Week 8: Environment

Last week we worked in teams of three to build a small landscape. I was in charge of creating the landscape and placing the different textures down. My other two classmates were in charge of the skydome and the foliage.

Environment is something I want to focus on, and this was getting my feet wet with playing with UE4 environments. I was able to play with setting up the material and figure out how to paint the landscape with free textures on the UE4 Marketplace.

Common Art: Week 7 - Setting up UE4 Materials

Last week's assignment was to go into UE4 and set up materials. Setting up the materials is very important since you are able to adjust and change parameters inside of the engine. This could be important if you need to change an aspect of your model to get it to look better.

The canon and the starfish were provided by the teacher, and using his example I adjusted the material and added some attributes to play with.

Life Drawing: Learning Anatomy

I wish I could post my figure drawings on here! As Life Drawing applies, we are drawing nude models and learning anatomy. This is the first time this has been available to me, and it has been invaluable.

We have finally covered all the skeleton, muscles and smaller features of the body such as eyes, lips, noses and mouths. It has noticeably improved my drawings just by attempting to identify and draw muscles where muscles should be.

One thing I have found an interesting love for is something we studied in our Drawing Fundamentals class: Value of color, mainly black and white.

We were shown examples of pure black and white drawings with only shading and it was some of the most beautiful art! I would really love to do a few value study drawings and I am applying them to my nude drawings and trying to figure out how to get the look I want.

By doing this, I've identified problems with my art...meaning, I realized I am not sure how to get the effect that I want. When I look at a fold in a piece of clothing, I can see the light and dark, but I can't seem to get it to look right.

Doing these value studies, I believe it will help me accomplish the look I want in digital painting and clothing.

I learned all this by doing these Life Drawings every Friday.

RPP2: Rapid Proto-type Production - Robo444

This is our second RPP. What is an RPP? It is Rapid Proto-type Production. We get assigned into groups of 4 or 5 students and we build a proto-type game in two weeks! Its a lot of hard work and it really pushes everyone's skills and creative juices in a good way. Typically the groups consist of a producer, two programmers and two artists. I was the only artist this round with two programmers and two producers, so much of the look and feel of the game was up to me.

I was proud of this round and wanted to post some of my art and concept art from the project. I was able to use a lot of what I've learned so far in my drawing classes to make sure everything flowed easy.

Our game was called Robo444 and the theme of the game was narrative. We ultimately came up with an idea about a robot who gets short-circuited from a hive-mind mentality and learns to discover himself off the network.

One of the things we learned from our drawing class was to first come up with character silhouettes. These were a few designs that I created. From this silhouettes below, number 11 was picked as the winner from the team.

Once the silhouette was created, I drew out a color version of the character. Later, all the blue turned to red to make the robot more evil looking since the robots in the story were capturing and destroying mankind.

After the concept sketches were approved and well-received by the team, I went ahead and created a model and UVs for the character.

I did sculpt the model a bit, but ultimately that version wasn't used for various reasons.

This was all the color I placed on the robot. The red stripe going across it's flank and the red eye and yellow flashlight.

I also modeled and textured a variety of assets including:

- Broken CD

- Cigarette Box

- Ripped Concert Tickets

- Newspaper (Where I used Alpha to make the edges wavy)

- Radio

- Saxophone

- Soda Can

- Street Sign

- Trash Can

I also modeled a variety of repeatable textures for our subway scene.

The first four are different cement floor textures.

The next set is a series of walls to use in our subway. These are all repeatable and I looked up references of real subways to get an idea for the decoration and design.

After this, our game was a narrative and we decided to use cutscenes to tell major parts of the story. In total, I did 9 of these scenes.  

The opening consisted of these three shots in order: 

I am particularly proud of this scene since I applied composition to these shots according to what I learned in drawing class.

The middle three sequences were "memory" sequences, once again in the order they appeared in the game:

And lastly, here are the final three sequences in order:

After I finished the important scenes, I worked on the logo and some other graphical design assets to use for our game.

Overall this was a fantastic game to work on. The game turned out really well I believe and my team really worked as a team the later it got in the project. Everything was finished comfortably and no one felt extremely rushed. I was thankful to be apart of this game project!

Common Art: Week 6 - Tiling Textures in Zbrush

This week's assignment was a split path... create a tiling texture or color a character model in Zbrush. I opted for more of an environment approach and selected the tiling texture.

This was a great assignment! Environment is something that is frequently overlooked with younger artists and it's invaluable to learn how to set up a great environment as well as great characters to go inside of it.

It took me two tries of the stone to get the seams to match up, but I eventually got it!

This tile consists of a: Normal map, AO map, Depth map, Specular map, Shadow map, Color map and lastly, the render map.

2D3D Week 6: Starting the Fish Pirate

Last week assignment was to start our very first character model! This model has been proving very time consuming! I haven't quite ran into too many issue with it yet, but making sure everything looks good in every view can be challenging.

The model isn't done yet, but here is the progress so far. This week we will be completing the model.

Animation: Beginning Walk Cycle

In animation class we were tasked with creating our very first walk cycle! (Well, first walk cycle ever for me.) This was just moving the arms and the legs, no details of the head or limbs yet.

I do not have too much to say about this, other than the feet clipped and I didn't pay too much attention to the arms.

Learn and Grow:
1. Make sure the feet do not intersect the floor.
This is my first time ever working with animation. Granted, we had the bouncing ball assignment, and I don't plan on posting those, but this is my first true walk cycle. I had a little difficultly grabbing and controlling the feet and where they landed. We use a rig from another student from a class before mine, and it was hard to control at points.