Animation Retargeting

The semester is over and I am uploading some assignments that I may have missed uploading.

This particular assignment was learning how to re target animation to different meshes.

Final Project: Environment Assets

Our last two-three weeks of class have been working on assets to put on an island. Each of my classmates took an asset or two depending on complexity and we had to match styles and merge all of our assets together.

My assets were a banana tree, grass and ferns.

Here are my final rendered shots in Maya. I will add a UE4 screenshot when it becomes available.

Drawing Fundamentals

I am not sure if I mentioned it before, but we do have a traditional drawing class every Friday - separate from our figure drawing class.

This weeks assignment was to use techniques from Feng Zhu to learn how to come up with and create small environment clips and ideas.

To begin, you start with a grid in Photoshop that separates about 10 or so spaces to draw in. Then you plop 30-40 images down in a sort of color vomit or collage chaos.

This helps your brain try to pick out different shapes and colors and pull something from the chaos. Not all the clips will be successful, I had 2 or 3 that weren't... but this is what I ended up with.

I enjoyed trying out the different color palettes and trying to make them fit. The first one I did was the bridge in the upper-left corner, then I trickled to the upper-right. I then moved to the bottom panels and filled in the middle last.

The two-three panels I felt didn't work for me is the top-right (huts around a lake?), the bottom lower-right (desert) and the one above that (man vs temple).

I did have a few favorite too, the second row, bottom-left, and the pink temple were some I really liked.

From here, we had to pick one of the panels we liked and flush it out more. I choose the pink temple because it had a nice color scheme. Here is my final result.

Continuing Work...

Happy December! A lot of the work I've been doing has been for the same projects and cleaning them up for our final project.

I am still working on my banana trees and will sculpt and bake out some maps for our final environment.

We have also been introduced to BluePrints more in UE4! They are still frustrating to learn for now, but it is much easier to keep playing with them until they work. Working in real code I tend to freeze because I can't think of what else to do... Using this visual scripting allows me to just keep trying different nodes so it's a pretty take on what coding could be.