Week 3 - Looking Cool

OK.. Week 4 is packing quite a punch! I lost a big chunk of sleep getting this weeks vehicle design homework (will show it next blog) done after the last creature design homework set me back.  So this weeks post is a few days behind :p

 This week for vehicle we moved on to designing actual vehicles.  For the mastercopies this week we had to pick a couple of vehicles from Starwars.  It was a pretty tough choice since there are so many cool ships but I decided on Jango Fett's ship and the Jedi Starfighter.

For the main chunk of work I had to design 8 ships.  I got to try out a new ideation technique for this one I really liked.  I start out with a scribble and try to turn that into a ship shape.  The scribbles are a little more intentional than just scribbles though.  Looking at the Starwars shape language I made sure my scribbles were more horizontal than vertical and tried to keep the shapes more faceted.

After deciding on 8 shapes I liked I made 3 versions of each with little tweaks then picked the best ones.

 The final 8 designs were resolved in lineweight and then rendered.  I really liked the outcome! some very cool shapes.

 For environment this week I took one of my thumbnails from last week and tried to resolve it with more distinct value and some textures.  The techniques we are learning this term are helping so much, like resolving the atmospheric perspective first then putting lighting on top of that and finally ending with textures is helping the read of my pieces a lot!

For digital paintint I took my favorite 4 thumbnails and resolved them with light but no texture.  It is kinda cool to see these resolved but I think I have to push the lighting more to get back that really clear read they had before in the purely atmospheric perspective read.  This coming week I will be taking my favorite one of these and refining it further and adding color! a little scary but also looking forward to it.

 As well as the thumbnails this week I also had to do some Viscom exercises rendering primitive shapes.  It was really fun comparing these to my primitives from waaaaaaay back in Viscom 1.  It made me really happy to have kept up with this blog and be able to travel back that far in time and see what I was working  on :)

For Creature I took my lineweight creatures from last week and resolved them with value.  I tried to do them with combined linework and render but after I finished I thought they felt a little flat so I tried to take out the linework from just a small piece and one thing led to another and I lost a bunch of time fully resolving these guys :p  I do like the final look and next week I will be adding color to these!

I haven't been posting pictures of my sculpture yet... I just kept forgetting to take pictures :p But here is the Loomis head in progress.  There are a lot of steps each week but it is really starting to take form!  I also added an H as a Red Dwarf reference (for those of you unfamiliar with old British Sci-fi humor)  I don't think anyone in my class watched Red Dwarf though so it may just be funny to me :p

For Film History we continued with Horror and watched Rosemary's Baby and Psycho. Both awesome movies! I really like Hitchcock's work and how he deals with fear and suspense.  I had seen Psycho before and a while ago I watched the Bates Motel series on Netflix which was really good.  So I guess I knew the twist but it still made the movie fun to watch.  Rosemary's Baby was also really entertaining, in a dark sort of way.  I think the idea behind it was pretty sinister but what really got to me was the feeling of building paranoia and then the point where it all peaks and you feel genuinely terrified for the protagonist.  I don't want to say much more since it will spoil the movie but I do recommend it!

OK back to work I have to write my film history midterm on Donnie Darko, but first I have a loooooooooot of Environment design homework to get done for tomorrow :*( I am a little worried this week's work load is a microcosm of the coming final week! With Vehicle design so close to Environment design deadlines this will probably happen again.  Still really looking forward to some sleep this weekend.

Week 2: Not too bad

Slightly harder to stay ahead of the workload this week.  I still have a few things to finish before I get my tough Tuesday work pile on. I have actually started timing the hours I spend on each subject each week.  It has been pretty revealing since what I usually estimate is waaaaaay less time than an individual homework actually takes... It hasn't changed my routine at all but it has been kinda interesting to actually have timesheets again, though I used to hate filling them in for work.

Digital painting in class still life.  I am loving the way we are learning to paint digitally in this class! It is very slow but the results are just so cool!

This was my homework which was pretty much trying to replicate what we did in class.  I couldn't get as cool a lighting set up since I don't have any lamps so I had to rely on daylight.  The funny thing was that I gave myself a 3 hour limit for this one and just as the last 10 minutes were approaching the daylight started to fade so I couldn't have carried on if I wanted.

