Finals... for real this time!

OK term 9 is done! wow that was by far the hardest term at Gnomon to date! but we all survived good job everyone! :D

I wound up baking my creature final onto a rough low poly cage so I could do my previs in Marmoset instead of relying on Keyshot.  Hopefully I can run through a few Keyshot tutorials in the near future since it is a very useful program I just didn't leave enough time for this final.  Also now that I have seen what the other tracks are able to pull off in Nuke with their post processing etc I feel a little amateur doing mine in Photoshop :p

You can see more pictures and the Marmoset scene on my Artstation page.

For the Animation for Games final I finished up my Attack combo and added a rough death animation.  I have had a lot of fun in animation this term I feel like the lessons I learned last term combined with some of the new tricks in this class has caused animation to really starting clicking.  There is still a long way to go but I can totally see myself as a games animator if that every happens in the future.

If you want to see the full animation loops check out the files in my term 9 Google Drive folder

Here's the big one! Environment for Games! wow this class was huge.  I learned so much in this class and in the supporting classes like Texturing and Shading for Games and Game Creation 1.  I wound up finishing my Marmoset scene on Sunday night and the assignment was due Monday 7:00pm  So I thought I would try and get the whole thing into Unreal! It seemed like it wouldn't be too tough but wow there were a lot of steps!!  I had to add a 2nd UV channel to everything in my scene to hold the light map bake which in itself wasn't hard but there were just so many pieces in the scene that I had to repeat the same process so many times.  I think I might be able to write a quick script that could do that in the future though... we will see.
But that was only the first step after that I had to build and assign every material in the scene including some of the more complex ones like the glass and wax shaders, then do all the post (in camera) effects.  Looking back at it I'm not entirely sure how I managed to pull it off but somehow it all came together just in time!  Still there are a lot of little problems that cropped up, most likely from me having to rush it.  Still I did want to take this scene further in Unreal and make a small cinematic so I guess its pretty good to have it in Unreal so I can start chasing down those errors.

But now time for some well earned rest! C you all next term!

Finals!!... Kinda

Phew haven't updated in a week or so but I have been crazy busy!! Also had a little dental trouble... which was annoying and lost me a few hours so I guess I will be doing a little catch up over break :*(

I have a couple of makeups in week 11 so there will be 1 more update for my final final stuff...

Gonna do a little bit more with this project after the final TnS class.  I want to do a bit more with the Podracer Texturing.  Mostly some tweaks but I also want to paint some permanent decals and damage.  The assignment was to use Unreal for that stuff and it was a really cool learning experience but I really like how it turned out and I think with a few more hours of love the textures could go a lot further!!  I built some functionality, UI and animations for this piece too which I will screen capture for the final post of this term :)

Animation is getting there.  I need another pass at this attack animation to really push it and I got some great notes in class of how to make this feel more energetic! check out this attack loop in my Google Drive Folder

Going back to rendering.... hmm I never really got all that good in Keyshot but I shot myself in the foot a little here by assuming it would work with multiple emissive objects, custom lights and SSS skin :P I wasn't able to get the character fully rendered in time but I got some OK (debatable) screen grabs out.   

 I am pretty happy with the way this character developed.  I pushed the secondary forms a lot more from week 4 and I did a lot more with the cloth too. Still I have a long way to go before I would consider myself comfortable with costuming.  I am hoping to do a Victorian, Bloodborne inspired character next term which will involve a lot more costuming than this character... So I guess by the end of next term I should be a lot better with costume!

One thing Keyshot is quite good at though is making renders that look like 3D prints!!! I really like this effect! 

Just in case my workload wasn't quite heavy enough already I opted into an extra rigging project for a friend at school.  I have learned so much in Cameron Ward's class this term! really great teacher. I am pretty confident that I can rig up this stylised character, by Rico, with stretchy IK and a few other cartoony tweaks too before the start of next term.  If I can get it all to work well enough Sofiane Bnk will be using it for his animation graduation reel! which would be awesome!

I spent most of this week building a few extra props for set dressing my scene to bring a little more narrative intrigue to the shot.  Now that I am more familiar with the games pipeline getting these props all modeled and textured really doesn't take that long.  Especially considering they aren't "hero props." Still they bring a lot more to the main shot and some close up shots I have planned.

I am pretty happy with my first pass at lighting this scene :) but I do want to make a lot of corrections and tweaks before I hand this in next week!  There are still a few more props to texture but I am pretty confident that I can get it all done in time :D

Man this term has been tough!!  And I even had a couple of easier classes like Game Creation 1, Animation and Rigging each of which only took up a few hours a week to stay on top of... It makes me a little worried for next term especially since I switched out a couple of easier classes for 2 pretty tough ones, Advanced Rigging and Advanced Digital Sculpting.  Those classes combined with Character for Games, Game Creation 2 and VFX for games is gonna make next term even tougher :*( better get some rest over break!! Still one week left of this term better not slow down too much yet!

