CrouchingPlumber/HiddenLevel

...A Little more time now...

2010-06-26T15:47:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with my blog layout....Why in Hell didn't I do this before!?

The Best of the Rest....More Links!!

2010-06-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

Okay here are some choice snippets I've tracked down in Bloodhound fashion from CGTutsPlus.com:

The Water Tower Tutorial

The Hot Rod Tutorial

The Weapon Tutorial

The Scifi Thingy Tutorial

The Splines Tutorial

These Tutorials all look pretty good at a cursory glance. I haven't had a chance to vet them myself yet so with any luck they will be as kick ass as they seem on the surface...Enjoy!!

The Useful Shit Rundown...

2010-06-26T12:27:00.002-07:00

Not as purile as the title would suggest...

This is basically an expunging of all the links that I've uploaded onto the Uni Facebook site over the past year....

Not one of these links will fail to help you improve as a game artist so lap it up and if you find something useful, for Darwin's sake, upload it to Facebook so your fellow cohort can benefit,

We be family and shit...

Okay this is a great tutorial, a little over worked for a simple dumpster, but it's a great demonstration of High to Low work flow and also tips for texturing...Also CGtutsplus.com is an outstanding website so have a trawl through while you're there, you'll be glad you did...

How to Create a Video Game Dumpster: The Complete Current-Gen Workflow | Cgtuts+

Dont ask me why there's a picture of a car, but I kept it cos it's nice!!

This is a plugin for Zbrush, not a tutorial, but if you hit a bottle neck at the UVing stage or you are looking to speed up your workflow it might be just what you need...

ZBrushCentral - **** Pixologic Release: UV Master (WIN & MAC)

www.zbrushcentral.com

ZBrush Discussion Forum

...Advice on the general thought process that goes into realistic texture generation
Food for thought...

CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

features.cgsociety.org

If you can't understand why after pouring hours into painstakingly modelling, unwrapping and texturing your model, you can't make it look as pretty as on the forums, chances are it's all in the lighting. This tutorial is quite lengthy but it's worth it for the tips...

Environment Lighting 3DSMax

www.scribd.com

Environment Lighting 3DSMax.

Another linkedylink. This badger is on the polycount wiki, which is a good read in itself. But specifically, this is an 'everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask...' ...about Normal maps. Answers to questions even seasoned modellers need to know...Check it out...

Normal Map - Polycount Wiki

wiki.polycount.net

..And lastly the now INFAMOUS AK47 Hard-Surface modelling tutorial, this is with out a doubt one of the most entertaining and insightful tutorials on this subject, a word of caution though the normal map generation process he uses is a bit buggy and can produce seams, Check out Racer445's personal website for an update in the not too distant future...!!

tutorials by racer445, hard surface and weapon artist. - Tutorials

racer445.com

free 3D and game art tutorials by racer445, a hard surface and weapon artist.

Carnival of Links...

2010-06-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

The basis of making anything creative is feeding your mind with a large smattering of something interesting...

So it's good to know that in the face of a boredom epidemic there is a small collection of 'Cool Hunting' websites around poised to inoculate you with a painless jab of wholesome interesting-ness...

Now This won't sting too much...

This first one is outstanding for the coolest collections of concealed Spy Gadgets, Retro Sci-fi stuff, Underground Urban Exploration and everything in between...Seriously it has to be seen to be believed...

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/02/abandoned-places.html

This Link is to a website that is alot like Digg but actually interesting...

2leep.com: Connecting Bloggers

The next one is just well interesting if you're interested in Russian stuff!!

Environment Inspiration?

http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2006/12/20/village-in-ukraine/

This website is pretty interesting too, loads of interesting articles not to mention the one posted here...Some things you just can't imagine unless it happened in real life...

There Was Once a Woman Who Had Immortal Cells

www.todayifoundout.com

Errr read the title....

http://www.damninteresting.com/

Damn Interesting

www.damninteresting.com

A collection of damn interesting things.

....And last but not least, absolutely guaranteed to put a smile on your face if you like the hard trolling...

"yeah thats not what I was looking for at all."

www.27bslash6.com

What DOES happen to lost ants!?...THE OTHER BLOG..

2010-06-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

Apparently other colonies will accept them, if they don't horribly reject them at the entrance by chewing off their legs and head....

But that's nothing really to do with this post.

I've kinda decided that I'm gonna have two blogs instead of one.

This one is gonna be for the GameArt stuff and stuff that isn't really that relevant.

...And then I'm gonna have another one for the stuff that isn't even remotely relevant, ie the pseudo philosophical stuff...

Bring on the 'Masters!!!!!!!!

2010-04-06T06:53:00.000-07:00

Getting it/Going On...

2010-03-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

Well things may be looking up!

I can remember brooding so hard in year 2...doubting.

I wasn't even half way there and I had managed to convince myself that I couldn't measure up to the people around me, let alone what the Game Industry wanted of me.

I guess I can put it down to one thing: Opinion:

Tepid Feedback: I guess not everybody is going to feel as passionate as you do about your work. No-one else can see how much you have busted your ass to improve, how many hours you put into that piece of work, how although it's not perfect; that piece of work that you've slaved over is a marked improvement on what you've been producing.

I really wish I'd had that perspective when I was getting clumsy feedback from various visitors. They see so much work that they become numb to who they trample. One visitor was so negative about the sketchbook that I showed him after a presentation that I almost stopped painting completely!! I was beside myself. It didn't matter how much people told me my stuff was good, I couldn't get that one review out of my head!

The other day I was showing work to a visitor and if I hadn't heard anything more I would have been convinced that he had gone away completely underwhelmed. The next day Mike told me that the visitor had advised that me and some of my cohorts should apply for CodeMasters...soon!

Shitty Death!!

If I had never heard that, I think I would have looked back on that meeting as yet another of the former scenarios above. So now I'm stoked! I could never have conceived of this happening at the end of the course from my vantage point in the second year.

The reason for that is that I had neglected to take into account somebody's opinion:

I'd assumed one thing;
the other was true.

Contemporaries: Game Art, not surprisingly is rife with competition. It's a course based around creating competitive games; of course it'll attract competitive people!

I've never really done well around competitive people. I love a bit of harmless banter around some games, but I could never get my head around the mentality that requires that they be actively 'winning' in all aspects of their life.

Since when do you 'win' at art!?

However if you are around that mentality enough it could start to wear you down.

I was a bald tyre by the second year.

Some people had just convinced me (indirectly) that being great at gameart was unobtainable simply because they saw themselves as number one and that made me feel second rate just by being exposed to their lofty opinion of themselves on a day to day basis.

You can't change an ego maniac, it's just their way of dealing with life and their personal way of motivating themselves to try harder. And good for them if it works. A lot of them are Hares.

If you set your philosophy to being competitive then you run the possibility defaulting to Loser just because you decided that you were running a race.

We tortoises get there in the end. I just never saw art as something that you had to 'win'.

The Ministry of Misinformation: What I realise now is that Gameart is an imprecise science, full of quick fixes and patch jobs and definitely with more than one way of doing things. When I started the course I was polarised by one way of doing things because it was the way that I thought it should be done.

Luckily I had a chance encounter with a tutorial that was COMPLETELY PIVOTAL to the way that I create and understand game art and I duly doled out the tutorial to anybody who wanted it. But nobody else was ever as excited about the DVD as I was.

I guess it was just important to me because it resonated with the style of art I wanted to produce and answered the problems that I was having with making it at that time.

What I now know, and what I learned from that tutorial is that you should never stop evolving your way of working. It sounds like bible bashing but it is so important to find that path of least resistance in your workflow and the only way to do that is to keep searching out new tutorials and new softwares to enhance the quality and speed up the rate at which you can produce your work. If you and I are competing for a job and we can produce a comparable standard of work, it'll come down to who can churn it out quicker.

Accentuating the Positive: A lot of the above is what I learned to avoid but this is what I wish I'd paid more attention to!! All the time I was hating on my work I'd stopped listening to the people who were sympathetic to my cause and who were largely, genuinely supportive of what I had produced during the former years. I just became so bummed out by unlucky circumstances, bad equipment etc that I didn't feel that they were seeing it in a balanced way or that they were just trying to cheer me up! But they were trying to keep me on the right track and help me through darker days and for that I'm extremely grateful.

If their opinions hadn't have been successful I may well have made the biggest mistake of my life and run away from the intimidating lack of prospects in the worst case scenario that I'd constructed in my head.

Epilogue: I was really, really, REEEAALLLY uncertain of my abilities at the end of the second year, so uncertain that I had almost decided to jump ship on the 3rd year and pursue a completely different career.