For environment design we had to do a very similar homework to digital painting.  Since the assignment was the same I decided to approach the drawing style differently.  One of my peers suggested I try a technique where you just throw down brushstrokes and then carve in and try to make a narrative.  This was actually pretty fun and was very different to my usual way of relying on linework.  I can see it being very helpful if one is stuck with an idea but since the outcome can be kinda random it may not be the best when the story or style has been locked down.

I also had to come up with a story for some of my future painings.  We were advised to take an existing IP and put a twist on it.  That way we don't have to worry about developing a complex story.  I am going with a redesign of one of my favorite games from my childhood; Baldur's Gate.  I am going to design it as a first person action adventure game (think Skyrim) but I am also going to intertwine it with the Warhammer fantasy world by looking at the origin story of my favorite army the Skaven!  If any of you are interested in the Warhammer fantasy universe I will be basing my story on the Doom of Kavzar.

For creature design I took my silhouettes from last week up to linework level.  It was really fun getting to play around with forms and really run with some of the ideas I had last week.  I did wind up refining the silhouettes a little and changing the perspective on my quadrupeds to make the overall form more readable.

My story for digital painting is based on the Blue light, a Grimms brothers story.  I am twisting the story a little by making the creature summoned by the blue flame an automaton rather than a dwarf.  I am planning to try out a slightly World of Warcraft or League of Legends style to my paintings for this class but I haven't gotten the full brief yet so I am keeping my style options open for now.

This weeks homework was to take one of the two scenes we will be working with for that class and experiment with the composition.  The first scene I am doing is the point where the knight, exhausted, abandoned and injured falls upon the steps of the witches house and begs for help.

Sculpture 2 has been very chill so far.  We are working through the stages of sculpting a bust in class which doesn't leave a lot left to do for homework other than finish up and refine.  The class moves pretty fast so it is a little tricky to keep up but I can see the forms starting to come out. It is such a gear shift from sculpture 1.  I know everyone including the teacher has said this already but I have to say I was assuming people were sugar coating it.

Lastly we have moved onto horror for this weeks Film History.  We finished up taking about comedy in class and had a very brief discussion of the films we watched last week.  I was expecting a little more, I hope we get a little more time to talk about this all next class.

Anyway the two movies we watched this week were: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Freaks

I didn't care much for the Cabinet of Dr Caligari.  It was very very slow and the font for reading the cards (it was a silent movie) was, as you can see in the above poster almost illegible.  Which combined with the inaudimate time given to the audience to read them and the frankly boring subject matter resulted in a very dull movie.  There wasn't really any horrific elements for me maybe I have been spoiled by modern horror movies or games but I always thought it didn't really take much to freak me out.

Freaks on the other hand was great!! I was actually first introduced to the story when I was binge watching 30 second bunnies! and I have been curious about the film for a while but I never found the time to watch it.  Again there was nothing really scary about this film but it told a great story of acceptance, exclusion, betrayal and retribution!  I would say it is more of a drama than a horror film but I guess the ending probably does shift it more towards horror.

So onto week 3 and away from thumbnails!

Term Four Begins!!!

The last term of the first year begins! Feels like term one was just a few moments ago, Gnomon is really going fast.  So this term I have a lot of design classes: Digital Painting, Creature Design, Environment Design, Vehicle Design, Sculpture 2 and Film History.  That is a heck of a lot of digital painting.... I hope I can wrap my head around that soon!

So the first week wasn't too bad there was a lot of work but after some of the crunch of term 3 and the early mornings of term 2 I barely broke a sweat.  I even found time to cook and exercise yay!

Creature design had us working on static cages for both quadrupeds and bipeds.  Though it keeps the designs a little stiff it really helps with perspective.  I think I may have goofed on this homework though I kinda skipped the all important ideation stage and just went straight from research to final designs.  As a result I am not all that happy with my designs for this week.  Lesson learned I won't make that mistake next week.

I also had to design 3 humanoid, 3 herbivore and 3 carnivore designs based on a planet very similar to earth.  My twist on the planet design was to have earth 2.0 to have a blanket of pollution and dust that limits the amount of light reaching the surface (think Interstellar).  That means that all my creatures are very malnourished and forced to rely on roots and weeds for nutrition.  I looked at a lot of scavenger reference and for the humans a balance of severely malnourished humans mixed with some circus freak reference.

I do kind of like my rat host design (top right) the concept is that this rodent has formed a symbiotic relationship with a sentient fungus.  The rodent feeds the fungus from its own mass and the fungus works as a poisonous smoke bomb against predators when they are both attacked.

