One day to go!

Friday was soooo fun (yes those extra o's were completely necessary).  We got shown round the amazing and very confusingly laid out campus, then we got grilled for a couple of hours on Gnomon policy etc. Doesn't sound as much fun on paper but the atmosphere was great. The studios look so cool and there is tonnes of fantastic art every time you turn a corridor. I am very looking forward to seeing Gnomon up and running on Monday!

I met a bunch of very interesting people too some of which were taking the 2 year track so I will see them from time to time panicking about render times etc that's a whole year off for me :p.  The majority of us on Friday though were taking the 3 year program, I am really looking forward to seeing their work and working along side them too.  Again though I can't wait to start on Monday!

So today was mostly errand running I cycled down to the Grove which is a very classy kinda shopping street I guess, I don't really have anything from home to compare it to.  To be honest it mostly reminded me of walking down a theme park like Alton towers or Disney land with the large departments, green features and walkways, maybe a couple of rides would make it an even more fun experience.

I did find Santa and his reindeer just chilling in the parking lot though. Maybe he is outsourcing some of his work this year.

On the way back I stopped off at one of the biggest art stores I have ever seen. I probably sound a little naive saying that in the USA but I still can't get over the size of just about everything here! The cars the roads the stores just everything is so big! And I love it! I've traveled to the US a few times before but it still amazes me. 

Lastly before I sat down to fully unpack and prepare for my last day of freedom for 3 years I used my Gnomon enrolment sticker to jazz up my bike! It fit almost perfectly on the coloured tag on the top frame.

Induction today!!!!!

So after a few weeks of boring paper work stuff, visa application etc I finally made it to LA! It's an amazing city I've only been on a 15 minute walk and a subsequent 2 hour cycle and I saw so many cool and diverse areas. Apparently the weather had been pretty bad over the last week with lots of rain but thankfully it's gotten much better! I saw the sun and everything!

Today though is the induction day for new students and I am so excited I woke up at 5:00am though that might be jet lag.
I have been working on a mini project while I was sorting out everything to leave the UK and here it is:

To be honest I was hoping to get a little further and try adding glowing textures, rigging and briefly animating this character once I found out that Sketchfab now allows you to post animated models.  But I ran out of time so I just got to the basic texture painting stage.  I might pick this up again later but I doubt I will have time with Gnomon's workload.  Still it was a lot of fun and a nice break from all the travel/immigration planning.

I will try to post more regularly now and show some of my work at Gnomon.  I considered taking this blog down and starting a new one but I kinda like the idea of looking back in a few years and seeing where I started from.

Anyway here goes!

Going to LA!!

So its official I have been accepted onto the Gnomon 3 year Entertainment Design program :D

Its been a really long few months working on my portfolio. I haven't blogged much mostly due to the hours I was sinking into refining my old work, working on new projects and brushing up on my basic sketching.

But it all feels worth it now that I have made it into this amazing school! I have never improved as much as I did when I was taking the Gnomon online courses which feels like a very long time ago now. So needless to say I am really excited to get started in January! First though I have to work out a whole lot of logistical fluff, selling things here, getting together some funds, immigration stuff etc. its going to be a pretty busy few weeks ahead.

I know I haven't been posting much on this blog and as I said before the high work load was a big factor but it was also a little difficult being on my own and not having a lot of direction. I tried to land a few jobs and take on some freelance but most of it didn't pay off. The hard times did make me reflect on where I was and where I wanted to be with regards to my digital work and that was the main impetus spurring me on to go back to school. I believe I have the drive and passion to be up there and it took a lot of time to accept that actually getting there was going to take even longer than I had thought 3 years ago when I decided to move off my original plan to become an architect. Anyway enough of that onward to sunnier pastures!

For those of you who read this blog and enjoy the pretty pictures I am sure the quality of work shown is going to get much better and I hope to be blogging more regularly when I start in January!

But for now I have included my portfolio submission to Gnomon along with a quick video flick through of the sketchbook I sent over. Enjoy!

Update 4: The Goblins are Back!

Yay for goblins! I brought these guys back for an update.  I did a little work on their textures, mostly the knight but here they are in their little camp site! In my head they all have their own little character quirks, I wont go into detail but you can probably gather a little from this scene.  I still have a long way to go in learning about Unreal engine 4 but I think this scene looks really nice and all I did was import the models and textures and place a few lights! Looking forward to getting to know the engine a little better and start producing much nicer work!

