Andrew Loomis Figure Sketching

http://www.fineart.sk/photo-references/andrew-loomis-anatomy-books/figure-drawing-all-its-worth-andrew-loomis

Andrew Loomis is a writer/artist that I have recently come to know as he was mentioned in a video I was watching of a different artists work. I thought ill check him out because I know that I need to get better at movement sketching, I found him to be a very professional kind of person when it comes to language and the way he describes his ideas and concepts.

I think when it comes to being an absolute professional artist the person learning needs to learn the basic principles of everything even remotely related to what they want to be drawing in their profession, as everything in the create industry seem to overlap, like principles in filming can make a painting better or the squash and stretch in an animation may help the feel of a picture portray its idea better, this is why I have been studying A Loomis and trying to get the fundamentals of movements and figure sketches down a little bit more in my own skillset.

Nicholas Kay Artist Study

Nicholas Kay is a great freelance artist I found on YouTube a while back and decided to study his work and how he creates it as well as how he makes a living out of the industry of freelance illustration.

One of the key aspects of his work I think is that he works to create visual images as real to life as possible, he knows the tricks and tips of how to get metal looking like metal and how to get a real looking perspective feel and keep things in focus and depth of field. He uses a very theoretical approach to drawing as I have seen in many of his videos, he goes through stages of work which ultimately layer up the image he is working on and even though it may not look particularly stunning when he starts his work, in the end it always comes out amazing.

I have tried his way of working and created a character design a little bit like this one, I found working in a theoretical way to be quite time consuming, it is hard until the very end to visualise the finished result but I think it definitely payed of trying to work in this style which differs from my usual methods.




http://nicholaskay.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/feel-good-nonsense-and-hard-truths.html#comment-form

DeviantArt Competition

I entered a fairly small competition on DeviantArt as part of my PPP practise and came up against artists of this calibre, I really like doing landscape work as well as character concept art because it gives the painter a chance to portray and put images in peoples heads of scale and space which would otherwise be impossible without you know.. making the pyramids or something, I find it really fun to make huge scale pictures where the viewer can really see the depth and details in a piece and thought that I would blog about another artist that has entered this competition and that has traits in their own work that I would like to mirror and fins inspiring myself.

This artist did not actually win the competition even though I think that they probably should have as I liked their work the most, the perspectives in the bottom picture as well is something that made me like this picture enough to blog about it, the bottom one is again from another competitor in the DeviantArt 2D visual artwork competition which I sadly could not find again the get the name of the artist for it.

I do not think that I fully met my potential when doing work for this contest, this is because there was a limited amount of time left to create something for it but also because of the sheer amount of work that I had to do for the 505 module which was taking up pretty much most of my spare time at home and at Uni, I am thinking of entering another bigger contest in the near future and will try and focus more on this type of artwork when it comes to doing our own brief in the 506 module which will be coming up after the VFX one this year.

Freddie Wong Effects Study

The first thing I thought of when I heard we were doing a VFX after effects module was FREDDIE WONG! I have spent a lot of time being a vegetable in front of YouTube watching cool AE that Freddie has created, he has the same sort of humour as me which is a little bit stupid but also able to find something impressive and stupid quite funny.

So the reasons I have been studying Freddie as a practitioner are firstly, he does a lot of gun videos, he is very good at blood effects and gun sound effects and also the camera work that comes with scenes in action films, I have been thinking of creating my 1 min video with some gun fights and a bit of an action film theme going on but I dont know yet I will have to wait and see what people think to my idea presentation.



Another reason I find this video so good is that fact that Andy Whitfield stars in it with Freddie, the fact that Andy has a good enough sense of humour to work with a not necessarily big time production company and probably did this shoot for free makes the video a lot more funny and lighthearted as well as the fact that it is based on the oldschool game Timecrisis.



This second video has a breakdown of how he created the first person shooter film which makes fun of people who hack games like call of duty to be able to headshot people and got more kills for less effort.
It was a really interesting watch and gave me an insight into how a complex and interesting after effects video in its unrendered timeline should look, because before I saw this I had no idea at all what or how after effects should be used professionally.

FX Module Briefing Day

These were my initial thoughts on the OUDF504 module after the first day we were briefed on it, at first I really didnt like the idea of having a very linear storyboard that is already 4/5 done for us because I do like my freedom to be creative when working on a new module, but I guess this will be good for me working on a brief that is very specific as I have not done this many times if any in the past. 

