Week2 - Ambitious or Dumb...

Another fun week :) we are starting to make some progress after the slow start.  I also went to the Gallery girls event and attempted a crazy 3D animation assignment!

In Hard Surface 1 we actually worked on a slightly tricky model.  The concept itself is quite simple but getting that clean topology and even spacing wasn't as easy as I first thought.  There were enough pauses in class while we were modeling that I went a little further and modeled the neck ridges and cap :)

In Texturing and Shading 2 we are continuing to use Bitmap 2 Material and Vray to replicate the Substance Painter workflow... (I assume I haven't used it much myself) But Robby keeps saying how Substance does this much better.  This week we tackled adding procedural grunge to architectural materials.  I tried to put a little bit of a story in it too, and since I made that muddy texture last week I thought I would use it as a floor base this week :)

I have also started blocking in one of the props I want to use for my Texturing and Shading final.  The plan is to model, the above Bolter, a table, carry case and maybe a helmet too but I only have till week 5 to get it all done so we will see if I reduce the scope.  All the props are from the Warhammer 40,000 universe from the Imperial and Space Marine armies.  I figured the Warhammer style is exaggerated enough to be really enjoyable to work on but at the same time has the capacity to show off hyper real and grungy textures, since we will not be learning hand painted or stylized texturing in this class.

Drawing has been fun this week, I think its finally starting to click for me.  There is still a long way to go but I feel like I have caught back up with my quality from term 2 so hopefully i will be overtaking that soon!

For Animation principles we added a tail to our bouncing ball to explore secondary action.
The animation can be downloaded here

So here it is my 'ambitious' animation project... its called Vine Animation and you can find it here: Google Drive Folder

The brief was to use history based animation to create a plant growing out of a plant pot.  That didn't sound too fun to me so I went with the cute knights fighting idea instead.  The original scope of my project included a vine golem instead of a second knight but I discovered that there was no way I could have pulled that off without missing some of my other assignments.  It also gave me a chance to practice hand painted texturing.  I am still struggling with it and I hope I can continue to get more practice!

Term6 - The Animation Term

Well this is the last term before our group all pick our tracks! That will be happening in week 5 or 6.  I am still pretty confident Games is the track for me, I just get such a kick out of creating environments or characters you get to play with when they are full rigged, textured, animated etc.  I know as a job I want to work in a more specialist field like Modeling and Texturing but I do like knowing how to take something from concept all the way to final working game/animation.  Modelling and Texturing is a tempting track but there are a few tracks in the Game course that I really don't want to miss!  Anyway this term started very lightly with a cancellation in week 1 but now we are in full swing.  Most of the homework this term can be taken very lightly (like easier than Term 1 lightly) but as always we all have the choice to go waaaaaay to far with each assignment too :p  I am trying to go a little further with some of the animation assignments to try out new: modeling, texturing, particle effects, etc. techniques and it makes animating bouncing balls a little more interesting, since we seem to be doing it a looooooot!

Animation and VFX homework for week 1, both a simple bounce animation and then a scene which has some emotion and camera work.  Both my animations can be found in my GoogleDrive Folder

Hard Surface 1 has been pretty light so far but we are learning some cool things like menu sets and UI/tool customization.

This term for Texturing and Shading 2 since the course has changed tutor we will be learning Substance Painter and Bitmap 2 Material instead of Mari.  Honestly at this intro level I don't think there will be a very big difference between the two since we will probably only be using the programs for 3D painting and material work rather than some of the more complex inbuilt systems.  Still I am really looking forward to learning a little more about Painter! I've owned it for a while but I don't think I've actually opened it yet :p  This week we had to replicate 5 environmental materials using Displacement mapping in Maya.  We also learned how to use Bitmap 2 Material to generate all our maps for Vray! It is a very cool program. I think a few weeks from now when we know a little more I will be able to take my texture work to a whole other level! :D

Gesture drawing is starting with a slow burn, we are mostly recapping some of the old stuff from figure drawing but that was so long ago now it really does need dusting off!  It looks like we will be doing some very cool stuff later though in terms of story telling!

