Finals and Break!!

 Phew those last few weeks were tougher than I was expecting but I managed to get everything done and handed in even if it took a few sleepless nights :p

I am so happy with my Props and Weapons final! Its also gotten the most likes of any piece I have uploaded to Artstation so it seems other people like it too yay :) You can see the 3D version along with some other renders here at my Artstation It was a little tough getting the final polishing passes done at the same time I was putting the finishing touches on my Level Design final but somehow I made time :p

 

Thinking of that I made a realllllly dumb mistake with my Level Design final omg its still difficult to think back on :*(  So I spend an entire day working on my final for level design getting the boss mechanics to work right, adding flammable props getting the cross bow to work etc and then set dressing the whole thing.  It was a long day for sure! And at around 11:30pm after working 13 hours or so I was ready to back up my files onto my portable hard drive.  I opened the folder and found there wasn't enough space on my hard drive to keep both the old version and the one I had been working on so I just deleted the old folder...  And then realised 5 seconds later that I had deleted the wrong folder nooooo!!! I lost the whole day! ugh!!  But I stayed up that night at home and thankfully I was able to rebuild the whole thing and even set dress much better now that I had worked out the story for the final chamber but wow that was a really tough night! Not going to make that mistake again!!  I don't really know how to show my Level design final on this blog I may have to wait a bit to figure out some kind of screen capture that works with Oculus or just learn Unreal's camera pipeline but for now I don't have much to show other than a few screen grabs.

The Animation final went well.  The final class was to do a run animation which worked much the same as a walk one but now that I knew the process a little better I was able to get it working much faster and even add a little character to the run.

The less said about Character Development this term the better but I did find time to just play around with the final assignment a little.  The story is based around a character who developed a serum to create super soldiers, sold it to the futuristic US military and secretly implanted dormant hive mind characteristics into the mutation allowing her to control all the super soldiers and take over.  The story runs a little deeper than that but I'm just tired of this class and want to move onto next term.

 Character Modeling on the other hand was much more fun!  I think I pushed Zbrush a little hard when I was trying to get this whole piece posed as it caused Zbrush to crash quite a bit.  I am hoping at some point to get this character out into Marmoset or something so I can do some real texturing but that will take a bit of time.  I am pretty happy with the final look and I think this is a massive improvement over my last character.  I have one more big character class in 2 terms and I want to try a more stylised approach for that but with that said I learned a lot from trying this more realistic approach.

 

The Digital Photography final was fun but ultimately didn't work as well as I had hoped.  We tried out photogrammetry which is the process of creating a 3D object or environment using photographs.  It is pretty cool that with just shy of 100 photos and about 1.5 hours of processing time I had the above model based on a tea set I had at home and a cake I bought... for research purposes of course...  But the final model is a little rough and it took quite a bit of tweaking in Zbrush to fill some strange holes that the program couldn't calculate.  Ultimately I think I could have built this thing faster than the time it took to process but in time photogrammetry could be a really useful tool for props.  It is already being widely used in the industry.  I even saw a prop scanning team credit in the new starwars movie! so it seems like a good skill to know.

Lastly I managed to salvage some of the Character Development make up by sketching out some more ideas for the Riot competition there isn't much time left but I hope I can put together a little something over the break.  I am pushing my tower design a little further into actual living architecture.  I will have to start the 3D soon though.. just hope I can nail down a more solid direction first.