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.