However I was convinced by my friends to stick out the last year to see what would happen but I was pushing forward with my application for the other career at the same time. Whilst all this was going on, I had decided out of simplicity to keep the proceedings a secret from the teachers.

Imagine if I had told them, they might have thought I'd checked out and maybe they might have checked out on me. If they had done that then I don't think I would have had some of the opportunities that have come my way since then.

So in light of that, you could say that it was the one time my uncertainty had worked in my favour!

The bottom line is that for all the doubting and uncertainty the gulf between knowing nothing and knowing everything is filled with opinion and not that many are anywhere close to the knowing end of the spectrum.

You just have to wait til the end of the race to see who wins.

Eventful week...

2010-03-07T16:38:00.000-08:00

In a post a little while back I mentioned the problem with the labs now being closed early as a consequence of a runaway computer.

Well the drama continues...

Thankfully for the better!

The Head of the Art Dept called after our group meeting and has managed to arrange for the opening hours to be extended once again now that we are up against a deadline. This is excellent news for us even if the late opening hours will only come into play on 3 days during the week. It's better than nothing.

Also thrown into the deal as a consequence of volunteering to deputy the labs on some of the nights for our dedicated Tech; Tim, I seem to have found gainful employ!!! I simply offered to sit in the labs and lock up and now I've got myself a ten-pound-an-hour job for Friday night lab monitor duty!! Happy with that!!

Further to the good news; A stonking great visit to Outso!!

A group of young hopefuls from the course were invited to the Outso offices in Nottingham for a fantastic openday style looksee. Situated near the city centre the offices seemed just like the labs but for a slightly more senior crowd! Once we had the general look around and the outline on what the company handled we were given a first look at a unique IP from the Outso team which we had great fun roadtesting. But one NDA signature later and I can't tell you anything more that what I've already said. In fact you'd do well to forget that too.

In between button bashing we were spirited away one by one to have our lovingly compiled portfolios given the once over. I have to admit that I was nervous about the quality of my work, but I was surprised by how positive they were about what I'd shown them so that has certainly given me a reason to be cheerful. We shall see if this means continued interest from the company, I'd be happy if it did!

Oh and one more thing...

2010-03-07T16:27:00.001-08:00

Here is a quick clay render of the front of the main Absintherie building from my scene. It's turned out alot like my concept, but I'm still not convinced that it really portrays a sense of Art Nouveau era france. Hopefully once I give a few more accents (ie drainpipes and baked detail) and texture it, it'll start to look a little more authentic! The asset has been built in a number of parts which will allow me to employ a number of texture sheets and also to scale the textures down for items like the roof which will be further away from the player.

I'm quite pleased with how the staircase has turned out. I used one of the Max stair primitives as a template to build from and then I simply added the details to flesh it out. I've built the scene to scale but I'm still concerned about the overall scale when I get it into the engine and start to look around.

The general advice is to build everything 20 percent bigger than the scale suggests in order to allow the player more room to maneuver but it is easy to go overboard and then end up with an over-sized Alice in wonderland feel!

New Piccies....

2010-03-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

A few renders of some finished props from the FMP. Both sets were Hipoly-ed and baked back. I'm particularly happy with how these examples worked out. It seems all the elements that make up an asset are starting to come together in a way that makes sense now. All I need now is a decent way to view them. Max is very pretty when it comes to rendering pictures but it is quite poor at give you an idea of how the asset will perform in Realtime lighting situations.

It does have a realtime facility for lighting and shading your asset but in my experience the results are substandard.

More surprisingly I've found that you can load a mesh into CrazyBump's 3D viewer and this coupled with the inserted normal map or diffuse (it's either/or, sadly) go to produce an excellent way to guage the performance of your normal maps especially if there are seams showing up!

Although there are fantastic preview engines such as Marmoset out there, I'm suprised there aren't more simple realtime render engines designed simply for testing an asset and it's shaders.

One to research I feel.

More Pointlessness...

2010-02-22T17:11:00.000-08:00

So here's a little sunshine for the deadliners.

We were informed not long ago that the labs were to close at 5 again rather than the usual 9 that we grafters were accustomed to.

This is thanks to our good cousins at animation, across the hallway, having the good sense to have security so lax as to allow an entire computer, keyboard, moniter, mouse included, to simply walk out of the door.

Outstanding show! What does this have to do with us? Er..precisely nothing. Floorspace if anything, the fact that animation now has to be carted out by the resident custodian, so to do we.

Does this strike anybody else as a tad unfair? So a few civic minded of us 3rd years have gotten together to arrange a meeting with the head of department to discuss the matter. However there is a strong chance that even with our meeting penned in, the discussion will be distinctly one way.

I haven't really taken a particularly active role in my duties as Student Rep, because up until now everything has been ok. But when you sit down and think about this what they are taking is a hefty proportion of my time and others time to work on our most important project.

Four hours a day, five days a week, the project initial deadline in a month. 80 hours dragged out from under my feet. That's roughly a week and a half of 9 til 9 days in the labs. This estimate isn't even including the time running up to our final deadline.

It's late so I'll wrap this up. I'm not going to take this sitting down, I personally don't have the money to afford the equipment nessessary for this course and if it hadn't been for a kind hand me down laptop, I'd have been screwed from day one. The lab is the only access I get to decent equipment and there sure as hell won't be any installed in the library.

If they say no at the meeting, the next step is a petition.

First Post of 2010.......Slack Mike, Very Slack...

2010-02-22T16:49:00.000-08:00

Geez time really got a head start on me this year, I just can't seem to catch up with it.

This IS the first posting that I've made since December Padre. So here are a few piccies in place of the dedicated, thoughtful and above all REGULAR posts that should be here...

Above is a couple of quick 3D paintovers in the method described in previous posts.

Cam pointed out a very useful facet of the projection mapping technique that I've been deploying using 2010's new Viewport Canvas feature combined with the concepts that I've already made. I could align my Uv'd model with the conceptart and simply project it directly onto the face of the building.

It could be the quickest texture job to date.

For all of Viewport canvas' shortcomings when painting directly it certainly does work well when exporting and re-importing from Photoshop. It's as simple as taking a snapshot of your 3D object, popping that into cs4, doing you thing, saving and clicking update in Max and your updates are (somewhat clumsily) projected onto your model. Not perfect but the next generation should be outstanding.

Some Renders from the Current Term...

2009-12-15T09:07:00.000-08:00

So this is some of the not-so-interesting project brief work that we got from Blitz. Weird project specifications all round. Props with no Spec or Bump allowed, Crabs with a 4000 tri limit and an environment project with a texture budget of 2x1024 for diffuse, Norm and Spec. WTF!!!!

When Jolyon Webb had put down his specification crack pipe, long enough to crit the projects he had set he made some really interesting points on the projects just to help polish them up.

For the roof, it was really just a matter of sorting out some of the colours to make it look a little more coherent. I'd really blanded out some of the colours to get them to sit right and to yoink it back from looking too much like toytown. But Jolyon showed me that perhaps keeping it more like the original reference (which was pretty bright!) Would be more interesting, and I agree with him on that point, so I'll be giving the roof top project a quick tweak during the week.

The Crab project he had seen before, but it was the silhouette that needed more attention. If you put a self illuminating colour on your model then it appears in the viewport as a silhouette and it becomes amazingly apparent that it could have had a better distribution of tris on stuff like the crab elbows which were looking decidedly blocky.

Lastly he grabbed a screen shot of the garbage bag and painted it over in CS4 just to show what could be done with the silhouette to add a bit more character to the overall look of the detritus.

Some times it's a battle with teachers and visiting guests to know where the balance lies between representing reality and stylising it slightly for greater effect. On stuff like the garbage I stuck like glue to realism only to find out that it could have been better if I had just gone with my gut and made it a little more saucy with dents and dinks and stuff.

But although Jolyon is a hard man to please, it's encouraging to know that all I have to change on the projects is a few little things here and there which can be tweaked in a day.

FMP Update...

2009-12-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

Starting to feel like a factory production line with these now, but I've realised that I can use the models that I produce to create the render base for these images as the beginnings for the actual model.

This little badger is going to be the front gate for the external courtyard in my scene; sitting directly perpendicular and adjoining to the right of the main building as you look at it.

I'm enjoying the composition of materials in the piece but I think I'm going to have to revisit the clock and play around with the design. Also the design for the gate itself is going to change too.

Some inspiration sites...

2009-12-09T15:29:00.001-08:00

>I've found a site which has turned out to be an absolute gold mine of fascinating stuff;

DarkRoastedBlend by the way that is a Mongolian Death Worm...

It's very much in the vein of a CoolHunting site but they just dredge up what ever is unusual in the way of technology, architecture, art, sports and much more.

I really recommend it to anybody looking up military or weapon hardware as they have some outstanding articles on stuff like concealed spyguns from history, including a door key that doubles up as a flintlock!!