History of animation started pretty slow too.  We had to copy a few pages from the old animation masters and then do a bouncing ball animation.  I was pretty tired of ball animation by this point so I decided to jazz it up a little and animated a baseball player practicing! Mostly so I could work out a good workflow in Photoshop for quick 2D animating.  I actually really enjoyed putting this together its the closest thing to real 2D animation I have done since I used to do flip-book style doodles in History class back in Year 9 at college. This animation is also in the Google Drive Folder.

Week 10/11 - Done... phew

Its been a weird last week.  I didn't have quite the scramble to final deadlines as I had in week 9 but it still wasn't easy.  Everything is handed in now and I can finally take a breath and relax :D

Original concept by Ryan Church

 For my Intro to Maya final I ran in a slightly different direction than the concept.  I matched the modeling and lighting with a little time to spare and found that once translated to 3D the piece wasn't that exciting.  I spent the last week tweaking the lighting, textures and adding a little extra modeling to tell a different, darker story.  I am so happy with how this piece turned out, I was looking back through this blog, waaaaay back to my old 3D work and I am so excited with the amount of improvement with my lighting and texturing!!  Can't wait to see my improvement with modeling next term with Hard Surface 1.

I reworked my SpiderGirl live action design for my Advanced Character Design final.  This was more fun than I was expecting in the end.  The technique is a little limited in terms of heavily relying on photo textures for a polished look but I can totally see myself adapting it with slightly lower standards of polish to very quickly iterate on costume design while still keeping that realistic look.

Again I am super happy with my final for texturing and shading! All that work on the diffuse textures really payed off.  I thought it would only take a few hours to knock up the materials in Maya after the diffuse textures were worked out but I was soooo wrong! I spent a very long time working on this project but I found just enough time in the end to put together the action comp above :)

Defiant ship model supplied by instructor

Week 9 sleep: a thing of the past

OK so I am now in week 10! and at the point where I am handing in Finals! though most of my classes moved into week 11 so it is only Digital Painting and Compositing I will be handing in this week.

Week 9 was the craziest week at Gnomon yet.  I have been pulling all nighters sleeping really weird times like from 6pm to 12pm :p just so I can try to get everything done.  I am just about on schedule but it hasn't been easy.

For Intro to Maya I have been working on my final. We had much less time to take this one from concept art to finished piece so I had to pull out all the stops to get it this far this fast :p phew!

I am pretty happy with the look so far, its all modeled UV'd  and unless the materials change the look drastically I think the lighting is there too! :D just texturing left and only one more week to go eek! no time to relax just yet

I finished my compositing final which was waaaaaay more than was required but I just really wanted to have some fun with After Effects and telling a silly story.  The requirement was a 10 second effect shot and I think I wound up with a 3 minute sketch with 8 effects.  A little dumb considering how much work I had for other classes but I don't know if I will ever have a reason to do something like this again so I went for it. I can't upload this one to Youtube because I used unlicensed music, sound effects and grabs from games but I might be able to upload the file for people do download but I just want to reiterate it was a student project solely to improve my skills with AE and I don't own any of the copyrighted material.

Texturing and Shading is coming along.  So far I only have the diffuse texture painted in.  I will be making a few tweaks and then moving onto building the actual shades to make the metal act like metal and the engines glow etc.

Wish I had a little more time to work on this one but here is my final for advanced Digital Painting!  I am amazed with how much progress I have made from last term! and I'm so happy with the level I can take my paintings too now :D there is still so much to learn but for me the next quest will be to try and apply these skills to 3D hand painted textures, when I can find some time to try it out.  I feel a little sad thinking my digital painting classes are over now but going forward I feel I have the knowledge to self check my work and keep improving.

I also got invited to a fashion show, as a plus one for my roommate, for a company she used to work for.  It was a pretty awesome show, there was singing and dancing lots of very well dressed people in the audience too!  I tried my best but I had also had about 3 hours sleep that day so I probably looked a mess :p  

Week8_Moving onto finals

Uuuugh so tired... OK one more week closer to break but looking at my schedule for the next few weeks it's going to be tough!

Advanced Character design has moved onto kit bashing photo real concept design but here is the final version of my game character.  Since I didn't get any feedback on this last week I just went ahead with the changes I wanted to make anyway and then took it to a more polished look.

My Midterm is shaping up, there is still a lot I would like to do to push it but I have to move onto the final now and maybe come back if I have time to polish and correct the last few issues.  I still have to put this through Photoshop - render out all the passes and composite them, add a vignette and color correction to bring it all together and link it a little closer to the reference... Hope I can find time!

