Drawing on the train (extra work):

These were just quick sketches I did while I was on the train to work. I do begin to feel much more comfortable drawing people now. Its really interesting, you can see each person having different shapes and expressions on their faces. Who knows, I might come back to these sketches and use them for a future project.

Final Background Designs

These are my fianl background designs for my groups game. Though originally we planned on making 8 levels, we ahd to rearrange it 6 because each background took me a while to complete. Not only for concept design , but fr changing the style to pixel art. I managed to make four of the six backgrounds whilst one of my team memebers made the last two.

Scene 1: snowy forest

Scene 2: snow mountains

Scene 3: Sci Fi room

Scene 4: Sci Fi blue room

brush technique and speedpaint

Quick blob texture practice:

This was just a quick texture brush practice with a blob. 

Bobby Chiu image:

Task: For this exercise, we had to work in small (by zooming out) for the first 30 minutes of the lesson. We also block out the broad areas e.g. blues and the orange. Then for the second half of the lesson we had to work on the details, for this we could zoomed in more. This involved adding the white patches of the while skin, the boys eyes and so on. 

after 2 hours:

making the 1 scene and 4th scene

These were my last background designs. to try and make the forest scene. I started with a basic style of just having straight tree trunks. Followed by adding basic mix of purple and blue snow. and then having three different levels of colours in the background.

 This image shows my piece adding branches to the trees. However I thought the background was to light, so I had to darken the trees and the green area and add a lighter texture to the snow.

 This was my final design for the snowy forest scene. As shown down bellow I changed the scene a little by adding more snow and giving the piece a smoke effect on Photoshop. I am really pleased with the end product and will continue to work on my second sci fi room.

Forth background:

This is my final background I managed to do. This is the 4th scene in the game as the player enters the sci fi room. This piece was one of the easiest background designs I had done throughout the project. For this I used bits from my previous sci fi room. As well as adding a new effect (adding the blue glow effect). 

This is the finished background design of the Sci fi room (scene 4). I played around with the glow effects and added more shapes and colours. For example the tubes and the grey panels. I ma very pleased with how this worked out and this personally is one of my favorite backgrounds I made simply because I experimented with different style and used different techniques from the other backgrounds. 

Space ships

The homework for the next 2 weeks is to design our own Space ship. Depending on whether I want it to be a battle space ship or just for transport. However I might try to combine the two just to experiment a little.

Moodboard:

Rough Sketches:

This first two drawings are designed to be a combination of a tour bus that we use at the present time. But I changed it a round a little and designed to make it a futuristic taxi. 

This second sketch is a more violent machine. A one seater is influenced by having the same fire power as a tank. Yet can glide into space with ease. I also got inspired by the star wars design of Boba Fett's ship. You can see the amount of detail that was put in for Boba Fett's ship, as it does look like something that is possible to make in a 100 years time or so. That is something I will try and aim for my final design. 

This last one was a rough 5 minute drawing, but I liked the design so much that I have now considered to use it for the project. I might consider going back and re-sketching it to give it a cleaner and neater design.  

Final Idea:

This was a rough final design of what I wish to make my space ship look like.

Modelling Spaceship on Maya:

Techniques and References used for Final Design:

Bush I used for scratch mark effect.

Technique used to make shine on metal. Followed this video to learn this effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBYYQFXD1Ho

Final design pose:
So I chose this position for my final pose. Now I plan on colouring it and adding textures to it.

Final pose with colour:

Using the same technique as my gun classwork, I placed textured images from Google and added colour to help form my ship. After spending 12 hours on this I final got the final result. I also quickly did a simple space texture in the background to add more effect to the work.

Final Design:

This is 'The Rust Bucket'. An old military prototype, The Rust Bucket is a five seater vehicle. With the main cockpit having two seats for the pilot and co-pilot. Whist also having a one seater on each wing. The wing pilot is in charge of the machine guns, and the main cockpit is in charge of firing rockets and steering the ship.

Though I managed to improvise and got a fairly good final piece. I felt as though I could have got a better result had I used shadowing on my when I was rendering. It was frustrating because I remembered doing it in one of my Maya lessons. However it was late during the Easter holidays and I was running out of time. So as I said before, I had to improvise by finding where the light might come from and where would the darks be on each material. Never the less, I was still pleased with my efforts. I feel as though I am improving and progressing with my designs and sketch's, but I will need more time to get even better.