What da F**k!?!? That door had it coming!

The site also had a wicked travel section including an extensive section on Japan (of course!)

And for those of you who didn't know the Japanese were vending machine bonkers here is a standard lingerie vending machine, which also vends in the un-used variety!!

Here's another assortment of the weird and wonderful. I'd also like to underline just how rubbish Blogger is for uploading pictures, really guys what are you sodding paid for!?

Codemasters Talk...

2009-12-09T14:57:00.000-08:00

Today hailed the return of a Codemasters speaker to the course.

Previously they had been a regular fixture on the courses' lecture roster but faded away soon after the present 3rd year started the course. Let's hope we can look forward to more regular appearances.

Guest speakers have been a bit sparse in the last couple of years and the 'recession' excuse is a bit weak now. Lets get some more games companies in!!

The talk today was an eye opener in a way that I expect the speaker was not intending. The lecture started in a bit of a meandering style, launching into some of the influences that had inspired our guest speaker to start drawing and painting and then on to a sample chronology of his work from early employment to current projects.

His work was really a mixed bag of styles, 3D and 2D and surprisingly varied qualities of work too. But what bit me was how much dicking about he had to endure as part of being a game artist.

He had experienced the monotony of making small, non-descript shrubs for racers, mud etc. He had been made redundant when a company was closed by Sega and he had suffered the extreme drought of working as a freelance artist. And all this in spite of him being a considerably talented artist.

It makes you think.

FMP Update...

2009-12-09T14:40:00.001-08:00

Here's a front elevation of the Absinthe house. I've based the fascade on Maison Coulliot, a famous art nouveau style house in Paris. I'm not massively sure on whether I'm going to be keeping this colour scheme or even this style but it'll evolve as it goes along.

Doorway...

2009-11-16T15:41:00.003-08:00

This is another little concept I was working on over the weekend for the front door.

Again it's a 3D paintover; lovingly mocked up in Max and then painted up in Photoshop with a liberal smattering of texture overlay and other tricky chicanery!!

The model is simply skylit and rendered out. A top tip for anybody wanting to try their hand at some 3D paintover action is to add a different colour material to individual bits and bobs which they might normally have to paint around by hand. For example in this piece I made all the windows white. Then after you have rendered out your lit version, delete the skylight and hit render. What you will find is that the renderer spits out a flat colour render of your scene with absolutely zero value information.

You can now use this flat colour separation plate in Photoshop to colour select fiddly areas with ease, thus saving hours of mask painting!!

I stumbled over another little trick by accident whilst I was trying to vignette the edges of the image: If you apply the dark edging with the gradient tool and then use it as mask on a Hue/Sat adjustment layer in the layer palette what you can do is lower the saturation around the edges of the piece. This, I felt, really made you focus on the centre of the image more.

Subtle but effective.

Lastly, another happy accident. I like to experiment while I work with layer blend modes over the work in progress just because of the unexpected results. Whilst I was overlaying the original render image over the whole I set it to negative or difference and it made all of the shadows illuminate which gave the rim light effect that you can see on the support posts in the image.

I'm happier with this image than the preceding one but these are a learning curve whilst I'm making them.

Next I'm working on various external wall elevations.

Doorway...

2009-11-16T15:41:00.001-08:00

Update on Absinthe Concept...

2009-11-16T15:21:00.000-08:00

I posted my Absinthe Exterior Concept on facebook and received a bit of feedback so here is the next iteration of that including all of the suggested fixes that I've received.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

One comment mentioned that the light appeared to be a little watery!? I think that means that there was a little too much bloom on the light and that was giving the surrounding areas a washed out foggy feel. So that's been knocked back a bit.

Also the banisters were'nt reading well against the wall behind them so I've picked out the banisters with some weak reflected light from the downstairs door.

Now that I've put them side by side it looks a little like I've just put a purple filter over the top, but I can assure you that it was a little more complicated than that! The angle of the light in the original suggested that it was late evening and so to achieve that and make the overall picture more attractive I decided to give the yard's shadow a more purple slant which pops out the orange lighting more.

Now that I have put them next to each other I'm thinking that the purple is a little overpowering so I may knock that back somemore....Stay tuned!

Final Major Project Development

2009-11-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

Just a not-so-quick paint over of the Google Sketchup model I whacked together before. It shows a rough idea for the layout of the garden courtyard area outside of the Backstreet Distillery.

It's a bit sparse in terms of the props I want in the outside area but it should give an idea of some of the mood I want to inject into the piece, though I envision it being set at night. Another concept depicting that to follow and I'm going to get to work on the interior layout soonish too!

I've been slack with the old digital painting so this has been a nice break back into that, and I'm pleased with the results, (though I relied heavily on texture overlays. But hey! if it's good enough for the industry bods it's good enough for me!)

Gears of Mike...

2009-11-02T11:11:00.000-08:00

I doodled a few designs in my sketcher a while back and I've had it in mind to mock some of them up, so here is a high poly model of one of them.

The idea behind this mini project was to get comfortable with working with subtools in Zbrush. As you can see it's made up of a large number of parts. The main donkey work was done in Max in an evening and the next step will be to rough it up a bit in Zbrush and then use Decimation master to knock it down to size. (No neat topology here!)

I really like how Epic use a neat contrast between different materials in their environment assets, especially between stonework and metal and I'd like to try and get a sense of that dichotomy here.

I AM THE CRAB!!!!!!!

2009-11-02T04:07:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not I have been beavering away at some of the course projects although I've been a little slack in the posting department.

This post seeks to rectify that!!

Here are a few pretty pictures of the finished crab and some WIP!!

The Zbrush Renders are done using a beautiful material called a framer, which does an incredible job of showing off the surface detail. To make my job easier I used a trick in zbrush to make picking out the detail a far shorter process:

Basically you unwrap and texture the asset as you would normally then in Zbrush you can load the texture and apply it as an alpha directly on to your model (go into the texture menu and click on 'make alpha'. You may need to invert it in the Alpha menu!) You can then either use the inflate deformation in the tool menu or you can go over it with a brush so you have more control over the outcome. Then you just pick out the details.

This crab is as big as a fully grown man.

Getting Inside Epic's Head...

2009-11-01T07:53:00.000-08:00

So I've been checking out Epic's Environment work on Gears of War just recently to try and get a bit of inspiration for ways in which to carry out my FMP.

Their main Environment artist Kevin Johnstone has been posting quite prolifically on Polycount just recently, which has been a fantastic reference for their Hi Poly work, he has also been giving tips on how he produces such amazing Hi poly Sculpts.

The only problem with the thread is that he is really coy about sharing any low poly wire frames of the assets. I don't know whether this is down to genuine lack of time on his part or whether the low poly wire frames are a little crap compared to the highpoly stuff.

Don't get me wrong, in game, when the assets are running in the engine they look excellent! But it could be down to them using a polycrunching utility to produce quick low poly assets from the high. These utilities provide great low poly meshes for Hi to low baking but the result is a messy, technically poor looking wire frame.

I've already found out from Heather that for the Final Major Project, polycrunched meshes are a no no, which is a shame because it would really save me time. I could devote more development to Hi poly assets. So the only alternative would be to model a relatively over-tesselated mesh in several pieces in Max and then subtool them into Zbrush where they can be sculpted and roughed up a bit!!

With that done I can make use of the Zbrush retopo tools and build a low res mesh over the top.

From what Johnstone has said I can tell from the above examples that the main payload of building has been accomplished in Max in many little pieces. For instance the top pillar with the metal detailing was a splined shape which was then made to fit around the half cylinder by applying a Patch Deform Modifier to it.

Something else he said which will make me think carefully about the way I approach asset making is that he spends a bit of time thinking in advance quite carefully about how the piece will fit together modularly. So planning is key!

Alambic Configs...

2009-11-01T07:21:00.000-08:00

Here is a little more sketchup madness.

I really want to play around with the composition of the actual Absinthe making apparatus.

These are the main componants that I'm playing around with here but once I've settled on a layout that I like, I'm going to add in the plethora of pipes and what-not that link all of the machines together! Whoop!

I have an idea for baking in the metallic information on the Alambics and metal work too. I'm either going to bake in a metallic shader effect in Max using one of the Architectural materials and Mental ray OR I'm going to work out the method for baking out metallic shader materials in Zbrush. With these as a base I can work grime textures in on top and gaussian out the reflections a bit so they don't appear too perfect!

More FMP development stuff!!

2009-11-01T07:09:00.000-08:00

Here are a few more renders from the courtyard area for the FMP. I've managed to track down a few renderers for Sketchup which can do outline and photo real renders. The only problem is that they are free trial for a month and then you have to pay for them!!

