Week 21 & action plan

Back in Week 20 we were asked to prepare the current stage of the character project we had reached at that current point in time. After submitting my screenshots of the model I had my review with Mike and Emma.

After about ten minutes with them I was tasked to come up with an action plan on the way I'm going to tackle the next part of the year in respect to what we'd discussed in the review.

One of the comments that was made was my seemingly lack of response to feedback which I admit is something not documented in my blog, so therefore I'm making a conscious effort to document it not only in my head but on my blog as well.

I also take too long on projects as I find myself not balancing my time with my personal work and development as well, so I'll need to compensate with the quality of my projects in order to develop further as an artist in my own respect as well.

Now I had misinterpreted the hand-in for what they wanted to look at for this review, I thought they just wanted to have a look at the point we had reached in the project so I had just saved out some jpeg screenshots of where I was at in 3DS Max. However I think from the feedback they wanted something more presentable than just a screenshot, therefore I need to be mindful of how my presentation will effect my grade.

I was also told to re-do the character project in my own time at around 2k tri limit, theoretically taking half the time of this one in which I'll understand better the processes I've been going through.

So to recap:

Commit positively and document feedback.

Be mindful of completing projects in sufficient time.

Pay attention to aesthetic quality of work and presentation.

Redo project with a 2k tri limit.

Complete a post-mortem of project afterwards.

In other news I've been modelling this past week and I've reached the end of my modelling. At the time of the review I had just completed the body, however now I'm about to complete the texturing phase of the project too.

The main problem I found was that in the 3 Weeks leading up and preparing us for the project, we had a week where we modeled folds, which I'm now aware that this is not a good idea. This reason being that it completely destroys the topology of the model and therefore will not deform correctly when rigging. However, ironically, I don't have enough time to redo my topology completely as I will then be behind for the rigging and texturing of the model.

For now I'll leave you with the screenshots of the model so far and next week I wont have too much to show as I'll mostly be rigging and tackling that!

Week 20; The Modelling of Me!

  The modelling of the head didn't go as smoothly as I'd of liked it. In fact, I spent the majority of the week modelling my head, which was a huge time sink. I think I personally invested too many tris and too much time in modelling my head and overlooked how many tris I'd need to model the rest of my body.

Breaking my face into Face Loops

Start of modelling the head using box modelling - Front View

Left View

  Never the less, after the final touch ups on my concept and researching facial topology I cracked on with modelling the head for my model. It was actually rather a simple process which I just found very time consuming as I wanted to get it near enough perfect since when you look at a character the first thing you notice is the face. After many cuts and swift loops later, I ended up with this at the end of the week:

  At the end of this week, after modelling most of the head I decided to do a quick paintover of the features to make myself look considerably older. I debated whether to model the creases in my forehead in for next week, but after consultation, decided it'd be better to conserve my tri count and add them in on my texture. 

  It's not perfect yet, but I'll keep on cracking on with it over the course of next week, and hopefully tomorrow I'll start modelling the body and the rest of the accessories!  

Paintover of head model

Week 19; Feedback and Continuing Concepting

  This week we continued with our conceptual character development based on the feedback we got last week on Friday. My feedback entailed annotating my mood boards and further idea generation of my photobashes. We were also set a task to complete 20 iterations of value design (separation) for our characters so we can apply colour easily as an overlay.

Clothing Board

Annotated Mood Board

   So I started Monday with further pulling ideas from mood boards and clothing boards I had compiled, after annotating them and figuring out exactly what I wanted from them, then arranging them on my mannequin. Like last week I warped and used the perspective tool to clothe my mannequin until I had around 32 iterations of idea generation. I then put these images into greyscale mode so I could separate the values easier for the next stage.

Photobash Continued

Face Paintovers

  I then went on to some further idea refinement by doing paintovers from the four successful photobashes. I added accessories and such quickly by painting over the concept, which enriched the character and provided a purpose for the character. However before this I did research into what accessories a medieval fisherman would use and came up with a simple rod, a pronged harpoon and a basic net form, whilst adding detail to the belt area with various utilities that a fisherman may find useful. This added a layer of realism into my character which is quite valuable.