Animation and Rigging

Animation:
For this lesson we got a chance to learn how to animate objects and rigging them. This comes as good practise for rigging our statues into positions we want as well as adding other elements to our battle arena.
Making the Pole and Ball move:

The first part of this exercise was to make a ball and a pole move. One rigged to go up and down, the other to move side to side.

Making a ball bounce.

Animating a rat:

The next part of this lesson we had to model a rat sized object. Then we had to draw a line path for our modelled rodent to move across. I felt as though building my rat was the easiest part of this exercise, the hardest part was rigging the damn thing to move! But I digress. After a little confusion with the frame settings I managed to animate my rat to get from point A to point B (the start and end of the line).

This could be used for my battle arena to make it feel more alive. However depending on how much I get done before the deadline also plays a part in this.  But it was good fun to animate objects and another skill that I have learnt on Maya can be ticked off the list.

Skeleton Rigging- moving the model into sitting position:
Now comes the hard part.. rigging my statue into a sitting position. To make this setting I went onto "windows"- animation edit- then clicked on human IK. I then chose to create the skeleton and it opened with the skeleton on my statue. Then I had to bind the skin onto the skeleton so that when I move the skeleton into position, then the skin will follow.

To move the skeleton in place, I had to select the circular joints and would have to choose to rotate or position it. This took me the longest to do, as I was struggling to make the model and the skeleton as similar as possible. But eventually I managed to place everything into the right position.

After being satisfied with the positioning of my statue I then got rid of the skeleton and now it has set the model into that position permanently. 

Now that it is finally done, I can now concentrate on making the hammer and armour for the statue to complete it as well as adding the textures for the throne. This was a very hard thing to learn and I had to be patient and had a bit of help to fix the rigging, but I am just glad that I have completed the poster for my statue.

Finished rigging statue

Life Drawing week 21 (final day of life drawing):

My last day on life drawing:

This was to be the final time I'd be able to do any life drawing for the first year. And it is safe to say that it will be strange not to have any life drawing now. But I digress. For this session we did something a little different. The model this time was wearing clothes...strange. However this was a different challenge, as we had to work with different areas of tone and line, for example the creases on the shirt. He did different poses and we used pencil and charcoal.

The last image was my favorite, because the creases and the shape of the figure looks very well done. The preposition is a little bit off with his right boot, but the rest of the body was really accurate. 

Form Language

The key thing to take in this session was how to establish key elements and aesthetic direction, in 2D and 3D designs. Fir example making an object based on using only the angular or rounded shapes to form the design.

We also watched a short video covering the key topics and examples of form language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukNI5ojXU9U

Practise:

We were told to make two different designs, one based on angular geometric shapes and lines and the other is on rounded geometric shapes and lines.

Hangmens Tree (extra work)

This was a quick improvement on my sketch I did earlier in the week for my tree project. Though it does show a little bit of character, I did not consider putting it in as part of my project. The name is loosely based on Peter Pan's home 'Hangmens Tree'. 

Trees

For this brief, we had to create a tree with character. In other words, a tree that conveys a sense of  atmosphere, feeling or mood. An example of this could be giving it magic,  a feel of unease, or perhaps danger. For my personal tree I would wish for it to be more of a large gloomy tree. giving it a sense of fear and danger.

Moodboard:

Photos:

These are just some of the photos I took while I was walking back from Woking to Farnham. There where some very unusual and interesting shapes that I saw and could be used for my design.

Drawings:

Just a few sketches to develop my idea for a final piece. 

Final:

The Spirit Tree

For this final I decided to try something a little different. Instead of a neat and clean style (which would have suited well for a man made object ), I went for a more experimental and colourful approach. I used one of my sketches as the idea for the shape. I also combined the photos I took in the forest, to be used as a colour pallet for this piece (so a lot of greens and blues). This took me 8 hours to do and I am very pleased with the outcome because I feel the colours mould together rather well, also having the path their, grabs the views attention and directing their eyes towards the huge spirit. tree.