Don't they realise there are poor student bastards out there!?!?!?

So I'm gonna have to get as much use out of them as possible!!

...Closely Follow by Number Two..!

2009-10-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

I've been getting aquainted with Google SketchUp this weekend in order to quickly knock together some ideas for the layout of my FMP.

There is also a very good reason why I'm using this over the nightmare and misery of Max and one reason only...

Google have thought about the people that have to use the software.

Thank you Google!

The interface took me all of ten minutes of watching YouTube to figure out and the ease of modelling and just how completely intuitive the modelling style is, is just a breath of fresh air!!

The idea for modelling is subtractive and consists mainly of drawing shapes on planes and then extruding shapes into and out of existence. Genuinely I think Studio Max could learn alot.

So this is just a simple layout of what may be the external courtyard area, it is not finished but this will be the first in a number of works in progress which will flesh out the project in weeks to come.

First Post of the New Year!

2009-10-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

This isn't the grand opening the first blog back really ought to be. I have however found some really interesting 3D work be a website called http://www.graffititechnica.com/.

Well worth a look, check out some of their work below...

It's impressive what you can do with some splined shapes and a bit of Mental Ray!

SelfPortrait2 WIP...

2009-07-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

I've done a little bit in the way of texturing today, literally just sticking parts of the photographed face over the AO. If you stick them in a layer folder and set it to Hard Light over the top of the AO information, then the separate parts you have on different layers self-blend and it means you can move them about with ease and still get an impression of how it might look when finished.

The 3 point lighting is making it look a funny colour at the moment, but like I said it's still a case of stitching parts together at this stage and I can colour correct later on. The skin also looks a bit grey in places, but I'm going to play around with colour adjusting the AO layers into a dark red colour which will give a more believable impression of blood below the surface.

I'm thinking I'm going to have to neutralise some of the shadows on the photos too.

But overall, I'm much more pleased with how this has turned out compared to my first attempt.

Get Ze Head Right and Ze Rest Will Follow...

2009-06-29T11:23:00.001-07:00

I thought I'd take another run at doing my self portrait again. Well just the head this time. Last time I really messed up the UVing and needless to say it pretty much ruined everything that followed.

So using that one as a base, I re-UVed it using the cylinder unwrap technique Dan H told me about. For some reason it just worked a hell of alot better this time around.

Next I took it into Zbrush and then baked it off via XNormal. I decided to sculpt in the hair a little more fully this time doing away with the crap looking alphas that I used last time. I think although it looks a little stylised it gives a better effect.

Next up I'm going to paint out some of the baking errors and then proceed to photo texture.

Work In Progress....

2009-06-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Here are a few quick piccies of a side project I have going on...

I got bored of the Brighton Pavillion Gateway, so for now at least, I'm going to shelve that so I can get some more fun stuff off my chest first.

I had a chance to look through the Unearthly Challenge entries from last year again and I really liked some of the stylised (stylised being ANYTHING that won't fit into the REALISTIC bag!) pieces that were submitted. So with that bouncing round my head I decided to give a stylised building a go. Something simple and colourful. Here are the ideas so far...

AO render, I just had it in mind to make a sort of cottage type thing.

This is a render of a colour separation, I threw this in because it makes the next couple of pictures possible. If you chuck this in on top of your AO in Photoshop you can make big easy selections of separate objects, which makes the task of painting up models with many parts really simple. I believe you can also bake this out onto your UVs. For anyone who doesn't know how to do this: Chuck a Skylight into your scene, Deactivate the lighttracer and hit render. Simples.

Using the Colour separations, color select and layer masks in Photoshop, I managed to throw this colour scheme together in record time. If you had to design several alternative colourschemes for a model this technique would allow you to test drive several colour schemes faster than painting from scratch.

I bunged on a few textures and used the Transform tool and layer blends to see how it might look with textures.

I'm liking how it's looking colourwise. I wasn't entirely sure where it was gonna be but I'm leaning towards it being in an outback style environment. I'm also thinking that instead of the chimney being made out of crazy bricking, that it's actually shaped out of adobe mud, so I'll dig out some nice cracked mud textures and give those a go.

Once I have the main textures thrown together I'm going to build a few more items to cast around, barrels, lanterns, rope etc. in order to give it a used look.

Again I have built this modularly so I can disassemble it and shove it back together in a few different configurations, so I may have an entire settlement out of just these pieces.

Horror Rises from the Grave...

2009-06-01T06:08:00.000-07:00

Lucky me: You wait for a decent horror to come along and two come along at once!!

My recent restoration of faith in the Horror genre has come in the shape of Drag Me to Hell and more unexpectedly in an old GameCube game: Eternal Darkness.

The Horror genre in movies and games has been pretty rubbish recently. Owing to the new ultra real capabilities in the technologies used for special effects for both parties; they have been vying to show as much gruesome detail as their new found effects can possibly produce.

The new generation of horror; dubbed horror porn, because of it's explicit depiction of violence; seems to lean more of it's 'thrills' upon out and out gore, instead of old school techniques. To be sure, seeing someone having their achilles tendons slashed and then being told to run, is a horrifying experience, but one that has discouraged me from seeing anymore of this horror sub-genre.

It wasn't enjoyable, it was merely sickening.

It's just a phase though and I'm fairly sure that once people are sick of seeing SAW(-insert double figured number here-) that the movie houses will start leaning back to some of the well crafted horror thrills of yesterday, when they couldn't rely on the special effects making anything look even vaguely convincing!!

Sam Raimi: the director of the Evil Dead series and more recently the big budget Spiderman franchise has recently been treading what I hope is going to be a new trend in horror.

Drag Me to Hell, is his most recent offering which sees an instantly appealing, female bank teller, cursed after rejecting a third loan application from an old gipsy woman. Not surprisingly the old gipsy woman takes umbridge at this and promptly curses the unfortunate lass.

What ensues is a roller coaster of tension, unease, fear, panic and at it's apex all out unpredictable Evil Dead style lunacy. The shocks keep coming in scatter gun fashion and this sees said doe-eyed bankteller being thrown around like a sack of spuds by a malevolent demon who seeks to torment her over three days before dragging her, unsurprisingly enough, to hell.

Though the movie has some very low-brow gross out moments, as only Raimi could engineer, it never has to resort to heavy, sickening gore. Raimi's directional style also seems to have straightened up slightly too from the very comic-like Evil Dead, so what you get is a slightly more straight-laced story, which still includes some very tasty black humour.

('Here Kitty-Kitty!')

Audiences are very much becoming immune to cheap horror and gore through the media. Movie houses have responded by cranking up the intensity rather than looking at well planned, and well established horror devices, the kind that Raimi deploys here. Let's hope they pay attention!

In the games industry they would do well to pay attention to economy of action too. Though I get the feeling that such games would be for a specialised audience only. If a game doesn't have the action set to consta-bang, I expect the games industry would worry that their audience might crawl away and read a book!!

Out of boredom, the other day I decided to give some of the GameCube games in my housemate's collection a go. With Mario Galaxy out of the way (stop running off the end of the platform you little bastard!), I decided in extremis to try out Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.

For starters I'll get the negative out of the way first, as is my habit; the graphics are abysmal, No Good news; Bad news; Good news Sandwich, let's get that out of the way first.

With the visuals aside though the concept is great. It follows the lineage of a family tree through the ages and you play these members in action sequences as they are read by a modern day relative on retrieved diary pages. Their quest is to fight a growing evil through the decades. The story isn't the main attraction to this game, though it does have the occasional twist.

The thing that makes this game stand out is the inclusion of a Sanity Meter, which decreases everytime you run into a zombie. You first start to notice it is running low when the camara starts to 'dutch' to one side and the background noise produces odd whispering. As the unease creeps up the whispering accumulates, doors thump and your character starts to whimper.

But you are almost compelled to let your character's guage run dry because when it is really low, they will experience hilarious, full-scale hallucinations! They run thus;

You cross through a door; a gang of monsters grabs you on the other side and tears you apart; You wake up outside the door, having never even opened it!

You walk into a room and everything is gigantic!

You heal yourself with a potion and promptly explode!

The best one happens halfway through the game when you finish a chapter: A screen pops up telling you this is the end of the game and that the story continues in Eternal Darkness 2. Your character then snaps out of it and screams; 'No, this can't be happening!!'

I haven't seen this type of blatant toying with the gamer experience since the fight with Psychomantis in Metal Gear Solid (you know, when you had to change the controller to port two half way through the fight!?). It's a great experience and you run the risk of really harming your character just to see what crazy hallucinations they might experience next. I'd really like to see an update of this game, (a good update) because good concepts for gameplay are rare and with today's graphics this could be a real winner.