Accessory paintovers

  After this step I went onto separating the values, which actually was rather harder than it seemed. My initial plan was to just use an overlay layer with different value combinations until I found one that looked okay, but the layer blend mode didn't give the drastic change I was looking for, and ended up painting over some values by hand to get the correct definition. This in turn actually watered down the details I was wishing to keep so by the time it came to collecting different colour combinations the detail had almost gone and the concepts seemed rather watered down.

Value Separation

  However I proceeded in producing the colour iterations after picking a value separation that I liked. For this I collected a board of moods and colours from screenshots of Disney films and general happy mood images, which would be in keep with the project brief. I then colour picked the compositions and applied them over my concepts.

Colour Mood board

  They do seem rather radical but I figured that I'd make them radical to see what worked and then edit and mute the colours on a later pass of the concept stage.

Colour Design

  I then landed at my final concept, seen below:

  However, I was unhappy with the presentation level and detail of the concept so I went back in and added texture definition and surface definition, re-adding the folds I'd lost in the value separation stage. We arrive here, my final concept (middle), with hue/saturation tests either side of the final just to see if I wanted to tweak any final colours.

Final Concept - Refined

  That's pretty much where I wound up this week, I'll join you next week where I can finally start modelling!

Week 18; The Village Character Project.

  This week we were starting the long awaited Character project, and boy, does it feel good to be getting stuck in!

Initial scrapped concepts from last week

  So far this week I have been compiling mood boards, clothing boards and all manner of research! For our Visual Design lesson we were taught the practice of photobashing characters together. This involves making a “mannequin” of ourselves taken from our orthographical images we either had to provide for ourselves or were taken on Wednesday which I sadly missed. We then effectively cut and pasted items of clothing onto the mannequin, using the warp function and perspective function in photoshop to make the clothing sit on the model. This is an incredibly quick way of generating ideas and developing those ideas with paintovers and such.

Annotated Mood Board

  I started by taking reference from my mood board I created, only realizing that I needed to make a whole separate board with a much bigger size just for clothing to photobash together.

Clothing Board

Photobashed Iterations

Face Paint-Over and Photobashed Concepts

  I managed to produce around 24 iterations of my character in different pieces of medieval attire, around three of which I think worked quite well. I had to hand in the clothing boards, mood board and photobashes of my character in for feedback review and then work on from there, so I'll continue next week when I have all of my concepts approved and I'll work on paint overs and orhtographics. Until then!

Week 17; Clothing Folds and Resurrection!

  To kick off the new week I have a new power supply and my computer finally works again! I know it'll be difficult following up from that exciting sentence but I'll try my best.

   This week we had a lecture on Monday from the Animation and Games Art 3^rd Year life drawing tutor; Geoff. This lecture was actually really useful for my life drawing as he explained how to really understand the volumes of the subjects we were drawing, with exercises like drawing the form as if it was see through to understand how (for example) a leg would deform when in a seated position – how the thigh flattens out. We also covered head proportions and the weighting of the subject in the sketch. For example: always bearing in mind the centre of gravity of the model when sketching, which gives a weight to the sketch and makes more realistic.

Andrew Loomis - Proportions at various ages

  In games production we were covering clothing folds, where we had to model a sleeve on an arm which was rigged to help us understand deformation of topology and how to create clothing folds on topology. The process includes using the “cut” tool to create diamond-like shapes and moving the verts to make overlapping folds – better demonstrated below

  For Critical Studies this week we were given our character project brief which I was absent for but have picked up the PDF. We have 4000 tris to model our character, a 1024x1024 texture and a 512x512 32bit targa for accessories.

  I've already decided what kind of character I'm going to design roughly; I'd want to design myself as an older character, perhaps late 50's as a medieval fisherman. I would have just created the character as a model of my in medieval fisherman attire although I didn't find that to be particularly imaginative and I thought it'd be interesting to try push the boundaries of what my imagination can cook up.

  I'll be back next week with my concepts and mood boards of the my character!

Week 16; A Character Continuation

  So after a weeks reading I'm ready to continue on with the next project warm-up for the looming character project. This week we were tasked with modelling a low-poly head, as a learning experiment for out character project. I didn't have too much hassle with this and was rather simple to follow along with.

