Week 3 - Looking Cool

OK.. Week 4 is packing quite a punch! I lost a big chunk of sleep getting this weeks vehicle design homework (will show it next blog) done after the last creature design homework set me back.  So this weeks post is a few days behind :p

 This week for vehicle we moved on to designing actual vehicles.  For the mastercopies this week we had to pick a couple of vehicles from Starwars.  It was a pretty tough choice since there are so many cool ships but I decided on Jango Fett's ship and the Jedi Starfighter.

For the main chunk of work I had to design 8 ships.  I got to try out a new ideation technique for this one I really liked.  I start out with a scribble and try to turn that into a ship shape.  The scribbles are a little more intentional than just scribbles though.  Looking at the Starwars shape language I made sure my scribbles were more horizontal than vertical and tried to keep the shapes more faceted.

After deciding on 8 shapes I liked I made 3 versions of each with little tweaks then picked the best ones.

 The final 8 designs were resolved in lineweight and then rendered.  I really liked the outcome! some very cool shapes.

 For environment this week I took one of my thumbnails from last week and tried to resolve it with more distinct value and some textures.  The techniques we are learning this term are helping so much, like resolving the atmospheric perspective first then putting lighting on top of that and finally ending with textures is helping the read of my pieces a lot!

For digital paintint I took my favorite 4 thumbnails and resolved them with light but no texture.  It is kinda cool to see these resolved but I think I have to push the lighting more to get back that really clear read they had before in the purely atmospheric perspective read.  This coming week I will be taking my favorite one of these and refining it further and adding color! a little scary but also looking forward to it.

 As well as the thumbnails this week I also had to do some Viscom exercises rendering primitive shapes.  It was really fun comparing these to my primitives from waaaaaaay back in Viscom 1.  It made me really happy to have kept up with this blog and be able to travel back that far in time and see what I was working  on :)

For Creature I took my lineweight creatures from last week and resolved them with value.  I tried to do them with combined linework and render but after I finished I thought they felt a little flat so I tried to take out the linework from just a small piece and one thing led to another and I lost a bunch of time fully resolving these guys :p  I do like the final look and next week I will be adding color to these!

I haven't been posting pictures of my sculpture yet... I just kept forgetting to take pictures :p But here is the Loomis head in progress.  There are a lot of steps each week but it is really starting to take form!  I also added an H as a Red Dwarf reference (for those of you unfamiliar with old British Sci-fi humor)  I don't think anyone in my class watched Red Dwarf though so it may just be funny to me :p

For Film History we continued with Horror and watched Rosemary's Baby and Psycho. Both awesome movies! I really like Hitchcock's work and how he deals with fear and suspense.  I had seen Psycho before and a while ago I watched the Bates Motel series on Netflix which was really good.  So I guess I knew the twist but it still made the movie fun to watch.  Rosemary's Baby was also really entertaining, in a dark sort of way.  I think the idea behind it was pretty sinister but what really got to me was the feeling of building paranoia and then the point where it all peaks and you feel genuinely terrified for the protagonist.  I don't want to say much more since it will spoil the movie but I do recommend it!

OK back to work I have to write my film history midterm on Donnie Darko, but first I have a loooooooooot of Environment design homework to get done for tomorrow :*( I am a little worried this week's work load is a microcosm of the coming final week! With Vehicle design so close to Environment design deadlines this will probably happen again.  Still really looking forward to some sleep this weekend.