To pull off psychological horror well in a game deserves a round of applause, and Eternal Darkness proves that a mature genre, one that understands and respects the audience and because of this can generate a truly emotive experience, can be applied to a game without resorting to lazy and disruptive cut scenes to do the story telling.

Update...

2009-05-23T14:45:00.001-07:00

Righto, just made a few quick changes along the lines of the last post, not to mention a quick tweak to the overall proportion which helps it I think. The textures pop more, the bump map on the broken bricks has been duly 'broken' and although in this lighting it doesn't show the specs have been ramped up on the now forward reading graffiti and stencil number. The mesh is still a pig's mammary gland, but it has been more fully optimised and though it's not pretty it'd still function in-game.

Still not perfect but hey for a few nights work, I'm willing to call it good experience.

If I were to make this again, I would focus more on the initial shaping of the gross forms to make them more believable before wading into the nitty-grittys.

WIP...Zbrush Destroyed Pillar.

2009-05-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

I was just messing about in Zbrush and this pillar turned into a mini-project. I sculpted this up from a Zbrush primitive and then baked out the High and Low in Xnormal.

Although I like the way the textures turned out (1024x1024), the overall look of the pillar looks a bit chewy and stylised, like it's been squeezed like a tube of toothpaste. The idea was that the brick and plaster outer had been gored away by a collision at some point and there was a big chunk of the brick insides missing.

Instead it feels like it needs the edges roughened to show a change in surface from flat to destroyed.

I was lazy with optimising the low topology too, but as ever I was just eager to get on with the texturing stuff!

Stuff I'm going to work on to improve this:

Optimise the Topology and in so doing create harder edges on the plaster outer.

Work on the brick inners, especially the closest corner in the render, to look more chipped away rather than curved.

Raise the specularity on the Yellow stripe, to pick it out more.

Flip the Graffiti and numbering, apparently when I was UVing I didn't realise that the whole bloody thing was backwards!

The overall colours and the Occlusion between the bricks looks a little muddy to me, so I'll have to make them pop a little more.

And lastly and most glaringly the scale of the bricks on the inside are completely unrealistic, but you'll just have to imagine that they're medieval bricks that just happen to be inside a modern day pillar!!

Work in Progress...

2009-05-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

This is a hasty render of the building that I'm currently working on.

It's the gateway to the Pavillion in Brighton, my home town.

As you can see it's made up of loads of different parts. The idea is for it to function as a series of modular parts, which is pretty prevalent in Environment modelling for games. The idea is that once I have completed the textures, I can dismantle the building and quickly generate new permutations of layouts using the separate parts of the building, a bit like lego, only not nearly as much fun...

When I say it's quicker and easier, it's a bit misleading, it took me forever to figure out the best way to go about making the interlocking modules! Also I've got some reservations about just having bits of wall floating next to each other, it feels a little like bad construction. But hey if the industry says it's okay, then who am I to argue with a pay cheque!

The model is pretty Hi-poly but I wanted it to be fairly detailed when you get up close. I'll be working on some levels of detail. But the detail is only going to increase as the next step is to generate some nice AO and Normals from a high frequency model.

Oh Yeah Don't Forget the Blog...

2009-04-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

Back to Normality...

2009-03-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

So here's the thing, i now know several ways of making normal maps, in fact I know several ways of doing most things, skinning cats, cooking eggs ....and pleasing da ladies!!

Just kidding, I don't know any...

Bearing that in mind I therefore have alot of spare time on my hands so I decided to run a comparison of a few ways of making Normal Maps and make them face each other in unarmed combat.

Actually this is more to test post production ways of beefing them up.

For this I used Ben Cloward's Handy Dandy way of creating normals for planes direct from Hi Poly models. Dan H. has a great example of how effectively they can be used, working within his group's Unreal level for low poly rubble effects. Check out Cloward's web shite, no, I'm not going to link it for you...

So here is how the normals looked fresh off the printing press;

Not particularly eye popping, so I ran the map through photoshop and stacked two more copies of the layer on top of each other and set the top two to overlay;

Ok better. The top edges are picking out the light now. I noticed on this though that the bottom right hand corner is looking a little sorry for itself. It maybe to do with the direction of the light I was using in Max so mucho grande apologies.

Next up is The same overlay technique but this time with little something extra gleaned from Eat3D.

There is a slight improvement. The idea is that you tweak the levels of each of the stacked layers in Photoshop. Bringing the bracket arrows in towards the central spike on the levels graph concentrates the colour information and makes the normal more intense. Be careful though, you can over do it!

I read somewhere that sometimes if your normals aren't working in Max it's something to do with the green channel being inverted, so I flipped it and got this:

That's when I realised that I'd been rendering off rubbish shots with the channel flipped. Oh well you live and learn. Please feel free to ignore all of the above. The bottom right corner now looks more like it should and the whole plane has suddenly come to life!

But I'm still concerned that the top edges are unnaturally dark. Still that may yet be a problem with the lighting.

I baked out some AO to go along with my Sci-Fi panel and here is how it looks with the stronger bump map:

And here it is with the Green Channel Unflipped:

Got to admit having the AO on there really helps both their cases. The fact that I've been running the entire test with the wrong set up doesn't really help to draw conclusions. But if we've learned one thing today it's this...

Sometimes you just don't learn anything.

Some thoughts on Direction....

2009-03-16T08:17:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write a separate piece on what I had learned from the project managers at Blitz.

I was starting to feel like a prime, evil bastard for some of the big decisions I had made on the team project. It felt like I had taken creative control out of the group's hands.

But it takes a bit of perspective in order to see things from a better angle. The project manager described that it was essential to do this, it was his job! He needs to be the one with an eye on the end target and whether the team can make it to that target. If they cannot then parts need to be stripped away.

I was forced to clamp down on how much of the level we could do. It was after all, an environment we were making and not a full blown level. I feel that distinction was fuzzy in some people's modus operandi. If I could go back and do it again, I would strip it down even further. Maybe just the courtyard and the Panic room.

He also described to me that the most creative people ALWAYS proved to be the biggest hurdle in team work. It just takes one bad apple to spoil the barrel. His advice;

FIRE.

THEM.

He told me in no uncertain terms that team work is key and it is always better to have the reliable team and one without the attitude problems. They get screened out pretty quickly if they even make it past the Meal Exam. I should point out this is not the ethos of every company.

So I was, up until this point, really bummed out with my performance as a team leader. But it's not my fault. I did what was needed. You can become overwhelmed by mass opinion.

Imagine you were trapped in a party with a hundred Nazis. You know their ideology is wrong, but a hundred people with the same opinion, no matter how wrong, are hard to steer right.

The team project is over and though originally I felt that I owed an apology for my part that feeling has now passed.

I am no longer sorry.

Blitz Open Day...

2009-03-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

I feel bad now that on the feedback form we received at the Open Day we didn't get to hold off judgement just a few hours more!

The day ran as expected, there was a heavy, heavy briefing on the role on each individual department, including HR for some reason!? This coupled with the fact I had only gotten about 3 hours sleep the night before and the air con was set to 'suffocate' meant this turned out to be more of an eye closer than an eye opener.

However plus points on the day were;

the tour around the studio, if only there had been more time to stop and talk! From the few moments that we had spent in there we managed to glean some amazing insight into some of their techniques. How they make a collective of NPCs look cohesive within a style and how they texture faces using hand painted techniques! Amazing stuff, if only the whole day had been like that!

The demo we saw of some of the games they're working on looked incredible! We all got to experience the innovative new 3D game they're releasing along with the 3D technology to run it. I can imagine migraines the size of Saturn but would it be worth it? I reckon so!!
The current 3rd person they are working on Dead to Rights looks incredible too, one I'm defo gonna have to have a go on! And I can't say that about many games!

The formal open day ended with some portfolio critique, though I feel they might have been holding back a bit. Plus it felt like they needed more time to get through it all.

I will interject here by saying the group of 3D artists that attended the openday from other Universities were quite talented, I had almost expected from the hype our course receives, that we would have shone but there is actually some very stiff competition coming our way. Nothing unobtainable, but it's up there. But then, they were all 3rd years!

I was lucky enough to skank a few more minutes worth of critique time with the 3D art manager, who I bombarded with questions!

So up until this point I was tepid about the day, we had seen some wicked snippets of stuff here and there but apart from a few teasers it wasn't anything we didn't already know from countless presentations we had had before. And man was I feeling the fatigue!

Then we went down the pub.

This was the turning point in the day. If I could have gone back and regraded they day after this part I would have scored it a ten! And it's not just because I had a couple of pints in me!

I had been debating before with somebody about how this could just turn out to be a brown nose fest. Trust me it couldn't have been further from the truth.