For digital painting I did a still life study of something on my desk using the painting techniques we learned in class.  It was weird for me because there was no sketch stage I had to go straight to rendering.  It actually worked though I really like the final outcome!

The second step was to do 10 thumbnails that purely use atmospheric perspective.  Just relying on the rule that things become de-saturated and usually lighter as they recede into the background.  This was pretty fun and also gave me another chance to work on my composition.

For vehicle class I had to do two master copies and 8 'Spaceboxes.' I liked both assignments but the space boxes were especially fun!  The task was to take a rough boxy shape and make it look dynamic with decals or cut lines etc.

Lastly for Film history we had to watch two movies 'Duck Soup' and 'Blazing Saddles'

I really didn't like duck soup! I found it confusing, obnoxious, too silly and even at just over an hour far too long.  I appreciate that it is a film from a time when people were experimenting with communicating story visually but it is just not a film for me.  The only redeeming feature was the mirror scene where two characters are miming in front of each other perfectly.  It wasn't the first film to do this but it is a good gag that has been repeated a lot since.

Blazing saddles however was a brilliant film! I really enjoyed the story and humor.  There was a great balance between silly and self aware jokes the characters were appealing and the allegory though depicted a little bit shocking for this day and age still holds up as a great message.

OK week one may have been a little more chill than normal but it was over pretty fast! here goes week 2!

Finals Done!!!!!!! Break time Finally!

Wow that was an intense few weeks but I'm all done now and I can finally take a break!  I barely got any sleep over the last few days while I pushed to finish my first animatic. I am writing this in Lecture 2 one hour before my last class starts where we will all be presenting our storyboard finals so wish me luck.

Creature final: I'ts weird to see how this one turned out after my initial cute creature design but with a bit of pushing my cute squirrel based creature became the Arbor Draconem! Rar!!

Character Final: I had two weeks to work on these two pieces, nailing down a solid turn around and a set of expressions and gestures was a lot easier after allllllll that practice over the term.  I am really pleased with the outcome and seeing how much I have improved with character design! Looking forward to advanced character design already! 

Design History Final: This one was a bit of a controlled mess! but I am super proud of my group we really nailed it!  We made an international style cake house complete with car and environment too!  It was a lot harder than it looked and most of the project was mitigating mini disasters but the final product was bad ass! and pretty tasty too.

Product Design Final: Cracked out my old version of Keyshot for this one!  I wasn't planning to go so 3D heavy but once I actually made the thing in 3D it was just too much fun to render out all the pretty passes and comp them. :) I am especially happy with the last image of how this could look like in game! last terms Graphic Design Final really helped with mocking up a game UI set up!

Color Theory Final:  I am actually pretty surprised by this one! I am really happy with the way it turned out and I am going to try to find a way to hang it on the my wall.  All the saturated purples and blues look really nice compared to all my other more gritty Gnomon posters :p

Story-boarding Final: And here it is, complete with cheesy (badly recorded) voice acting but I actually managed to pull it off.  I had a brief period of doubt that I may have bitten off more than I could chew for this two week project with all those other finals too but with about 4 hours of sleep a night for 8 days it somehow came together :D

Now to go home and sleep for the whole two weeks of break :p

p.s sorry for splitting the video into multiple parts blogger only lets you upload tiny video files

Week 8 - Nearing the Final Stretch

Phew just a quick post this time still lots of homework to do... Zoology Final due in under a week now eek!

Part of the Zoology final was to take one of our horse sketches from the visit to the barn and render it.  We were able to pick any medium to render so I went with a tried and true graphite and Prismacolor render.

In class we spent 3 hours doing gestural sculptures from our sketches from the last zoo trip.  I went with a sculpt of the super cute otter scratching his chin!  I really enjoyed trying out the softer clay it was much more intuitive and easy to use but also a little more limited than last terms sculpting clay.

For Character we were working on expressions this week.  This was a little trickier than last weeks gesture homework but it was a lot of fun.  I really liked adding the snake expressions to the 5 refined expressions.

For Product design I worked on refining the mask.  I am hoping to finish out the 3 pages and also pose the 3D character and put her in a game environment with a little bit of UI if I can find time!

For storyboarding we finally presented our rooftop stories :) I managed to finish adding value to all the panels but I was cutting it close!  The feedback was great I will be adding a couple more slides before next class and refining the ending.  Francis didn't like my ambiguous ending and after thinking about it I agree it will be a stronger story if I commit to a ending.