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.

2D3D Week 5 -- To Fish Or Not To Fish?

Its really not a question. You have to fish. For a grade and for practice!

So this week consisted of doing everything we did for Weeks 1-4 and applying them all in one week!

Here is my progress:

This is my low-res fish model I started with.

Next, I fitted all the UVs to the model.

From here I created a higher-res model to pull into ZBrush.

ZBrush is a great program! I really like playing in ZBrush! I am still not that amazing at it, and still need to learn a few tips and tricks, but I can easily spend time in it.

I don't have an accurate image of my ZBrush sculpting at this stage, but I do have an older one...

I noticed in this version I had some weird black shading going on with my normal maps that I went back and fixed.

After I sculpted, I decimated the model then I spent some time baking. It took me about 5-6 bakes to finally get a normal map I was okay with.

The AO map was a similar process. It took a few tries to get them the way I wanted them to look.

I also created a POS map as well as a specular map. There isn't too much to say about these maps since they are all pretty much trial and error.

I did want to make a future note for myself that these maps all get layered on top of each other after you create your color map.

After I finished baking out these maps, I sent the model into Mudbox. This is another great program where I love to put on headphones and go to town. I pulled up some color reference material and switched between coloring in Photoshop and coloring in Mudbox. I didn't use much texture variance here since it was a fish, but I did add some nice scale stencils.

Here is my colored fishie!

And my final rendered fishie:

Lastly, we need to always make sure the model looks good in whatever engine you use. Our engine of choice is UE4.

I really like how this turned out more than my model! I am super proud of this fish wayyy more so than my cannon.

Learn & Grow:
1. Understanding Mapping
I still have a hard time understanding where and when the maps get used. I understand the normal map, but are the AO and POS maps required for a model? My understanding is that it's mainly for aesthetics.
2. Decimate your model!
Somehow I missed this step with my cannon? It's not a big deal for these models since they are so .. "small".. but I did decimate my fish to try it. Its very nice to know also in ZBrush that decimating your model removes UVs! Speaking of...
3. ALIGN YOUR UVS!!
I ran into a newbie mistake with my UVs. I just left them in whatever shape or alignment they happened to fall in. This created way more headaches than I wanted it too. Not for my normal maps, but for my AO, Spec and POS maps.Next time, make sure that if you can, align your UVs how they would work on the fish. A specific example of this is for my POS map where I created a ramp gradient. One half of the fish was below the other half and the gradient made one side of the fish black, and the other side white. Awesome.

I was super nervous about making sure I followed each and every step correctly! I did have to ask a lot of questions and tips and tricks for certain programs, but I feel it turned out well, especially for cramming everything we learned over the past four weeks into one! Now, time to work on my RPP!