Week7 - Not long left for Finals eek!

 A sobering and at the same time very productive week!

 Finally got the last thing on my to sculpt list done!! though this piece probably took the same time as almost all my other pieces combined :p or at least it felt that way.  Though now I have something like 15 custom brushes I made for this piece that maybe I can use again in the future.  It was an especially fun piece because it holds a large amount of the back story to my environment's setting.  Much like the long stone carving for Skyrim (but nowhere near as cool) a lot of the pieces of this relief sculpt hint at larger story elements.  I called out a few of them in the above image but there are more hidden gems in the piece too.  There were a lot more I wanted to add but I planed out my schedule for the rest of term and I need to kick up another gear if I want to get it all done :*(  I dont know where I'm going to pull the time from though I feel like I am already maxed out.

I got the rest of my scene into Marmoset this week too.  For the most part I am happy with the bakes but allllllll of my Substance Designer work needs a lot of work.  They all need re-scaling and just more break up.  I am going for a cleaner Bloodborne vibe and putting this all together made me realise just how far off I am from that goal.  Still moving forward though :) and now I can feel the piece coming together as a whole and I can add textures to the scene as I complete them.  I hope I will have time to add more break up to the floors and walls and add all the tertiarty props to bring some lived in clutter to the scene! Plus I need to learn how to light and post process the scene but that comes later.

 My texturing and shading final is coming along nicely too.  I have my low and high poly pass done and its all baked now so onto texturing!  I spent quite some time in Zbrush adding detail to the Podracer and rusting it up a bit too.  We will see how much of that comes through when I work on the roughness and grunge passes!  I also have to build in some floating damage and sticker decals as part of the assignment. I left the damage quite light for the first pass so I can add those custom details in Unreal.

 A bit of basic material work, plenty more to do but so far a good start :)

I also build a small trim detail sheet which I will use later to add procedural damage.

Moving into the final for creature design! I picked my star wars creature to develop and take to final render.  I have one more week to finalise the sculpt and tertiary detail and cloth but I am happy with the main silhouette at least :p

I think I bruised my pen finger though with all this Zbrush this week!! It's the same feeling I used to get during my exams back in college.  Advanced History and English exams requiring multiple essays that all had to be done in ink pen left me with a permanent dent to my middle finger :p I wonder if that is something that future generations won't have to deal with now that digital papers are more widely accepted.... weird thought anyway lots of work to do! bai!

Week6_Awesome Week!!

The usual Sunday and Monday night push this week to get everything done on time but I feel like I have made huge strides this week :D

 Wow this was an awesome and difficult project!  I build some of the insert pieces first at a waaaaaay higher resolution than I should have.  I kept thinking that this piece should be ready to bake when its done but that just left me with an unstable and huge Zbrush scene.  I know now that it would be better to use proxy shapes at a much lower resolution to figure out the interaction of forms. I think because of that issue I wasn't able to play around with the creature too much because it took a few seconds to even move the camera after a while :p Still I really love this guy! and it was a blast to combine environment pieces and creature.  The face was probably my favorite piece to work on when I integrated the colossus eyes and the kind of cute features he immediately became likable :)  If this was a creature in the game I wouldn't want to kill him!

 I wanted to create a creature that was a living embodiment of the Great Wall.  A little tropey I suppose but I still think its a legit direction :p 

I built the center piece in the above image and then I was able to create all the other shapes just using different mirror axis.

I wanted to play around with some shape creation in Substance Designer and thankfully this weeks creature assignment was perfect for it!! It was easier than I thought and in a few hours I was able to put together this cool floor texture that is completely dynamic! I think its my OCD side but its so satisfying to complete one of these things knowing I could use it to create dozens of variations!  Now I just need to figure out the later stage stuff like better edge ware and detail!

 For Environment design everything is starting to come together.  I have my scene all blocked out and I have added a couple of the missing pieces from last week like the rose window etc.

 I added a wood panel texture to my Substance Designer textures which marks all of the basic ones in my scene.  If I find time it would be nice to add some more but I have to get the rest of the base stuff done first!

