Week3_Fun before the first crunch

This week has been pretty fun in a strange way.  I am still freaking out about environment modeling since there is so much to do.  I'm confident I can get it all done but after planning out the next few weeks I am not allowed to get sick or anything! essentially I have no wiggle room :p  Still the other classes this week proved to be either very light in work or just creatively a little more enjoyable which calmed me a little.

For texturing and shading for games I worked on a little bit of Substance Designer.  I think its a very powerful program for repeatable textures like brick walls, plants/ground cover etc but its not the best program (IMO) for things like metal.  At least I'm not at a level yet where I can make the most of it.  This above brass texture took me quite a while to put together and even though the scratches are procedural I don't think it would make a good metal base compared to the stuff I can now make in Substance Painter.

This cobble flooring however is awesome!! I am still getting to grips with the software but things like this are just so cool!! and every part of it is totally controllable.  I am really excited to see what more I can make with this software in the future.

Creature was awesome this week!!! The assignment was to sculpt our interpretation of the Vodyanoy a Slavic malign water spirit.  I took the mythology quite loosely since it is described as an amphibian creature that resembles an old man who preys on unsuspecting swimmers. I went for more of an angler fish style frog monster.  This creature uses its tongue like a lure to bring its prey close then it drags them instantly into its giant mouth! nom!!  

If you wanna check out the model I uploaded it to Sketchfab!

Creature is taking up a lot of homework time this term and its difficult since I am not really focusing on character or creature but I really appreciate the chance to develop my design skills for this class.  I feel that since we have to go from our own concepts all the way to a realised 3D sculpt, in only 1 week, this is a great class for developing design skills.  The classes in the past like digital painting, viscom etc were great starting points but I feel like all those hours have finally come together and I am much more confident in shaping volumes, forms and silhouette to tell a story.  Don't get me wrong I will be spending the rest of my life getting better at this but its so gratifying to see all that hard work come to some kind of fruition.

Nearly done with all my main hero props! at least the modeling side each of these needs a quick Zbrush pass and then they will all need texturing at some point! this is the part that is a little scary since we are moving into week 4 and I want to make more progress just to feel secure!

For Animation we are still focusing on posing but with a little more focus on attack and idle states for our character.  I wanted my character to fight with a pole-arm or spear just because they are some of my favorite animations especially when they are exaggerated like in Dynasty warriors!  This of course meant I had to model and texture a spear that looks like it could fit the character we were given for this class.  Since I had so much other work to get on with I only budgeted 5 hours to build, UV, bake, texture and rig this weapon... and I just got it done in the time limit! Yay! There is obviously more I could do to improve it but I think it fits the character enough and it will do for what I need it for.  The spear also spins and opens like scissors which I may use for the attack animation it depends on whether we are doing a combo move or a single strike.

Week2_feels like week 8 already!

No kidding this term heated up realllly fast!!  Even with rigging and game creation being relatively light I already feel like I usually do around week 6-8.  Don't get me wrong its an awesome term so far and I am really learning a lot but wow I am a little scared of how tough this term is going to get.

I am still merging texturing for games and environment for games this week so I am working through my hero props and some tillable elements too.  I have around half of my high poly props modeled so far so another week and I should have almost all of them done yay :)  We are now using a set texture resolution of 512px per meter.  This actually makes UV'ing very different where the size of each uv'd piece is already determined so you just have to find a way to fit them on one tile.   This really satisfies my spatial awareness OCD.

In environment for games we moved onto tillable textures on repeatable items like architraves or floor moldings etc.  This is one I did in class, using a mouse in Zbrush is a real pain :p but it was a useful exercise.

These next 2 things are for my environment final.  I am pushing the concept to include a more damaged falling apart castle with some Lovecraftian themes. Ultimately with the environment work we do next term I want to set this castle overlooking the ocean.  In my narrative the castle is owned by an obsessive rich recluse, researching the Necronomicon.  This will make it easy to use the pieces I build this term to fit the game environment I built last term.

Rigging is going slow and steady.  Our class seems to be quite far behind the other class taught by a different teacher but I like that we are taking each step very carefully.  I am really starting to understand the fundamentals behind how each part of the rig is put together.

Creature modeling this week was 3 busts for predator creatures that are air, sea and land based.

This first creature is a flying jellyfish type creature that breathes in gas, from natural vents in the earth, to inflate its body and allow it to fly in the air where it waits for unsuspecting prey to latch on to and then drain of its blood!

This next guy is kinda inspired by The Shadow over Innsmouth in the sense that I was listening to the audio book while I was sculpting it.

This last one gave me a bit of trouble... I just couldn't get any shapes that I liked.  Then I got something that looked kinda cool and I ran with it and pulled out some shapes and before I knew it I had a dragon.... the one thing our teacher told us to try and stay away from :p oh well I kinda like the look even if it looks a little dragony.

Animation was pretty easy we had to pick a character archetype and using the rig we have for class come up with 5 poses.  I am going with a prideful but angry character kinda like Vegeta from DBZ.  So to me that means controlled, superior and aggressive posture.

Lastly for game creation 1 we played around with physics objects, collision and basic importing at the right scale.  Then for homework I built a Rube Goldberg machine.  I still don't know how to export animation from unreal but its only a very basic set up where you push a ball which travels up a lift into a cannon and then is shot into a sign that pushes a balloon onto a pin which bursts and drops a little banana on a button that releases 100 giant bananas! yay!  Honestly that was really fun and quite relaxing compared to the other stuff we are currently working on.

Here goes term 9!

One week in and I can already tell this is going to be a tough term!! I started the week with Environment for games, where our teacher dropped some pretty real and a little bleak knowledge.  It was mostly a get in gear speech but it marked the point where everything seems to be getting more serious at Gnomon.  So final year and onto making some awesome demo reel pieces!!  Good luck everyone!

So I made a good effort for the Riot competition and I was planning to keep working at it and finish the whole brief but honestly after this term started I realised I really have to focus on pieces for my demo reel now.  So I did manage to finish the void tower but the jackalope warren will have to wait for a while ;P  Here is my void tower :) I am so happy with this project!! you can see some more images on Artstation You can also see my progress on Polycount.

 For Creature modeling we started simple this week with 3 maquettes 2 human and one of our choosing.  I went with a little rat as my third sculpt.  This was quite a fun exercise focusing mostly on anatomy. I feel that I learned a lot from this exercise just being able to play around with the sizing and positioning of major muscle groups in 3D space.

Environment for games started off pretty strong with the homework being choose a concept to work from and block it in.  Since we are working to a grid for this project the old circle of hell was much easier to live with since there is no way for the environment to fit on the grid and match the reference perfectly so you just have to get it as close as possible :)  I am going with a castle interior which I will be able to repurpose for my game from last term when its all done :)

Thankfully some of our classes interlink this term.  The homework for texturing for games is even catered at building and texturing a few props that would go into my environment final :) yay.  So I have been busy mocking up the high poly versions of some of my environment props.

Rigging was another fun class... lots of fun classes this term yay. Our teacher speaks super fast though and goes through a lot! which I like but its very intense!  For this week we just had to put together a simple human block out broken up into various pieces then set the orientation of each piece correctly and get the naming right.

Lastly game creation looks to be the relaxing class this term.  There isn't a lot of homework and from the looks of it it might be a lot of review of what I learned last term. Still its good to really solidify that teaching and it frees up some time for me to really nail environment for games :)
OK onto another week here goes term 9!!!