Rob's Modelling Blog: Week 3: Feel the burn!

Here's to another crazy week! Chugging along with life drawing and Viscom. Getting into the gritty side of Perspective and a guest speaker from Blizzard!! 8D woo! Though its starting to feel a little crazy thinking we are already approaching week 4! that's nearly half way! I feel like I just started :p

This week for figure drawing we moved onto fleshing out the legs which we tried to combine with the torso work from last week and I think its starting to have a big effect on my work. It is very clear now how unrefined the arms and head I do are compared to the new approaches I am learning for legs and torsos. Next week we are tackling arms so I cant wait to see how that looks :D.

Viscom was great fun as usual :) we are now cutting up our primitive shapes into cooler looking shapes! I went a little off road with this weeks homework and drew some props instead. I will probably be told off for this. I did do some basic shape adjustments too but drawing the props was just too fun! Especially since its the kind of stuff I like to doodle anyway, it just looks right now!

Early on in the week a couple of guys from Allegorithmic payed the Gnomon Games Group a visit to do a QnA before a bigger presentation to the whole school. I have used Substance Designer a little for my portfolio but seeing what these guys could do with the software was amazing!! I honestly can't wait till I get to play around with Substance Painter and Designer for real! but that's a long way off.

Mid week we had a guest speaker from Blizzard Jonathan Berube. He worked as the VFX Art Director on some of my absolute favorite game cinematics including Starcraft Heart of the Swarm. They played that cinematic along with a couple others on the big screen in the Gnomon stage with some amazing acoustics! I didn't think my eyes could get that big but I enjoyed every second!!

On a side note some of you who followed my older (now deceased) blog while I was at the NFTS may remember I actually snuck into the movie theater and played the Heart of the Swarm cinematic on the big screen but I was doing it through youtube so even though it was epic this time it was even better!!

Anyway back to Berube. His presentation was great he gave us a little back story as to how he wound up at Blizzard, referencing the sword and shield you get for 5 and 10 years working at the company! so cool. Then he went on to talk about one of the shots he worked on for the Heart of the Swarm cinematic and how it was all put together. He even went into depth about how you can use a single frame to animate over a 3D plate in essentially 2.5D. That might not make sense to some of you reading this, its a little tricky to explain without awesome pics and even awesomer hand gestures but trust me it was a very cool technique! I definitely wanna try it out in the future.

I then rounded out the week by joining Golds Gym located right behind Gnomon so yay for convenience! but booo for aches and pains! Though I'm at day 4 now so once you get past that first week and it becomes a habit it gets a lot easier. Waking up the day after my first session was rough though I hadn't done any decent training in a verrrrry long time so I could just about raise my arm above my waist... this made reaching for cereal for breakfast a genuine challenge :p

Anyway enough rambling I have to get to bed, early morning tomorrow so I can get my: Perspective, Art History and last tweaks of my Photoshop homework done! bleurgh

enjoy some pics