Week7_Thanksgiving

A bit of a weird week since we lost Friday to the Thanksgiving holiday so I wound up with a three day weekend :D

This gave me just enough time to finish my high rez props and weapons final.  I am working on getting the low rez version done and with any luck baked before Tuedsay's class!! eek.

For level design I am still working on the last bit of blueprinting before I can get stuck into set dressing and getting the boss character in there.

For animation I worked on the lower half of the above guys walk cycle.  It was a little more mathematical and recipe based than I was expecting but I am happy that I have finally had the time to actually work on a walk cycle! my past animations have been pretty rushed/botched.  Hopefully now I will be able to build more realistic ones... Especially after this weeks homework to do the upper body.

Photography was a little tricky this week.  I went out and shot some HDR 360* environments.  It was a pretty cool process but you really had to nail the photography in the field to get the stitching process to flow smoothly.

Character modeling was a little slow this week as we moved onto UV'ing and displacement so I spent a little extra time moving forward to building a realistic eye model just in case we don't get enough time to do one in class.  The tutorial I was following focused on getting the piece to look good in Arnold but I want to apply the same theory and get the eye to look good in real time too.

As usual nothing to report on character design, yet another class canceled.

Week 6_The Sprint Begins

As of the end of this week I have started the final projects for Level Design and Props and Weapons.  That kinda marks the point in the term where I try to jump ahead and free up as much time as possible to get good results for those main classes.  Having said that I do still want to do good work for my other classes I just will be spending more time on my 2 core subjects and as usual minimal time sleeping :p

In Character Animation I put together a lifting animation.  This exercise was focusing on anticipation and acting while we start to get more used to using full character rigs.  The rig we got this week was a lot more 'user friendly' or I guess just simpler than the rig I used last week so I was able to cover more ground much faster.  I also recorded myself doing the same animation as reference which was fun but I tried to keep it secret on my secondary monitor as I was working at school :p As always you can find the full animation in my Google Drive folder.

I made a bit more progress with my character sculpt over the last couple days.  I am going for a semi-realistic style but I exaggerated some cuts and overlaps to give the character a more dynamic look.  Depending on how much time I have over the next few weeks I may try to refine this further but I still have a lot of costume and texturing to do for this character so I may have to move on.

I moved onto using some of Substance's generators to add some edge ware and more advanced detail this week.  It was cool to move onto using the core generators rather than relying on Substance's basic smart masks.  There were some limitations I ran into with the texture being so small but I think the overall look is pretty good and will work just fine for my character Modeling final too yay!

I have chosen my final piece for Props and Weapons which I will be modeling over the next week.  I was looking through some more complex organic pieces at first but I think I will be able to ace my fundamentals with this piece and still challenge myself.  Also it does share a slight similarity to the Enigma machine I built waaaaaaaaaaaaay back for my portfolio to get into Gnomon so I definitely hope I will be kicking that pieces butt.  Wow looking back at it... yikes...  Sometimes it is both sobering and gratifying to look back and see where you came from.

Level Design class was super fun this week.  The homework was a little tricky trying to retrofit all my blueprints to the VR Pawn but I am amazed at how easy it is to integrate VR into Unreal 4!!! I had a movable character who could pick up the rune sword and smack boxes around my level within 20 minutes of firing up the level :p Soooo awesome!  The rest of it was a little more tricky but I now have everything from my midterm working yay! I struggled for quite a few hours but I couldn't get any of the other features I wanted to work like: Snapping the sword to the VR controller, spawning swords from a backpack volume behind the head, getting a crossbow to work, magic fireballs, using a shield in one hand and a sword in the other... Still maybe my teacher can give me a hand with these other features!
I have some pretty big plans for my final but we will see how much actually makes it to week 10.  I have been playing around with VR for a while now but this is the first time I have actually gotten a chance to play with my own models in game! and I am pretty hooked! I am now certain that some day I will be developing my own VR game some time in the future.

I also spent some time modeling a bunch of props for the arcane library which is the final zone for my level design project.  I have a few other things I want to add but I will be set dressing soon and seeing if it all comes together!

For Digital Photography we have graduated from the exposure triangle yay! Now we are moving onto HDR images.  It was really cool learning how these are made especially since we tend to use these in 3D as image based lighting.

Not much to report on for Character Design another pointless class

Week 5 - Calm before the storm

This week has almost been relaxing compared to last week but I can feel the all too familiar build up as Term 8 prepares to ramp up towards Finals.

For  Animation I expanded on one of my previous assignments and added some camera work.  I tried to add a story with minimal extra modeling and animation.  The full animation is on my Google Drive archive.

 For texturing and shading we took another step forward with the Midterm assignment.  I built all the base materials my prop will be using.  No weathering, AO masking etc just the basic base materials.  I assume we will move onto weathering next week.  I did enjoy the process of breaking down real world materials and trying to recreate them but when I transfered the materials to my main scene the scale was a little whack and I had to tile all my masks quite a lot to fit the 2K texture res.

 

 I like the look so far! Really looking forward to progressing to texture based story telling with this item :D  I also tidied up the Normal Maps a lot, based on what I learned from last week.


Not a whole lot more to report on for my other classes.  We missed a character modeling class so I am just refining my topology and working on a bit of basic sculpting.  I am not going to bother posting my character development work.  The feedback was positive but I just really don't care about this assignment so I don't want to keep a record of it.
We are taking a break in Level Design to think about our Final projects which we will be doing in VR :D I am super excited to start that!! Counting down the hours till 4pm tomorrow :D
Nothing too special for photography this week just a little bit of experimenting with ISO and High/Low key lighting set ups.

The other fun I had this week was a little extracurricular.  There is a Riot Art challenge happening between now and the end of January.  There are a bunch of categories but I'm going down the environment modeling route.  For the competition I will be modeling a turret and a creep den.  My turret is going to be Void themed, which gave me an excuse to brush up on my Lovecraft reading.  All I have had time to do so far is plan out the rough themes of my models and do some deconstructing of Riot's Void characters and art style.

For my creep den I want to build a little home for my rabbit model from week 1 though I will be transforming him into a Jackalope!

Week 4 - The Midterms begin

Animation was fun this week I worked on a jump.  I didn't put too much extra time into story or environment this time as I wanted to spend as much time as I could on getting the jump to read well.  I think it still needs improvement but this weeks assignment will give me time to do that so yay!

Not much extra stuff to show for level design I have been working on a lot of the behind the scenes blueprinting and adding text to help the character understand what is going on.  I hope I can find a little extra time to work on some more environmental props but the Props and Weapons assignment it pretty huge this week.

For Props and Weapons we have started our Midterm! I am modelling my character's katana.  I am pushing it a little getting the sword and scabbard down to 5K but I think it will still look good at that resolution.  Next week we will be texturing the prop.  I wound up doing some pretty high rez detail in Zbrush which was faaaaaar too high to take into Substance so I had to bake in Zbrush then combine the normals in Substance.  I think I will be rebaking a lot of this over the week since the homework has gotten a little lighter.  I now know a better way to get the high res surface detail for fabrics which relieves a lot of the pressure from the whole super high Zbrush sculpts so I'll be trying that out next week too.

OMG photography homework was awesome this week!!!! I teamed up with a couple classmates and had a blast playing around with shutter speed and lightsabers!!

Character modeling went well this week we have now finished the body anatomy and that is the assignment for next week.  I will wait till next week to post an update with the finished topology ready for Zbrush :)

No rants for character design this week because it got cancelled. Though I thought it was pretty funny how excited everyone got that the class was cancelled... It must be because of all the extra time we got to work on that awesome homework :p