What a bunch of genuinely interesting people, it was so apparent that they loved their jobs, the whole day could have been a gloss, but that would have dropped away at this point and they could have been making every excuse to bugger off. But it was really relaxed and they were more than happy to chat to us about our questions.

I got to sit down with a couple of Project managers and I was amazed how many parallels there were between the problems they faced on a big project and what we faced on our meagre team project. The biggest similarity was how tough, but necessary it is to make the hard decisions that make a project a workable affair. Everybody had a great idea to contribute to the project but unless you have someone to draw the line then the game would never get made.

The big picture hit me after I had had the chance to think about the day afterwards.

I have to admit I was really getting jaded about the idea of going into the games industry, all we seem to get fed is the bleak outlook.

But I can see a way forward now, this open day really showed me what is so wicked about working in this industry, it's not to stand alone on your perch and try to convince everybody that you're the top dog in your field, but the fact that you get to work with a massive group of people that think just like you! All the people who aren't interested or who don't want to work in a team won't even get past the door.

Everybody who worked there had earned their stripes artistically and had proved that they can contribute positively to the team.

Now that is a bonus I'm willing to work towards.

Old Worries, New Possibilities...

2009-03-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

Wow I didn't expect the title to sound like a Political campaign!!!

Ahem...

Everybody on our course looks towards the end of our Degree and worries about what it's going to be like in the valley past interview mountain.

EA spouse is the term that haunts me most and stories like this one.

This story does however come with the reassurance though that some companies are starting to mature and respect their employees rights. Bizarre Creations are the company mentioned in the above article. Relentless Software, who I have mentioned before also cultivate more friendly working contracts. They have gone nearly 4 years without crunch time. Good news.

For the unfortunate amongst us who may well be subjected to the employment abuses framed by the likes of EA in the future, there is a solution. We all have rights and if you want them respected it is worth looking into associating yourself with a union in order to be better armed if such a case should arise.

The one directed in this link is just an example but highlights what you can expect to benefit from membership.

But hey, let's just pass the interview first!!

What if Piracy was a Good Thing?

2009-02-28T10:14:00.000-08:00

Piracy as a good thing?

According to the dated documentary I've just been watching it could only take a paradigm shift for television companies to benefit from torrenting!

I don't know how this could work for film, games and software downloaded a la file share, but the idea runs thus;

It costs television companies a certain amount to buy a show from a distributor and screen it, but it recoups alot of it's costs (and in fact makes a 1500% profit in some cases on that cost) by selling advertising slots. They lose live viewing figures though thanks to torrenting. Which in turn worries the advertisers who feel they are not getting the coverage for their product.

The supposition of this documentary though, envisaged that TV companies USED hyperdistribution opportunities like torrenting and streaming to further the distribution area of their programs by foregoing live broadcast and uploading programs for torrent themselves, which in turn is far cheaper and guarantees better viewing figures albeit just not all at the same time.

Interestingly the speaker also made the point that producers of programs could fore go selling to networks entirely and distribute themselves far more cheaply by encouraging newspapers to give a DVD with their production away free. This is cheaper than going through a distribution company who they pay to sell to all the major networks around the world. They of course could sell advertising space directly for massive profit.

This is old news and alot of companies have started making their content available online, however sanitised of advertising.

But who knows how much other media could benefit from the same shift in the way the problem is viewed? Perhaps it is more difficult for software and film companies to create a return out of the same solution?

The part of the documentary that really got me thinking though was a way of preventing having the adverts cut out of the torrented programs by selling the on screen real estate commonly reserved for their own companies watermark logo.

Everybody has seen them; SKY ONE will have their logo, half opacity, floating over every program you watch on that channel. Unintrusive, but it's there. There is no escaping the fact that this is a SKY ONE program. But the talker in the documentary pointed out that the TV companies had missed a trick in this area.

They could sell this little corner as branding space to advertisers. Whether there is a SKY ONE logo or a Nike swoosh floating in the corner makes no difference to the viewer.

But how much would advertisers be willing to spend on not just a 15 to 30 second slot in between programs which may not be viewed when viewers pop out to make a tea? But instead near continuous advertising, which is guarunteed to be seen by anybody that watches the programs? That is a slot that advertisers would pay massively to obtain.

My thoughts turned then to games and how they could profit by selling real estate to advertisers. It is a mechanism that is employed to a limited degree (ie unlocking DIESEL brand clothing for your character in Devil May Cry 2; Gilette vans knocking into you in Burnout Paradise.) but is wholly underutilised by games companies.

People are going to hate me for suggesting advertising in games but I shall explain my reasoning after these suggestions:

The biggest crime in games is the loading screen, it blights all of our game play experiences but if it is inevitable then this on screen real estate could well be sold to advertisers for a massive profit. How many loading screens per game? How much potential advertising space? Perhaps games companies won't see the loss of loading screens as such a good thing in light of advances in technology if they knew how much money they could be making from these gaps in gameplay!

Not to mention that this is property that would be seen over and over on subsequent replays of the game.

The idea of watermark adverts, as pointed out above could be innocuously placed. If they are tolerated in television they can be tolerated in game, just a small addition to the already cluttered HUD in most games. The player may earn the right to toggle it on and off after completion of the game. Perhaps it is only visable when paused?

Product placement has been happening in films forever; You will forever associate a certain brand of car with James Bond, So why not associate Master Cheif with a certain brand of Turtle wax? As mentioned above games already utilise this but how about having every mundane item in a game being a sold as space to a certain brand? So now every drinks can you see in a game is Pepsi.

Now, what I have suggested is sacriledge to some. Games are in general safe from the greedy hands of advertisers. But if a games company that self publishes titles were to make a profit from this kind of near constant in-game advertising space (and the profit would be massive; TV companies can command millions for primetime advertising!) Then how could the employees from that company benefit from that extra injection of cash? Would benevolent bosses bestow bonuses? Could it bolster a companies production costs enough to hire locally instead of outsourcing?

If this were put in place it could mean more job security for us, and that is just one benefit if the money were used properly. More Money means more employees means less crunch hours means no more EA widow. This is all fancifully placed firmly within the ideal world.

But the benefit to the Game company employees, and us, in return for a wallpaper change on a loading screen, could make the minor shift all worth it.

It's all in the Family...

2009-02-24T10:22:00.000-08:00

I received an email from an aunt recently telling me about a distant relative who had been interviewed about her incredible life in the Guardian, by yet another relative, Joanna Moorhead! (Moorhead is my mother's maiden name).

It turns out my distant relative, Leonora Carrington, is a notable Surrealist Painter who ran away from home with Max Ernst and hung out with people like Dali and Picasso!! She currently hails from Mexico, but she was taught in Florence, lived in Paris, fled the war all round Europe and still produces amazing pieces of art to this day!!

I kind of wish I'd heard about this before! I had an assignment when I was back in secondary school to write about an interesting member of my family tree. Sadly I had to settle for the head of the Irish Dental Association!!

But it's good to know this whole art vocation could be going somewhere!!!

Speed Modelling...

2009-02-24T08:44:00.000-08:00

The Theme for this little badger is to assume that the human race didn't rise to supremacy and that perhaps another species gained sentience.

I felt the salmon shared the mournful demeanor of the contemporary stockmarket tradesman (he'd obviously be alot happier if he was running a bank!!).

467 tris/512x512 diffuse/spec/bump. Timescale was from 10 til 5 (not including lunchbreak!)

Go SalmonMan FLY FLY!!!!!

Future Renaissance....

2009-02-22T15:05:00.000-08:00

Okay I'm still ironing out the kinks but I'm still practicing the ShapeForm stuff in the Industrial rendering method. I've also been reading up on lighting too. For this one I decided to go for a more Renaissance feel. All textures hand made in CS2.

The Power of the Word 'Why'...

2009-02-22T09:17:00.000-08:00

The word 'Why' is the smartest word in the world.

Every smart person you have ever heard of in history had the backbone to ask.

Any inquisition is smart. The saying goes; 'There are no stupid questions'.

There are as many sayings for making assumptions without questioning the artifact or situation.

One is; 'Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups'. It's usually when we have jumped to a faulty conclusion that we genuinely fuck up.

I have just recently. A friend of mine made a mistake in his love life, I jumped on him to rectify it. He did. I assumed he still had not, jumped on him again and made an asshole of myself. Lesson learned. Next time I'll ask a simple question.

We don't just make these mistakes on our own though. The biggest mistake we can make is when we believe that an individual or group has all the answers and we just follow their lead. You can never assume that somebody has all the answers. It's comforting to think that someone has it all worked out on our behalf, but it's wrong.

I come back to the Jeet Kune Do analogy alot. Put aside your assumptions.

