Week4 - Doughnuts and Bolters

Gearing up for Midterm, which doesn't mean a whole lot this term I guess.  For Hard Surface and Texturing and Shading it means that we are starting on the final but for most of the other classes we are just continuing on like normal.

For VFX this week we are working with constraints.  They are quite handy and the basis for a lot of rigging which we will get to in the distant future.  I am actually looking forward to really learning rigging, I know a little from past projects but I hope to learn a lot more.  I had a bit of fun with this project and designed an automated doughnut factory. You can check out the full animation here

 

Texturing and Shading was a two parter this week.  We opened Substance Painter for the first time and played around a little, which was fun.  The assignment however was just to finish off our final models.  That means UV's, optimization, composition, lighting, the works!  It was tough but i managed to get everything done.  I am working on the composition with a little help from one of my past teachers Devon.  I hope to really nail it down over the next week or so to make sure I get the most out of the whole piece.

 

There wasn't a whole lot of animation in this weeks animation assignment.  We had to design a character instead, one which we will be animating over the next few weeks.  That means keeping the design and accessories to a bare minimum since I will be drawing this character probably a few hundred times :p.  Here she is Zahra; once the eldest daughter of a famous Egyptian family she was shamed and banished after her younger sister outwitted her with an elaborate scheme. Having been forced to survive among the dangerous nomadic clans roaming the wilderness Zahra has risen through the ranks and now marches against the city of her birth with one malicious intent, revenge.  Aaaand next weeks assignment is to figure out how she jumps........ my initial reaction is she would probably get someone else to jump for her, but I guess if she actually had to jump it would be in an elegant way. Which I will, of course, be acting out myself to see what that looks like :p hope I don't bother the downstairs neighbors.

 For Texturing and Shading we had to pitch our final models.  I was initially going to go with a quad-copter drone but the more I thought about it the more dull it sounded.  So I decided to go with the Viking unit from Starcraft 2!! I want to essentially uprez this in game model into a cinematic quality model.  It has been done before though but I will be trying to put my own spin on how it would be detailed out at a high resolution.  The piece itself has a lot of parts and can switch between walker and flight mode.  I will be focusing on nailing the walker mode and if I have time (big if) I might try to rig it and make it transform between the two modes but I'm pretty sure the walker mode will be taking up the majority of my time.

I also wanted to start preparing for some of the later games classes I will be taking in the future.  Since Riot is up there on my dream job list I figured I should find some time to use my digital painting knowledge and really work on getting better at Riot's style of character texturing.  I don't think its something Gnomon focuses on or teaches specifically but I am getting some great help and advice on how to improve from past teachers and new friends.  My first step was to try a master copy, just in value this time before I get a grip on color.  I chose Zed from League of Legends because he doesn't show any skin and is mostly hard surface so a little bit easier than Ahri or Gnar etc.  I really got a lot out of this exercise but finding time with our workload is really tough so I hope I can keep finding time to working on stuff like this!