Week 7 & 8 - its soo hot

Ugh the past couple of weeks have been tough :*(  Not only have we seen another heat wave making the 40 minute walk to school really uncomfortable but I've been having the worst luck with Maya and Vray.

One tiny crash while working on a rivet?!?! super simple no idea why it crashed lead to one of my mirror nodes being corrupted and I lost all the work I did re-topologising this guy's head.  It messed up the geometry on the head with a bunch of weird bevels and extrusions and the little green fragments are what was left of his chin... sigh.

But I did manage to get the work redone in about half the time it took me for the original yay!  A few of the pieces are really coming together now :) Though we do have a review in about 4 days from me writing this and I need this guy much more developed for that! wish me luck.

My second major error was the stupid Vray licensing system.  Unlike almost every other software out there Vray only gives you a license to use their renderer through a ridiculously convoluted method of usb dongles, online authentication and large documents of installation guides.  I spent about 3 hours trying everything under the sun to get my Vray to work but to no avail.  I sent the main guys an email and added a ticket to their online help but its been a 4 days now and I have had no response.  So they just lost a customer, I am tired of having to put up with this just because they are afraid of loosing a few sales to software pirates.  When my subscription expires in the next few months I am going to learn Arnold (the render that ships with Maya now) and frankly I advise everyone else to do the same if they don't want to put up with this awful licensing system.  Sorry about the rant I just lost so much time and energy dealing with this and I needed to vent.

So back at school the Vray system works fine :) I got my sculpted rocks and environment detail from Zbrush into Maya and now I am working on adding the vast amount of vines, rocks and crystals using MASH.

For game design over the last two weeks I blocked in and then developed my Keyshot showing a moment of gameplay as a sales pitch.  It has been tricky to find the time to really work on this but I think its up to an OK level even if its not my best 2D work :p

Next week I will be working on fixing up the placeholder UI.

My Scripting final is going well.  We learned a rather messy complicated way to build UI and then a week later a much simpler and user friendly one.  I now have my final UI working and building itself so I just need to add the shader creation functionality to it and I should be done :D  Though saying that getting the script to function will take some serious thought and planning.  There is another function I want to add based on the idea of the user accidentally closing down the UI before they are done but I'm not sure I can pull it off. We will see.

Unfortunately due to the mountain of work that is needed for Visual Structure I have put my Zbrush project on hold.  I guess I figured this could happen but I think I need to focus on one project this term to really get a decent result.  There will always be time to work on Brenin.  Maybe next term when I have another 5 class term.

Week6_gearing up for finals

This week has felt like a bit of a recovery week after the Hard Surface 2 midterm!  It has also been kinda fun to start getting into the meat of some of my projects as they gear up for the last few weeks of the term.

For game design we had to take our character designs into color.  I think I will be refining the poses and a bit of the details for the final pass but I am happy with the colors I think it works to bring them together as a group but still give the characters an individual nature.

This is the block in for my Hard Surface 2 final.  I was going to go with something more complex but I think I would rather nail something a little simpler than stretch and run out of time while attempting something more ambitious.  Still I really like the concept for this character so I hope I can do it justice!!

Visual structure has finally moved onto asset creation yay! Our team have developed a very strong basis for our story, shape language, character etc which is making design decisions quite easy now as we progress into fully realising the scene :)

We also put together a quick animatic from the block in, mostly just to get the pacing accurate and see if our shots are working.  We may be adding in a third cut between the two existing ones to emphasize just how far the bauble falls.  Check it out in the term 7 folder here Google Drive Folder

Next week I will hopefully have some cool armor designs for the king character and with any luck a big step forward with my Hard Surface 2 character.

Week 5 - No Sleep for the wicked

Phew this was the hardest week of this term but I managed to get my car finished! woop! Now onto more fun things! :D

For game design the assignment was to do 10 designs of a character and 10 designs for an enemy... I really wanted to do a line up of my 4 main character classes so I kinda went a little overboard and did 50 designs :p I am pretty happy with the overall result though! A little bit of tweaking and I think it will be ready for color.

I don't really know what to say about this project.  It has eaten up so many hours and I guess it looks ok.  I learned a lot though with regards to surface cleanliness and edge flow.  Thankfully one of the guys in my term wrote a neat little UV'ing script that really sped up the last few steps! 

For Scripting class we took a step away from hard core coding this week and focused on making our own shelves and being able to call our scripts as buttons.  I updated my custom shelf to have some awesome new icons!! 

My team are making some good progress in Visual structure.  We have finally nailed down a solid composition block in complete with camera animation and rough geometry.  Next stage will be establishing a color pallet and then creating the asset list and dividing up the work for the next few weeks.

Sculpting is coming along too.  I have the main body blocked in now so I can move onto blocking in the costume.  I have fallen a little behind the class I am trying to follow but hopefully I can find a little extra time over the next few weeks to really catch up.

Weeks 3-4

It doesn't feel slow anymore! eek!
OK so with the rapid development in Visual Structure, the unforseen mistake with my Hard Surface 2 midterm and preparing for the character design week for game design the last couple of weeks have been really tough!!

 So my ribbon technique did work and gave some great results topologically but it left me with a very lumpy car.  This was a lot harder to clean up than I had expected and it took twice as long as I budgeted to get my Tesla to the above clean base :(  Still it's ready to add panel details and all the proper scoops and lights now so phew I should still finish it on time.

 Game design homework called for some camera exploration.  I was imagining my team's game as a third person high action shooter a little like left for dead 2.  I threw together the environment added some color and then sketched out character for scale.  I like this approach to camera visualisation with a sketched character its a lot faster and easy to iterate but I think if I actually had experience in Unreal engine I could have imported this scene and just used their basic avatar to work on the camera placement.

I finally found some time work work on my Zbrush block in.  I didn't make that much progress but I think I am starting to get back to the level of Zbrush I was at before Gnomon.  I really hope I can find time to keep working on this guy maybe when Game design lets up a little.. though that will coincide with Hard Surface 2 moving onto finals... who needs sleep anyway.

Visual structure has really started now.  Our team is doing great! everything is going ahead smoothly so far, we have 60 concept sketches between us all and now we are working towards locking down a 3D block in.  It's a lot of fun to be working in a team again after so long doing individual work.  I even enjoy the silly little things like scheduling meetings and dividing up work :p  I can't wait to see what we come up with when we start moving onto the modeling and texturing phases.

 

 This is one of the rough 3D block-ins we have so far but I expect it to change a lot before we get it locked down.

Scripting is going well too.  We have almost caught up with the same level I had in C# which is cool I am really looking forward to the next few weeks when we start to think about our final scripts.  I am really curious as to what my class mates will come up with.