  For games production we used a technique called box modelling where essentially, like a classical sculptor you carve the head out of a block, using the cut tool and swift loop tool craft out the head.

On Monday was the preparation for this exercise as we were tasked for Monday to take photos of our face ready to draw face loops and facial topology over them so we could model out the head using those images as reference.

  For the latter part of the week we were given a critical studies talk about cleaning our footprint on the internet and roles we would have in a company or group. We started with a sort of personality test which then determined which of these Nine roles we'd fall into:

Plant
Resource Investigator
Co-ordinator
Shaper
Monitor Evaluator
Teamworker
Implementer
Complete Finisher
Specialist
 

  After taking the test I fell into the category of “Teamworker” which is surprisingly accurate for one of my attributes. This role entails “Co-operative, perceptive and diplomatic. Listens and averts friction”. However the “Allowable Weaknesses” include “Indecisive in crunch situations. Avoids Confrontation” Which I wouldn't say is totally accurate. Some good food for thought though, It'd be nice to be more rounded an individual rather than sitting in one category. The other part of the lecture was finding ourselves in search engines and how we can eradicate any unwanted data of ourselves found easily on the internet, which I didn't find too bad as there isn't many things that I could find about myself, except my Batting average in 2012, which is probably the only embarrassing I could find!

  Other than that I ventured into town to buy my own copy of “The Hobbit” as my other copy is back at home, since I had finished “The Rachel Papers” and my Power Supply had not yet arrived. The reason for doing this was the third film in The Hobbit series was released recently which was getting poor reviews and it'd been a while since I'd read the book. But that's about it for this week, I'll join you next week!

Week 15; A Fresh Start with a Funeral

Hello again! So we meet again after the Christmas break and this first week back has been quite eventful.

To start off the week we were given a project to help us with the forthcoming character project. We were given a low-poly female body to model in a week. Now, halfway through this week is where the fun begins. On the Thursday, my power supply for my desktop blew, leaving me stranded for a computer, only being able to access one in labs – The death of my computer. This was a rather awkward situation as I was working from home on modelling the body of the female character so I only got so far.

In better news, this lead my back to my love of reading; since I was going to be without a computer for a while. So, I decided to revisit an old favourite of mine which I never finished; The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis. An Intriguing and somewhat challenging book (vocabulary-wise) which I distinctly remember reviewing for a Year Nine project in secondary school, only to be told it covered “Rather inappropriate subjects”. I digress, the book itself is a fascinating read into the mind of a highly intelligent, yet uncomfortably awkward teen, Charles Highway, on his journey of the last three months of being a teenager. A highly acclaimed book that I'd recommend to most (once I've finished it, anyway), as so far it's been a gripping story and has more than sufficiently challenged my vocabulary.

Back to more familiar ground with the modelling side: This week was an exercise in body topology of the female form. I spent most of my time trying to replicate the topology given to us on the reference plane for the modelling process, and even though I didn't get to finish the model before my computer blew, I still have a good understanding of how to go about modelling my character for the Village Project.

For Critical Studies this week we were given a new perspective on how we should be constantly evaluating and re-evaluating ourselves as we continue on the course. There were some very helpful things I need to do which I really hadn't thought of before like filing my marked work away so I can reflect on the feedback on a later date. I also need to actively do something about my feedback, something like making a plan and sticking to it, maybe pinning it up in my room to remind myself. Also compiling all the data of my feedback and trying to work out some trends to improve on. The lucky thing is that our feedback is either verbal (Therefore I need to have a notebook handy to take a note down) but mostly digital so I can always have a copy online to file away. 

  We were also given a sheet to write an action plan for our next two years at university and analyse our personal strengths and weaknesses. From these things I determined some future goals; including every Tuesday working through an hour of tutorials to improve my overall knowledge of the programs and medium I'm working with and writing a blog schedule to strictly follow.

I have also determined over the Christmas break that I need to make time to work on my ability to draw, which will come with practice of life drawing and extra life studies outside of taught class time.

So it's not all bad news, I've rekindled my passion for reading, and in a couple of weeks I'll be able to have my computer back and upload the model lost in progress.

I'll join you next week when I hopefully will be the proud owner of a new power supply!