As I already had a few ideas in my head before the module started I wanted to get the ideas in my head out before I forgot them even if they were not particularly relevant, these were the few ideas that I had that I didnt want to waste even if I didnt particularly use them in the end.

Final Machinima Piece

This is the finished uploaded Machinima 1 minute video that me and my group created together. We based our project on the title Surveillance which is why we had generic stereotypes to start with, an then improved upon them. We thought about Surveillance as a word and some of the first things that came to mind were someone looking at someone else, a camera and security jobs. We then based our storyboard roughly around the idea of a guard ship and security cameras. This evolved over time into what has turned into the finished cinematic. Anyway here it is.

Maya Animation Playblasts

These are playblasts of all the animations I made for my character as my part of the Machinima team project. I am quite happy with all of the results, the only one I would have liked to be a little different would have been the 5th one down, which could have been a faster flowing animation. I made these by in Maya removing all of the grids and visibility controllers then just hitting the playblast option.

Maya 5

These are some of the final screenshots I took of the processes I used and explored in Maya and Unity, the top screenshot is of my character in Unity with his 3 animations attached to him. The biggest problem I had with Unity in this project was not really a big one, I had to create new textures and use Targas instead of IFF formats for my imported texture files. This was a minor inconvenience and I had to create a separate bump file to make the bumpmapping reimport to the model but other than that everything went fairly smoothly.

I also used Andys environment to animate my character in, this would make sure that when he is imported to Andys Unity folder and resized to fit in the scenery he would interact in the environment properly. 

The differences between this model and the alien one is about 20 hours of modelling and rigging experience. I feel it necessary to point out that my Alien model will be far inferior to the rigging used in the Guard model, this is because it was my first time using these processes and it was all a little rushed as we were given a bit of a deadline when it came to finishing the alien model. I spent a lot more time on my guard because it felt like it was mine, and I want anything I make to represent me, therefore I tried to make it as skilfully as possible. At each stage in the rigging process I saved the file separately to make sure I had files to fall back on, and I paid special attention to every stage of rigging and made sure it all worked properly before I moved on to the next stage whatever it was. I also did all the housekeeping for my guard model and locked off all the joints so that it could not accidentally break, it is a pretty bomb proof model and I would confidently give the model to an animator to used knowing that they could not and the model would not break by accident.

Concept Art Aftermath

With the little amount of time I had left after animating all the scenes my character had to be in, I decided to draw a little concept art of what could have happened after the incident which occurs in the machinima. At the end of the machinima the ship that the scene is set in, blows up. The animation ends there but I thought it would be cool if I added a little bit of a teaser to what happens after the end of the animation. This art is a study of practice as well as a little bit of extra work towards the 505 module. I learned more about the dodge and burn tools in this exercise which is what I used very roughly to create the image at the bottom. Overall I am happy with this quick drawing and think I want to improve in this type of artwork in the future.

505 Final Crit And Feedback

This is the check sheet for what needs handing in on the deadline of the 4th of December (practical hand in deadline) and what needs handing in on the 6th of December (blogpost hand in deadline). I got a lot of good productive feedback on my comment sheet when we all went around and assessed eachothers work in the final crit of the module. I got stuff like, need to make my character move more in realistic ways, and nice texture but environment is a little dark. I will talk more about this in one of my next blogposts, where I will have uploaded all the playblasts that I used in my crit to be assessed on. This is one of my favourite ways of assessing eachothers work, it does not take a full day like the present at the front of the class crit does, it also helps people put forward their opinion as it is an anonymous comment and people are not afraid to write down what they think.

Sound Recording Day

This was an independent day we spent at college as a group to try and get some more appropriate sounds for our spaceship environment, we didnt want to get stuck using unrefined sounds from online to bulk up the noise in our finished project. We spent a good 6 hours in the recording room picking and editing noised we found on soundtrack pro, we also recorded our voices for the characters in the scene, which I think is a good thing to do as it interweaves you more to your project and makes you care for it more and maybe even work harder for it as a result.

These are just the images I took to prove that we spent an independent day in the recording studio. I actually found this to be a very fun day and it felt good to be getting ahead of work and doing independent extra work. I will be evaluating how our group worked together in my evaluation but think that doing this own little project as a team made us work better together and made our team morale higher and again in turn made us work better.

