I've found a life drawing class near me and I went last night. It was a bit weird and frustrating at first, but then it was almost like I hadn't been away from it. Here's my piece from the 50 minute pose at the end.
I've even drawn the face! I've always had a weird mental block about drawing faces - I've always been paranoid I'll get it wrong or offend people or something, so I just haven't done it. And that in turn makes me think I can't do it and feel horribly self conscious and it becomes a vicious cycle. But weirdly I'm starting to get over that, without really having done anything about it.
When I progress in art, it seems to feel like the knowledge or ability of how to do that thing has always been there and that the walls are just falling away rather than learning a new block of information. Almost like there's more space in my head for stuff rather than less. Does anybody else get that?
I thought I'd put this up on here, it was a pretty fun project and got lots of good responses. It's a poster for XSS (Extreme Street Sports), a Southampton university club which Tim co-founded. The poster was for their fresher's fair, and Tim went around wearing the featured top hat recruiting people.
Crossposting this from facebook. This is a dragon I painted for my Mum to go up in the local library. I normally end up painting something at least once a year to do with the summer reading scheme. A year or two ago it was nature and I made loads of googley eyed bugs and painted lots of animals. Recently I ended up painting up a wooden Pterodactyl, I wonder where that's gone...
But anyway! This is bigger than A0 and painted entirely with poster/ powder paint! Who needs photoshop when you have the primary colours, black, white and green?
I suppose technically it is some kind of exporting to reality... even if it is just papercraft. Well, here's my tester, and it definitely worked! Only unforseen problem was that because the model had an open base, the papercraft wasn't particularly stable and the edges were wibbling everywhere, so I made a rough base for it. Here's the net, it's 3 A4 pages:
So the plan is now to do a few more things, I was thinking of doing this lot as a group, lots of nice boxy shapes:If anyone wants, I can run their models through pepakura and try to make the unfold as user friendly as possible, but I will NOT test build anyone's models for them. Also if anyone does want to do this, the lower poly the model, the easier everyone's life will be.
I'm doing a proper version with a full background, but it's not coming out the way I want it, so I've done a 'illustration in the corner of a book or something' version. I will post up the full background one once I've finished it, but I just don't think I'm ever going to be happy with it, whereas this I quite like.
I've been busy with the final project lately, but I did find time to make this monstrosity for Tom O' Brien's birthday (it was only a little bit late) And here he is in the lab, waiting for his new owner to arrive
Well, I've entered my first Gameartisans minicomp, the sackboy mini! The brief was to create a new costume for sackboy, either based on an existing character or an original idea. The limit was 2000 tris and one 512x 512 diffuse map, with any other maps being optional. I thought it'd be nice to have sackboy in some kind vehicle, thinking about the way vehicles are often represented in children's plays. I settled on a plane, seeing as cars pop up now and then in LittleBig Planet anyway, and then decided to kit out the sackboy appropriately as Biggles, the fictional World War 1 and 2 pilot. The background is taken from one of the Biggles books.
I think I did OK for my first entry, and I certainly had fun with it. Blogger seems to be misbehaving and not linking to the full sized image of my submission, so I will do it manually:
I don't really have anything amazing to report, I just thought I should update. Both the van and the pony are getting there. For the van I've almost finished the diffuse, then it's normals and specular. Then I can start the damage state, but at this point I don't think I'll make it anything that affects the entire mesh. Low poly pony is pretty much done, I just need to clean up my texture seams and fiddle around with my alpha channels. I've also done most of the high LOD body mesh, just hooves and facial features to tweak, then I get the fun of trying to make it fit my existing texture page. This screenshot doesn't show the alphas that go over the hooves.
Well, in the end I did do what I said I wasn't going to do, and I started making the van. The mesh is pretty much finished now, the only things I have to add are windscreen wipers and seats. I've modelled an interior as well, but I'll leave shots of that for when it's all actually finished. I have no idea what to do for the damage state, I want to do something really dramatic!
I haven't posted anything in a shamefully long time, and I have been working, I promise! I basically got bored of the garden, it was progressing but I felt I had little to show for the effort I'd put in, and it was feeling slightly bitty. I decided to switch to a nice lumpy thing, so I started on the pony. As it stands I've done my low poly (under 2k tris) and unwrapped it. I've got some cones and extra bits for alphas as well but they're hidden in that screenshot. I also started to rig but got frustrated and left it... I've started texturing but nothing's really happening with it yet. On the plus side, Hopefully I'll only have to do it once and it can serve for all 3 model iterations. I'm also finding I really want to start modelling the van now that I have loads of photos. I think I'm going to have to force myself to stick to one thing at a time!
I've started work on the environment brief, I'm doing the corner of a domestic garden. I took lots of reference photos while I was at home over the weekend, and have begun to build. I started on Monday after working at Outso, after the frustrations of starting out with Maya it was really relaxing to come back and work in Max! Here's my reference material: And here's how mine looks so far: It's a small area so my plan is to model and texture the big boundary areas, the soil and fences. Once those are in I can model and texture all the fiddly little things and just spend my polys making some nice plants.
I've finished all my units! Yaaaaaaay! The last three were practically the same mesh, the only difference is in their weapons and accessories. This made things pretty easy for me and meant I only had to really worry about the texturing. There were some really nice sword and sheath designs saved up for the important members of the army, so I had some fun with those.
As mentioned before, in the third week we decided to focus on a sitcom format. Dean and Alex chose to do part of an episode of the Mighty Boosh to see how the two remaining engines fared. Meanwhile, I didn't really have much to do, so was glad when Rupert Harris from the Bamzooki team got in touch with us.
Bamzooki is a CBBC show where kids can download a kit, create their own Zook, an insect-like creature, and give it different skills. Some will be fast, some strong etc. They then submit their Zooks to the CBBC website, and some are contacted to be on the the show. The contests are rendered in 3d and superimposed onto the show to make it seem as though the kids can interact in real life with their creations and watch the competitions on a table in front of them. The idea was for small segments of the show to have the Zooks out in the real world, creating mischief. Rupert was wondering if any of this could be achieved with machinima, so I had a play in the Bamzooki engine and with some video editing software and came up with this:
I also explored ways to personalise the Zooks a bit more and give them character, so I created a dummy Zook in Max and made it some features. It was good fun but unfortunately the Bamzooki engine doesn't support alpha channels, so that was a bit of a dead end.
This time round, Alex had the most success. His Mighty Boosh machinima came out really well and although there are limitations and things Moviestorm can't do that the script required, you can't tell too much. Moviestorm was very strong with regards to set creation and character customisation, as soon as the video plays you can see that it looks like the Mighty Boosh.
Dean had a lot of problems with Source, his lip synchs refused to preview and his character refused to begin the machinima sitting down. His choice of characters was also very limited by the way the Source engine works. Each character comes with their own set of embedded animations, and you can only choose from these when you are making a machinima. Unless you want to edit an existing model and re-export it, or make a whole new character and add in the animations, you're quite limited. The default textures weren't really ideal either, and make the shop seem a little bit creepy!
Jappet was unsure if I should upload these as they're based on existing works, but there are a lot of machinimas that use film and TV soundtracks, especially ones done with Moviestorm. I did e-mail the production company behind the Mighty Boosh asking for advice about it but unfortunately didn't get any reply. I think we should be fine as they are mostly our own work and they should fall under fair use with regards to copyright. That being said if I do recieve any e-mails or comments from official channels telling me to take these down I shall do.