It took a few late nights but I now have almost everything in my scene baked!!  Just a few more pieces like the rose window and the floor disc left then its onto texturing.
I mostly focused on environment and creature this week so I haven't made much progress on my pod-racer but there isn't a lot more to do on it other than a little sculpting and then I can move onto texturing! :) We will be using hovering planes to add damage and decals to the prop so with any luck I may be able to rig up something in Unreal where I can use variables to add damage and stickers to my prop! which would be really cool.

Week5 - a bit of a breather

A bit of a tough one but compared to last week this was much easier!  I still only got one night to work on creature but I think I am getting a lot faster in Zbrush so I was still quite happy with what I was able to do in a short time :)

Moving onto the texturing and shading final :) I am going with the below concept for a cool looking podracer!!  I have finished the low and mid models this week.  It took up quite a bit of time but it was so much fun to do!  I now have to send it thorough to Zbrush to add some cut lines, rivets, damage, etc. then texture it over the next few weeks :) I will probably be taking a break over the next week to make more progress with Environment for games but I feel like I am in a good spot to move forward.

Completed my basic run cycle for animation.  Next up is refining the run and starting on the pre-attack idle animation.  You can see the loop in my Term 9 Google Drive folder.

Finally putting things into my environment scene in Maya :D there is still plenty of sculpting to do but everything is UV'd and low poly modeled and all the tiling is working now yay :)  It was really satisfying to put the whole scene together and see it all taking form.  Can't wait to see the next step where the high poly sculpts come into play!  I should have the majority of the modeling done by next week and then I can move onto texturing.

Here is my creepy creature sculpt for this week!  The brief was to design a face hugger based on the Alien movies.  I went with a spider like creature that burrows deep into your skull scoops out your brain then takes over! I really grossed myself out looking at reference for this creature and found a whole new subspecies of super nasty spider 'the bird dung spider'... yuck! you can see the decimated model on my Sketchfab page.

So this week I will hopefully be making big strides with environment for games, also the brief for creature is Shadow of the Colossus!! that is so cool! I can't wait to get started! I will definitely need more than one night for this assignment! wish me luck

Week4 - Crunch hits already

This was really tough, trying to get ahead or at least just stay on track with environment for games took a lot of hard work.  I wrote out a chart of all the elements I needed to: model, sculpt, bake, texture and implement and it was a little scary!  I managed to get a huge chunk done though but as a result all my other homework got pushed right up to the wire.  I then had to do a few tough all-nighters just to do them a little justice and after all that I am just going to have to repeat the process again :p  I know its always an option to just phone in homework for other classes but I just have such a guilty feeling when I think about doing that plus I really enjoy all the other classes, animation, rigging, creature modeling the assignment are all enjoyable... So its quite easy to get lost in an assignment and just enjoy it.  Well I am just about staying above board for now so I can have my cake and eat it too, at least for the next couple of weeks.

I didn't have much time for creature sculpture this week.  I only got to spend one evening sculpting this character, which is a shame because I would have loved to spend more time refining the design and costume!  Though I may be able to come back to this design for the final.  The theme was a character you could find in the Cantina bar on Tatooine.  I am not a huge fan of the strange starwars background creatures unless they are mounts or more brainless I guess... I just find them a little weird for my tastes.  So I went for more of a sinister sith/geisha style creature instead.  It was interesting to have such a short time budget to create something original and I guess as a result I had to just go with the flow and not think too hard just to get it done.  I do wish I could spend more time designing this character but just diving in without overthinking was kinda fun too!

Making progress with all the pieces of my level design final.  I have almost all of the props modeled now phew and some of them have a bit of texture work too :) I am trying to build everything up piece by piece so I will give all my props a bit of basic texture work and see how they look in engine before I take individual props to a more polished level.  That way I think I can maximise my productivity and not spend too long on a prop that doesn't get a lot of screen space.

The texturing and shading midterm was a really tough deadline this term but I really appreciate it since it pushed me really hard to get a lot of substance designer, modeling and texturing done all for week 5.  I don't think I would have pushed so hard if this deadline hadn't been looming!  The assignment was just to put a little diorama together using some of the props and textures from my environment final.  I probably wont be using the flesh texture in my environment final but I wanted to go for an Amnesia style creepy vibe to play around with vertex painting.  So creeping flesh was actually kinda fun to play with.... weird sentence...

I am still working on my animation which is a run cycle for my character.  And for rigging we have moved onto building control shapes.  Its not too exciting so I wont bother with a screen grab but I did get a little Python practice this week by building a couple of scripts that automate part of the control shape building process.

Next week looks like it might be more of the same.  I feel like I still have a mountain of work to do for my environment final.  There are just so many props and modular pieces that all need to go through a little bit of sculpting then texturing and baking etc.  I hope I can do everything I plan to do for my final!

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.