Thought Bubble Afterthoughts

Apart from this being the best day evar because I saw a SPARTAN! it was quite fun, it was a new experience for me as far as comic conventions in fancy dress goes, I felt like i kind of stood out being the only one not in costume. Anyway I learned a lot about how the people in the very select industry work, we talked to a lot of the people behind the stands not just about the work they were selling but more importantly about how they got in to the business and how much it costs to rent a table here and how successful they have been in this line of work and so on. The best part about an event like this is the unique amount of artwork that is exclusive to the event and the unique artists that are presenting the work that you may not find anywhere else, I found some stickers that looked home made but very well done, some postcards and poster artwork that were very well done and inspirational and probably would be impossible to find on the internet if I hadnt met the people who created them at thought bubble that day. 

I have kept all of the business cards that I found on the day because who know when I may need to call upon one of the illustrators or artists that I met on that day for work in the future, probably wont need to but its always nice to keep contact numbers and e-mails, also who knows I may just contact one of them to find something out or get some advice.

Maya 4

These are some of my most recent screenshots of my Maya work. They show some processes that I have used and how I have been working on my Guard model over the weeks. I will elaborate on the pictures a little to get an idea of what they are screenshots of.

This would be a problem I had with my characters elbow joint, it is not the same problem that Matt addressed in his tutorials but rather (I think) because of the angle of the shoulder joint in the arm, I managed to fix this after 2 hours of trying but inverting the elbow joint Y-180 X-180 Z-180, this made the arm in exactly the same place but it rotated properly this time. The other elbow joint turned out fine which I am thankful for, with arms in the future I may just avoid this problem altogether by modelling each arm individually instead of duplicating them and hoping that it works.

This is a simple screenshot of me following the tutorials and adding set driven keys to the foot joints and adding groups to control the different aspects of the set driven keys for the feet. This is a simple process but which takes time to get used to, it looks really complicated to start with but isnt once you understand the process. I now understand that each group does its own thing to the foot and that is why they need to be separated so that they work, I also understand that some groups are grouped to themselves because they have orientations from the same point but from different axes.

These are some of my later alien screenshots, finishing all the aspects of the alien. Some of the most complicated things about the alien are the little things, like the blink and eyebrow controls, I managed to get everything working well in the end but with only a few imperfections like the eyes following the head only a little slower than they should and the eyebrow controls not being weight painted properly but finished well enough that I could make animations with the model.

This is a screenshot of the actual finished alien. I did actually UV map my alien really well using all the processes we learned like pinning UVs and unmapping that way, but just ended up adding a Blinn texture to him as UV painting takes a long time and I was starting on my own models UV mapping and painting by this point.

This is a screenshot of the guard model I made which took me around 4 hours to model properly once I started. I made half of the model to save time and then mirrored and joined up all the vertexes and it seemed to work just fine for what I needed it for. This is also the guard model fully textured which I am proud of, I think because I like what I am making I am trying all the harder to make it work and look good.

This is the UV map with texture on it, this entire process on top of making the model from scratch took me around 5-6 hours to make the model, 3 hours on the UV mapping of the model, 6 hours on the UV texture map because I had to start again when I was half way through. Overall NOT INCLUDING rigging everything properly and locking it all off, making the guard with a nice texture and bump map took me about 15+ hours. I would estimate that with all of the rigging, handles, lock offs, custom attributes and all the rest of it, it has taken me about 30 hours to make a model that is finished and ready to be used in animating. The animating process is another matter entirely.

A close up of my guards face showing how the bump mapping worked and how well I think it worked. The bump mapping was just a case of using the processes I learned last year which is making a black and white version of the UV texture I made in Photoshop and then applying it to the Bump Map section on the Hypershade colour texture being used for the model. The bump mapping is what really made my model pop, he had a really nice texture before but with the Bump settings added to him, he started to look very sharp and robotic with each line and dint adding to his overall essence as a soldier. Another thing I really should mention is the smooth factor of my character, he has been strategically smoothed in places and left with the polygon normals faces in other for a reason, the soldier is in a bio suit, which has skin tight material in some points and blocky thick alloy armour in other points, I did this by highlighting the parts that I wanted to be smooth and hitting the smooth option, then on the bits that I wanted to be blocky I highlighted them using their faces then hit the restore normals option which makes them go back to their undeformed face levels.

The finished product. In the UV texture painting stage I decided it would be easier to pre render the lighting glow from the small lights than to add lights in either Maya or Unity because the characters suit has at least 20 lights over his body and I just found this way to be much simpler and much easier to do than the other way of doing it which would be adding lights everywhere.