Porfolio Update 3: Real Time Renders

I think this is the first ever post I have done showcasing a real time render prop :p  For those of you who don't know real time rendering means no extra time is spent by the computer to calculate the final look of a scene or model.  This is used for games mostly since all the action has to happen instantaneously.  Movies and animation however tend to use rendered images which means computer time has previously been spent calculating light bounces, reflections, refractions etc to make the image look more realistic.

This prop was actually modeled a while ago.  I built her for the first week of my character modeling course at Gnomon.  I was binge watching Attack on Titan at the time and I really liked their outfits! but I didn't have enough time to model a realistic version of one of the characters so I built a Chibi style version of Mikasa.  It was really fun to go back to this model and tweak the modeling a little and bring her all the way through to a textured asset.  It was a little tricky but I managed to get a model through Substance Designer (Material building program) into Unreal 4 (Game Engine).  At some point in the future I hope to take a model even further by adding animations and control but that will be a job for future me! For now I will be getting back into Substance Designer to work on my Enigma Machine.

Portfolio update 2: Bella in Color!

OK second upload.  This one was a little trickier than the desert fortress not in terms of painting or anything that was pretty fun actually but going back to 2015 Maya broke a lot of my characters materials like the skin and hair shaders.  I think I will try and fix these at a later date but for now on to the next one :D

So for those of you familiar with my work the character in both of these shots is Bella from my Character design online course with Gnomon.  Since finishing the 10 weeks of modeling I have textured her and played around a bit more with the hair system which is just so cool I recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind the cost its really fast and can produce some great results.  Don't take these renders as an example somewhere between me actually building the hair in Maya 2016 and rendering it in 2015 a lot of the connections got messed up but check out this link to see what GMH2 is capable of GMH2 hair.
The background was a mini environment project I used to get a little more familiar with texture painting in Mari.  Painting a lot of basic models really let me get to grips with the layered workflow and integration with Maya.
There is a little bit of a story behind the piles of coins though.... A long time back I actually did a little gif of a pirate treasure chest filling with coins coins!!.  Try as I might I just can't get Maya to generate a cascade of primitive objects like you would imagine in a liquid simulation.  I have tried physical emitters but even with letting Maya run for like 45 minutes churning out one coin per second and calculating all the forces (it turns out you can only simulate these with spherical collier meshes hmm...) there doesn't seem to be a way to actually convert the resultant piles of coins into actual geometry.  There are a few scripts out there that promise this but I couldn't get them to work.  So the work around I used for the treasure gif a while ago was to create a lot of coins hovering in space and just drop them and let Maya churn away, much to her distress I am sure, working out all the collisions.  Still for this one there was just toooooo many coins.  Despite the long time it was taking to actually simulate the coins I was determined to find a way without actually placing each individual pile the long way.... Fast forward about 3 determined but ultimately fruitless hours and I finally bit the bullet and just did it the long handed way which only took like 20 minutes opposed to the several hours I had spent trying to do it a smarter way :p oh well live and learn!
For me there is still a tonne more I would like to learn about texture painting and material design I am slowly starting to piece it all together but there is still a ways to go.
It was so fun for me to take Bella through to a textured state, I hope you all enjoy the final look!
Thank you for reading this far :)

Portfolio Update

Its been quite a while since I have posted anything but here is one of the few projects I have been working on for my showcase Portfolio.  Some of you may remember this one from my Environment Modelling course well its all pretty and in color now :) yay!  After battling and I really mean battling in like the most serious way with rendering in Maya 2016 I finally gave up and reverted to 2015 for this piece.  I have also been playing around in Substance Designer which produces some beautiful materials which I will be playing with for my game props later on but for now here is my slightly more basic Maya rendering skills. enjoy!

So this is one of about 13 projects I am currently working on :p I will hopefully be posting a few updates over the next few weeks showing how the other projects are turning out :)  I have a couple more environments, a new character, some cool props, the Willys Jeep and a little work on my adventurer Goblins! so now I have to decide which one to work on next... hmm... oh yea I am also putting together a 120 page sketchbook, while I get back into drawing by hand, almost forgot I should probably go back to that for now.. ok bye :)