Bruce Lee believed the above and sought to construct not just a martial art, but a philosophy that encompassed finding out for yourself. He got alot of it wrong during his life, but what he got right was questioning how it was. That is a philosophy I can agree with.

However one problem with the questioning process is knowing when you have gotten to the truth. When have we gotten the answer? When we are told? When we have seen it? When we confirm it for ourselves? Can we ever really KNOW?

Assumption and Opinion bridge the gap of uncertainty.

Our challenge is knowing where fact ends and our opinions start.

Something to Write about...

2009-02-22T04:24:00.000-08:00

Man I've been slack on the blogging side of things...

Maybe it's because of the team project. Time consuming stuff.

It's funny how not blogging can affect you though.

I enjoy blogging because it's a way to let me exercise my mind in a way that it's not usually stretched in day-to-day life. I can put shape to my thoughts and if it doesn't come out right the first time I can go back and re-write it and re-write it until it has the right ring.

I've noticed though that if I don't do it for a while, I find it difficult to string two words together when I'm talking to somebody. There must be something in the practice of writing that lubricates the part of the brain that deals with language.

I started out to write a really negative article last week. I didn't publish it though, because I wrote it in a mood. I need time to add perspective to what I'm going to write.

Tomorrow the student reps are having a meeting about the current student climate on the course. I thought to begin with that I knew what was eating the class, but the more I asked around the more the opinions varied. When Mike asks us why nobody is turning up to class and why the attitude of the class has been the way it is, it's going to be a difficult question to answer.
Everybody is going through their own personal drama, but counter to that, perhaps the foundation of the meeting and the question itself is a generalisation.

From what I've gleaned not everybody has a problem with the course. To some people there is nothing wrong. So when certain individuals choose to be rude to the course instructors and others still choose not to turn up, it is a problem at the individual level and should be dealt with there. No generally applied solution is going to keep everybody happy. Someone, somewhere is going to have a problem with the way things are.

That said, some points have been raised;

It is generally felt that the course is being mis-sold, at least through the work displayed in presentations.

The course is primarily a 3D course and perhaps the people who are most disgruntled are those who thought that this course was going to teach them how to produce 2D concept art in the way that the industry darlings do.

It needs to be made clear that the 2D supports the 3D and is not an end, but a means. Potential conceptors need to be directed to a suitable 2D course.

And besides, some really strong 3D artists are being produced on this course, why aren't they being represented in Course slide shows?

It is also generally felt that there is not enough feedback on the course. Nobody has had any feedback on the first round of assessments this year. This NEEDS to be done. How on earth is anybody expected to improve if they have no idea where they are dropping marks?

My own opinions, run that the course needs to balance out the creative freedoms of the course in a different way. At the moment the course is very open in the way the students are taught. The main bulk of the students learning runs along the lines of following online tutorials. Perhaps this could be tightened up?

The speed modelling that Heather has been running was hugely popular in the 2nd year and could be extremely beneficial in drilling techniques. This could be supported with one day modelling challenges where a student could easily produce a finished asset within the day. This would allow students the regular practice to consolidate industry skills that will allow them to quickly and easily produce and anybody who is not sure on a certain technique can ask for assistance in real time.

The course in general would benefit greatly from figuring out practical ways to encourage the students to implement their skills on a more regular basis. Smaller bite sized assignments could be really useful.

The area where the Course could benefit from loosening it's grip is the work that is set. For students that don't have a strong idea what they would like to produce artistically, the current work set maybe beneficial. I personally have a very strong idea of what work I would like to produce and I just don't have the time or the space to turn around and do them because I have to hit target on a project that has been set for me. It would be great to be able to plan my time on the course with the tutors so we both check the right boxes mutually.

I would also like to have a say in the balance of 2D to 3D I personally have to do on the course. At this juncture I want to have more time to spend on 3D.

I'm sure the ability to shape the course per individual could be an innovative way forward.
This course is all about being on the forefront of technology, why not on teaching methodology also?

The More I see, the more I See...

2009-02-04T03:49:00.000-08:00

Fight club is one of those movies that I can always watch.

I tend to mentally categorise movies when I see them on TV or advertised on a poster.

The first category are movies that I must see in the Cinema. Movies like IronMan. or when the Watchmen movie comes out, I have to see it on the big screen. They're movies that are designed to be spectacularised on the big screen and I'm a sucker for a good movie trailer! I had to see the Wrestler, because it had more good ratings on the poster than stars in the sky, and although I had been stung by that before, I was reeled in again. This time I wasn't knocked over the head and chucked in a basket though. Good film.

The second category are films that I know I'll see eventually whether I like it or not. I'll either see it on DVD or on TV at Christmas time. But I only see them at the Cinema if I'm desperate for something to do and I've seen all of the good stuff that's on. A lot of films I see fall into this category.

The third category are films that I REFUSE to see. Films that will make me get up and walk out of the room. Films such as Mean Girls and High School Musical and by no means restricted to that genre. Glossy, Vacuous, no, no, no and no. But that said I have been in such a tight spot entertainment wise that I've been forced to see stuff in this category and usually by a friend.
Yes Man was actually quite uplifting. Shoot me.

But I realised the other night that I have another category that circumvents this entire spectrum and it's Easter Egg films. Films that have so many layers, or that have so much interesting stuff going on, that I can watch them over and over without getting the least bit dulled by the experience.

At first sight Fight Club reeled me in with it's slick advertising and trailer. It's so dark and grimy and I'm a sucker for any film with a bit of fisty-cuffs in it. It was directly marketed at people like me; chop-socky fans with just a touch of intrigue or a twist. I was helpless. The Ad-men know their science.

The Cycle begins.

First viewing is always the same. You see the set up, the story unfolds in almost predictable style hooking you in with subversive, anti-capitalist narrative and then suddenly everything you thought you knew is turned on it's head.

Second viewing is a must now! Everybody has seen films like Fight Club and Memento at least twice. You will never find somebody who watched it once and was satisfied. We all have to see it again to sniff out exactly how we were tricked with such a crafty twist! We watch, we see more...

Third viewing is the realm of the bored now. You are stuck at home at Christmas and it's on TV you haven't seen it in a while and it's better than watching Rat Race. Anything but that.
It's also in the realm of the FanBoy. That's me. This viewing you start to see stuff in finer clarity.

You now know that at the beginning of the film, the image of Tyler Durden is subliminally spliced into the film several times before he actually appears to the nameless protagonist, just like he splices the genitals into the Disney film reel. You also see the Cigarette Burns, understand the penguin and appreciate all the subtle innuendo that leads to the runaway train of Project Mayhem.

You may also see subtle nods to the protagonist reliving his father walking out on him in the scene when Tyler Durden disappears from Project Mayhem. There are allusions to a God that may not even like you. Histories 'Middle Children'.

But the best viewing I had of this movie was the other day. I realised that beneath a movie that describes to us how a character is deluded and deceived and then after believing that he has reached a level of greater understanding of the world, is deluded and deceived again, I realised something else.

The film is engineered to do the same to us.

It puts us through the same ordeal as the nameless protagonist. We identify with the slightly lost narrator, we come to the realisation that what we believe about our cosy world is slightly blinkered and then we are forced to deal with the fact that even our new revelations are a fabrication.

It is one thing to watch a film and see a hero going through turbulence. But I love the fact that there is no escaping actually experiencing the same feeling as the protagonist in Fight Club. That's what makes this film a classic in my eyes, It's a Russian Doll where each revealed inner doll is made of increasingly raw material.

Seeing a film over and over, I've realised is the same as slowing down the movie to see what what the subliminal, one frame images are in the film. It can whizz past so fast that you don't see it for what it is the first time. You watch it a few times to catch the subtle nuances and to add more detail to the map.

The first time you get a broad outline. The second time adds some more features and yet more detail is added the third time and there after. You know the terrain better that way. You start to see the landmarks. The patterns look familiar.

It's like having your nose to a painting and slowly edging backwards, revealing more of the big picture.

We live the same.

We see a little more, feel we are more experienced for it and wish others would see the big picture too. Then we find out we are still just as lost in a larger pattern we can't yet see.

You'll just have to watch it again...

Parallax Mapping...!?!?

2009-01-13T09:56:00.001-08:00

So here's a quick blogpost on what I just found out...

I was doing some research into Normal Mapping because I was a little bummed out that my bump maps weren't better in my Environment. Even with the techniques of adjusting the levels and overlaying in Photoshop or even just blasting it in CrazyBump they just weren't popping in the same way I had seen demonstrated.

Normal mapping only really works when you are perpendicular to a Plane that is using it. But the illusion diminishes the steeper the angle you get to the wall until eventually it is pretty blatant that it was a plane the whole time.

