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.