New Brushes Test

This is me first testing the new brushed I downloaded with an online paid for tutorial video, I have never worked with custom brushes before and was very excited when I unzipped these from the file folder. I decided to do a blog about this because it is another steppingstone in becoming a good 2D visual artist and illustrator and will again expand my knowledge of how to use Photoshop to a more professional and expert level.

 

This was the initial go I had with the brushes and it was mainly a test to see what each of them did, I will be using them in a more refined and expert way when I work on my next piece of work, but overall with 5 mins I dont think it came out too bad for a test which is why I also used this image in this blogpost.

Deviant Art Competition

http://ayame-kenoshi.deviantart.com/art/Train-Your-Brain-Contest-336449766

 Jason Felix did the cover art for this competition.

 

So this is one of the earliest competitions I have entered this year as part of my PPP module and self directed practice. Deviant art is a good website to connect with and show case yours and others artwork. I have been a member of this site for a few months now and am getting more and more work up and a little recognition. Recently they held a competition for members of the site which has four categories for anyone to enter any number of times, I naturally entered the Entertainment 2D Entries section as 2D digital art is my thaang :). I know I havent won but it was good practice and was a nice opportunity for lots of new people to see my work, also if I had had more time I think I would have done a little better in the quality of work that I produced for this event.

Halo 4 Study And Artwork

Keeping up with my new tradition of buying special edition games for the artwork that comes with them, I decided to buy the Halo 4 special edition copy. I also tried doing a little bit of concept art for the halo universe in a style I have not tried before, it turned out not too bad but I am not particularly happy with it, the picture took me about an hour to do before I got bored and said it was finished.

Here is a phone picture of the startup icon for the halo game on the xbox dashboard. I have played the game for 60 hours it says in the statistics menu, and overall it is not as good as the previous titles and not as good overall as I had expected. It is conforming to the new fast paced games like call of duty that are being produced more and more rapidly these days and think it has lost its integrity a little bit.

Here is a picture of the items that came with the special edition of the game, I was quite disapointed with the 5 or 6 flimsy bits of paper that came with the game. It feels like games today are losing their integrity and becoming all profit and being churned out without any real thought as to the history or the old feel of the story that made the game good to start with. Halo was a slower more thought about game but seems to be moving faster and faster and is feeling more and more hollow as the series goes along, I am unsure weather I will be continuing to buy and follow the series as I feel like the good part of the halo universe has been lost.

Maya Stuff 3

These are another load of Maya screenshots that I have taken so I can elaborate on them and the processes that go into making everything that I have made in Maya. So I learned (or thought rather) that Unity runs animations at 30 frames per second and Maya runs things at 24 fps so I used the preferences menu and changed the time slider so that they would match up, it turns out that somewhere along the exporting line that Unity played my animations at the same speed they do in Maya, this was not a huge problem because all of my animations only run for about 8-15 seconds and the slowed speed is not that noticeable when it is played in context.

For the part of the module hand in where there needed to be our own versions of the alien Matt told us to make, I decided to learn all about how Unity worked and how it runs the scripts and animations, I did this early so that when it actually came to doing it for real I would know how to do it and get it out of the way faster. I hadnt finished my own alien by this point so I used Matts finished model to animate and learn all the techniques of what I would need to do for myself later. 

The scripts were not as tricky as I had anticipated, as long as there is no break in the code then everything works properly, its just a case of knowing what is meant to be written in the code and then going through and checking that there are no slight errors in it anywhere. We only used one script for our turntable hand ins, which was the random animation script, it plays one out of the how ever many animations are attached to the model at a time and chooses randomly between them all for which one to play next. After a few attempts I managed to get this working and was very happy to finish my alien model and get it out of the way. 

Another thing we needed to incorporate was the rotate around a point script for the camera so that it, when played, only rotates around one point in the scene. This makes a turntable look a lot nicer and also adds a little bit of interactivity from the viewer to do which is always good.

Here is a side on view of my character in his T pose so that I have better reference to model him from, I imported these into the scene as image planes so that I could scale my guy properly and all the proportions would be right. This worked well and I think I wont ever be working without reference in Maya when it comes to modelling again.

Again this is an image plane I used to model my character on.

