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!