg! it has helped so much!! I think this is probably one of the best hands I have drawn! yay! thanks Ray! I have gotten so much help from other Gnomon students since I started whether it be quick tips or help that borders on an actual lesson! I want to thank all my friends for you help :)

Some sketches for my Perspective final.  I have decided to go ahead with a slightly gritty Gothic church meets Steampunk tech combined as a temple dedicated to the original bunny! I will elaborate on the story a little more when I have some cool visuals to show you guys.  The thumbnail may not make much sense but its all there... in my head.

Speaking of bunnies, check out this cute little guy I saw at Target! I love Easter time!

So despite everyone freaking out with their Viscom Mid-terms and Perspective double homework we actually had a great turn out for the Sketchathon day 4.  That marks a whole month! its feeling more official every time!  Even though for this one I actually showed up 3 minutes late and forgot to bring.... like everything :p  We still made due and wound up with our random words being: Orc, Lawyer and Infamous.  

This one was really fun! and despite announcing at the very beginning that 'she would never win one of these' Angela took the group by storm this week! yay!

This weeks presentation was a little disappointing.  The content was very cool but I didn't care much for the format of the presentation.  The presenter went over a lot of very cool things to do with the dynamics side of the VFX industry and the few examples he showed were very advanced.  I don't really know much about dynamics and would have been totally happy to just sit there for 3 hours and watch some amazing explosions or water simulations but instead the presenter just asked the audience to ask questions about dynamics.  The other problem was the majority of our term, including myself are pretty sure they want to go into games which has a very different approach to dynamics (from what little I know). So all in all not the best presentation but still I learnt a few things.

I also did a little work practicing value and edges while I listened to some confusing dynamics stuff.  This guy looked much cooler under the red lights of the stage.  In the harsh fluorescent lights of Lecture 1 he looks a lot flatter :p

Back to bunnies! It was quite a surprise to look up one day and see this guy poking out of a building with cute bunny ears! #OnlyInLA

We also has a presentation from Jared Krichevsky this week!  It was really cool and my first Zbrush demo since moving to LA!  It is so much fun to just watch people play around in Zbrush, there are so many workflows and techniques you always see something new.

Jared worked on the Gods of Egypt movie and showed us a lot of content from early sketches through, lots of ideation all the way to the final models for the movie.

OK now to this weeks highlight! Zootopia!!!!

We decided to get the most out of the day we would see the movie early then use the inspiration to do work for the rest of the day.  We all met up before the movie for breakfast pancakes! with bacon! Nom!!!  For some reason a lot of the closer theaters including Archlight are not screening Zootopia??? so we tried a new one.  The 'El Capitain Theatre' did not disappoint in fact....

  

before the movie they brought out a real bunny and fox and sloth!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! what?! best build up to a movie ever!! I had the biggest smile when they brought out the cute little bunny and then went on to explain about how rabbits are the best animals in the world... well that's what I heard from the presenter! 

The fox was very cute too but a little active, I don't think he was too happy to be on that table. 

So after meeting some real animals these two guys, Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde came onto the stage to do a little dance.  Did I mention best warm up to a movie ever cos seriously! None of us had any idea this was going to happen :p 

 

6 very happy Gnomon students!

They were handing out fox and bunny ears after the screening so Cortana got an upgrade!

Wow what a week! but yikes on to week 9 now! I swear for the last few weeks I am constantly surprised at how close it is getting to the end of term! Wish me luck its going to be crunch time real soon.