Found a little time to make the last few changes to my first final for Digital painting I now have 1 week to work on the second one! eek! 

The second one is shaping up time to take it to a polished sketch level then work on lighting and rendering.

Lastly for compositing I spent a couple of hours at a friends awesome new apartment shooting for my final.  I pieced the rough draft together last night and it seems to hold up.  There are a lot of effects shots mostly involving tracking and masking plus my camera's mic is pretty bad so I will have to record some nice audio later too.  I don't know how I will be able to show this one, I might upload it to YouTube but that does limit the choice of music I can use... anyway back to class!

Week 7 - Wooo... wait... How much homework?!?

One week deeper into the monster that is term 5! this week was mostly UV'ing for me.  We had a few good lectures on how to approach it and how to combine groups for UV'ing etc so now I have both my Maya Midterm and my Texturing and Shading Final UV'd phew.  There wasn't a whole lot of time for much else :p

It doesn't look or really feel like a big leap forward but UV'ing can take a long time and really you only reap the benefits when you start texturing so hopefully I can get this scene finished in the next few days and then I can start on the Final! woop!

Same goes for the Defiant ship I tried to get the resolution equal over the entire model to ensure I didn't have any areas of high resolution texture next to low rez.  Now I can start having some fun coming up with a unique story for this guy that I can tell through its texture.

This is probably my finished version for 1/2 of my Digital Painting final.  For Compositing we learned how to use the puppet warp tool so I went ahead and animated this painting, league of legends style! It took a lot longer than I expected but I think it looks pretty cool... for my first attempt.

If you wanna see the animated version of the above painting check out this link!! Animated Splash Art :D

Nothing much to report from history of VFX we saw another couple of cool videos about the gaming industry this week and watched a very creepy interview with an AI... (shudder)  I picked my hero to do a report on, sounds like a junior school project :p But I am going with Neil Druckmann from Naughty Dog for my presentation for next week.

I haven't been too inspired to work on my character design project this week, we had another class where only 3-4 peoples work actually got looked at.  I know that it is supposed to be up to us to interpret advice on our own work from the in depth reviews of other peoples work but we all have such different styles and approaches sometimes it is really difficult to try and figure out how to fix something when you get 0 feedback.  I try to ask for advice after class but we usually run over 30 minutes so there isn't very much time for individual questions.  I will fix the few things I ran out of time to fix before the next class but I am really disappointed with the way this class has been taught this term :( OK rant over time to work on some thumbnails for my next digital painting piece.

Week6_First Review :O

This was a tough week, I think I picked up a bit of a bug :( but work still needs doing so time to soldier on.  We had our first Intro To Maya review this week, it was on a Friday to make up for the missed week earlier in the term.  The class was entirely review so it was a great chance to see everyone's work.  I was really impressed with how good some of the work was, a lot of people in this class are using Maya for the very first time and I guess I was comparing it to my early stuff, very impressive to say the least!

We are up to lighting for the Midterm, just UV'ing and texturing left, but only 1 week to do it then we are starting on our Finals eek!

For advanced character we are taking one of our characters to stage 2 before we polish it out next week.  I like the direction and simplified look of this character now but I think I lost a little something with her main shooting hand so I will probably re-do that soon.

For Advanced Digital painting I took my thumbnails up to basic lighting and color, this week I will be starting to render out this piece and also make a start on my thumbnails for the final piece.

For Compositing we are still working on the Little Red Riding hood live action composite.  It is fun to work with live action footage but its still more of an exercise so I won't be uploading the video this week.

In Texturing and Shading we are still working with BB8 but next week we will be starting on the finals.  I re-did the dirt and ware textures for this week with a slightly different approach, I like the look much better :D

I also picked my final model from Matt's archive, I thought it looked pretty cool but I didn't realise that it wasn't UV'd or named or grouped or anything XP so I spent a crazy hurried few hours UV'ing naming and grouping this guy.  Its a little rushed because the workload was nuts this week but I think its ready for me to start texturing next week.

For history of VFX we took a trip to a local modeling house called Anatamorphex.  It was a very cool studio packed with lots of awesome models.  The owner Robert gave us a really nice talk about his work in the industry and some cool stories from his past projects.