Week 1: Picking up speed

This week was a pretty big one.  I had my first intro to Maya class which was really intense! but at the same time very inspiring.  I like the no nonsense attitude of the class, I am sure I will learn a lot from this one!  Anyway onto the pics

For Advanced Character Design I had to design 6 characters based on the same archetypal base.  So I went for the gruff heroic legendary fighter and his physical antithesis.  The relationship I was picturing was a father son dynamic, quite like Stoick and Hiccup from How to Train your Dragon.  For the process the prescribed approach was a little different from my first character design class.  This time I worked purely in silhouette first just picturing the details within the larger shapes.  From there when I felt I had the shape language for each character down I moved onto color and a little value.  This week is pretty rough which allowed me to iterate on the designs quite a few times before settling.  The next few weeks will be spent refining one of these pair.

For Advanced Digital painting we started much like last term with some exercises.  These were focused on replicating lighting scenarios with different materials at different times of day.  It was pretty cool to think of the physics behind how we perceive color and how light changes throughout the day.  Next weeks homework however is to design a metal weapon think WOW or LOL style! So I am pretty excited about that yay!

For Intro to Maya the first weeks assignment was to collect a series of photographs to use for the Midterm project which is a replication of a photograph as a 3D environment.  I am going with the above image which is an interior shot behind the bar of the Green Dragon Inn from Hobbiton! The set actually exists and is a tourist destination in New Zealand!! Since I am still grounded in the US for the next two years I will have to settle for visiting it digitally for now.

Our Texturing and Shading class was cancelled this week so no update on that but I am looking forward to seeing what our syllabus is for that class soon.  For Intro to Compositing the brief was to build something in After Effects that uses a countdown but is also entertaining.  I went through a few ideas before I settled on the above video.  I think I am really going to enjoy this class. My uploads will probably be very low resolution though because of bloggers limitations but you will hopefully get the gist of what I was going for.

Anyway back to work!