Richard A online purchase

This was I think the first time I have ever purchased a video online, most of the time you can watch big screen films or mainstream things on the internet for free (Not that I advise this ;P) but with smaller more selective videos produced exclusively for a website, like the video I bought and downloaded, there is just no other way to get them than to pay for them. The thing is I will happily pay for these videos because I know that the artists and people making these videos are making and seling them for a fair price and for what they are worth, whereas mainstream companies will only try to make a profit.

Anyway I found this video very inspirational and useful to my selected practise, and think it is a big step forward for me as an individual to have started branching out and finding these new exclusive pieces of content that will hopefully improve my trade and advance my career.

Also here is the link to the website where I made the online purchase.

http://idrawgirls.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/concept-artist-richard-anderson-guild.html

A Little More Concept

This post is titled A little more concept because, well I have done a little more concept, but what I want to write about in this post is how some of my initial ideas have developed into the more finalised concept art you will be seeing in my blog. 

So to start with I drew this image, a guard in a security room. This could very well be a scene in the final machinima animation we are creating, but I only intended it to be a little more insight into the technology and time period of the ship, I wanted to give the viewer a futuristic feel and think that the suit and touch screen holograms he is working on might do that. I decided about an hour in that I didnt like the picture I was working on as it is, I finished it purely because I didnt want to feel like I had wasted my time, this is probably why it is not as good a quality as it could have been and explains why I didnt put as much effort into it as I could have.

The other images in the post are some sketches and inspiration I made or found in comparison with the work we are creating. I found this piece of wood a few years ago and thought, I want to use this in a creative way at some point, and now eventually I have. I found the image in an old folder on my computer and decided it could work as maybe a weapon design or ship design, I did some sketches (below) based on a ship design with the essence of the woods patterns in it, in the end I didnt do the ship designs but it is still good to blog about all the work I have created and done. I also noticed that a weapon in a recently released game (Halo 4) looks a little bit like the sketches I have made on my notebook for the ship design, I had not seen the weapon at all before I did the skeches so I was just surprised at how similar, to me anyway, they look.

Lecture 3 Panopticism

These are the lecture notes from the third Lecture in the OUDF501 Module I attended.

Finalizing Concepts

Because I know what my focus is going to be I have been trying to steer myself a little more in that direction as much as I can, that is the direction of concept art and development of game ideas. I took a little time out of my busy schedule to draw some more art on what an idea for the space/airship we are designing might include and look like. Mainly what inspired me to draw this though was some art in black and cream that I saw in a book in the library (which I have also blogged about) and thought I might be able to replicate the style in my own ideas and designs, I think I managed this quite well and am happy with this finished piece and will be handing it in at the end of the module with the rest of my work. 

And just as a little more in depth as to what it actually is a piece of concept art about, it is of a character in maybe a bio suit in a recreational garden where members of the ship can go for a walk and see organic life as opposed to the usual interior of a ship that are used to, it might also be where the oxygen for the ship is produced, and it is on the outside of the ship with a giant see through dome above so someone in this garden can look up into space if that want to and just generally overall get a feel of space and freedom when they need it.

Soldier Guard Character Sheet

There is not much to write about in this post, I decided to do a character sheet for the main character in the machinima we are working on because we as a group decided that I would be modelling and designing the guard character so it is always a good idea to do a character sheet. It just adds a little depth to a character you as the viewer do not know much about. Also the fact that you never see that characters face means he is a little more unknown than someone without would normally be, the fact that there is only a minute to represent the character as well means that viewers will not understand anything into the background of him, which is all the more reason to write this sheet up. Anyway here it is and if it at all seems a little generic, think clone soldiers from star wars and it might make everything make a little more sense.

PPP2 Research

When we where asked to look in the library for PPP inspiration and things to blog about, I found this magazine. It is called ImagineFX and features some really cool concept art and detailed processes on how to create work like this. the thing I like about the concept art in this book is how it done quite simply but still gives the impression of detail, shown in the image below and to the left there are a few very simple steps to creating a multi layered environment concept art, I will look into this type of working in the future and see how I can add the processes and maybe some of the style into my own work. Below also is a few artist statistics, it is sometimes nice to put faces and names to the work I am always seeing online that impresses me, it is also good that a magazine is featuring the artists as well as their work and seems a good way to market yourself. This is what PPP2 this year for me is all about, I will be looking for more things like this and maybe soon even trying to get myself featured in magazines as these people do and trying to market myself in the big open world.

I tried this style for myself and found it was quite easy and nice to do, It is especially good for concepts as they are quick and get the rough point across easily.