What I had heard of before but never really looked into was Parallax Mapping. The idea is that where as a Normal map will work out the correct shading to make an object texture appear more realistic from a certain angle, an engine that can utilise Parallax Mapping can work out the shape of an object from it's height map and then give it the correct three dimensional shape from that angle.

This picture is of two flat planes, believe it or not. Now Normal mapping could possibly approximate the depth of the furthest wall but it would disappear on the wall that you are standing directly next to.

There are arguments against Parallax mapping. One particular fella on the DevBump website almost rallies against them. To summarise his argument you can't differentiate between them and a Normal Map at a distance.

However the point when you need them most is when you are closest to an object or wall, when the illusion of three dimensionality starts to disappear. Surely it would be a simple matter to it activate within a certain proximity of an object, in the same way that a level of detail would work.

It seems that this kind of mapping, in my short initiation to the subject, is really only available to the programmer literate. That said it would be interesting to find out if there is an easy way for us to utilise it on the course, or if it is even within the realm of Max and our current processing power.

More to come...

Environment Do-Over!!!!

2009-01-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

Okay I kept a steady work in progress shot-by-shot type documentation during the making, but I'll just wade straight in with the near final piece, and save boring you.

The court yard in the background felt a bit stark to me so I have added some foliage since taking these screen shots. However I need to work out how to get it to render the alpha to shadow instead of showing a big square shadow for each foliage plane!!

I'm quite pleased with the textures for this piece and I managed to mill through them pretty quickly all hangovers considered. It's mainly phototextured but there are ALOT of crafty tweaks, courtesy of my new friends the layer mask and colour match tools.

I paid careful consideration to making sure the whole texture collection sat together as a cohesive piece, and that where different areas (ie where the courtyard meets the step and where the ground meets the walls) connect they flow together as seamlessly as possible.

I also imagined how various materials would interact in real life, for instance rust haze around metal parts on the door give a better impression of how these two materials would interact in real life. There is moss growing on every material that makes contact with it, not just the floor.

In the process of making this piece, I experienced the near Nirvana of CrazyBump. I cannot describe what a joy it is to work with this program!! I managed to construct all my bumpmaps in the space of two hours with this little puppy. It also generates specular and Occlusion. Shame it ain't free anymore!! But it might just be worth the money...

For those interested there is a 30day trial edition on the CrazyBump homepage.

If I had the time I would add some more detail to the foremost wall, it just doesn't ride well having a perfect straight line next to the rest of the decrepid feel, it needs a bit of battering. Also I may try and put it through Vray and/or Unreal just to see how it performs under different lighting conditions and then add some finishing polish to the textures.

This project was a real learning experience, I'm really looking forward to the next opportunity to make an environment. Just so happens that's the very next project...

Environment Project Redux.....WIP...

2008-12-30T13:27:00.000-08:00

Here's a quick update of what I've been doing for the last couple of days CG wise.

I've choosen to completely redo my environment based on one of the places I visited whilst out in Japan a few years ago. It's a simple scene of a fortified gate in the grounds of Himeji castle.

I decided a cool way to do it would be to set up the camera to closely mimic the appearance of the original shot. This required a bit of fiddling about on my part with the basic shapes of the piece but once they were in place it was simply a matter of using those shapes as a scaffold for the main elements.

Immensely satisfying to make this piece so far.

Self Explanatory...

2008-12-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty slack in blogging about the self portrait project. Here it is up to the point where I was pretty happy with the outcome. But as I well know I have been hexed upon birth by a gipsy, ensuring that nothing will ever be easy.

My woe this time is all about the unwrapping. What an underestimated and poorly documented area! It is true that a good model can be ruined by a bad texture and a bad model can be saved by a so on and so fourth. But what everybody forgets to mention is just how important a good unwrap is. Nothing is harder to unwrap well than a complex model such as a character.

For any first years reading, if you do a poor job of unwrapping your model you will be incapable of saving it with even the best paintjob. Put simply Da Vinci would have been incapable of painting the Mona Lisa on a screwed up ball of paper.

So my first attempt to unwrap my characters face was conducted within 3Ds Max using the Pelt unwrapper. It either couldn't figure out my edge loops and zigzagged the textures around the eyes. Or it reduced my face to an unrecognisable puddle and the checker texture was still all over the place.

So I ran with this and tried to texture as well as I could but I was scuppered by the unwrap around the nose and eyes, I was forced to paint out the texture around my eyes and it has left my character looking a little odd.

It has been my aim to try and Unwrap my model via other means. First up a great looking program called Headus introduced to me by Phil. This one seemed like the silver bullet of Uv programs, easy to use, very fast and effective. Installed it. Wouldn't work. Apparently I don't have permission to access it on my own machine.

Next up I decided to fall back on the program I used for the Lottie modelling project, Unfold3D. Not quite as sophisticated as Headus, but simple and quick to use. It did a moderate job of unwrapping when it didn't crash for the fifth time. However it required me to unwrap the nose separately.

It then failed to import back into 3Dstudio. The Uvw file was unusable.

sigh.

I took a look at Mathis's website. Apparently he uses a script entitled 'Chuggnuts' which affords the unwrap editor a variety of interesting tools similar to the ones found in Headus.

Downloaded it.

3D studio can't open it.

I'll keep trying but I'm so close to abandoning this project so I can rework my environment.

Low Res Colour Studies..

2008-12-26T12:57:00.000-08:00

I was watching some documentary on the Crusades, but I have to admit I was more interested in the Muslim Architecture. I decided to focus on colour and so I didn't deviate into too much detail I kept the canvas size as small as possible.

Zbrush my Ride!

2008-12-10T17:15:00.000-08:00

This is how I imagine myself to look were I to be reincarnated as a 70's chopsocky movie villain!

Building a Direction...

2008-12-10T04:11:00.000-08:00

So last night I got done playing the amazing new Prince of Persia game on the Xbox360 and I think it may have given me some new direction in which to head after the course!

What struck me most about the game was the eye popping environments, the sense of scale, the style, the unified colour and above all how much they contributed to the overall character of the game.

I could have been jumping around as a stick man for all I cared, I kept missing jumps just because I was spending so much time looking at the amazing backdrops. You can literally stand on high platforms and look out at the landscape for hours and not just a crudely modelled generic background, you can actually see other parts of the game out towards the horizon. Amazing stuff!

Sadly there are precious few screenshots of the environments on t'interent, so if you have access to the game it really is a visual feast of a game, not to mention having two characters that you can actually give a damn about. The game starts out as a dry wasteland and as you go around 'healing' the wasted ground the colour in the environments just explodes off the screen. The gritty grey look of the previous games seems very dull by comparison.

I really just can't get the environments out of my head, it got me thinking so much about what it was about the games that really stood out in my mind.

Every game that has ever stood out in my mind has had a really strong environmental element to them. The Onimusha series has an extremely strong sense of the Japanese culture through it's environments, markets, castles etc. You can't escaped the authentic architecture and sense of period.

The Myst series have these incredible deserted fantasy environments that you actually feel have a sense of mythical history coursing through them! They aren't just there, they have evolved and have aged with time.

Even the new Sonic Unleashed game has a phenomenal set of environments, very simple but strongly characterised and culturally well observed settings.

Whenever I have been travelling I've always been more interested in the architecture and landscape than in anything else.

Much as I like characters, if I'm honest I'm just more interested in the environments that they run around in.

Tonight Matthew, I'm going to be an environmental artist!

So what now?

I'm going to try and find out everything there is to know about the profession. And try and irritate as many environmental artists as possible in order to find out more about it!

Watch this space. But not right now. Right now you should leave.

Intermission...

2008-11-26T09:11:00.000-08:00

The only thing missing, is Knight Rider speeding toward us!

All Roads lead to Reality...

2008-11-26T04:11:00.000-08:00

It just took me half an hour to log into blogger.

In fact it has taken so long I no longer have any recollection of the subject I initially set out to write about. It appears that when I had set up a Gmail account to apply for the alternate FaceBook account required for submitting work for our course, Google 'intelligently' changed my log in name to the new account details on my behalf.

Sadly they forgot to inform just one person.

I have to wonder about the vast creative intellect that decided to include such a feature without some way of informing the one person it affects. But then it could be to do with Blogger's Evangelical mania for insisting that all bloggers be Gmail subscribers also. Any one for Fascism?

Now I remember...

Last week's movie got me thinking about how closely Terry Gilliam managed to portray our present society. Much closer than Orwell, I felt. For those of you that haven't read '1984', George Orwell's novel depicts a government that is all seeing. He speaks of 'Thought-Crime', the idea that if you even think of rebelling you would be stamped out. He writes about a power that runs perfectly, controls faultlessly, Big Brother never gets it wrong.

But 'Brazil' shows us a society that is controlled by a runaway train that they are responsible for building, but no longer know how works or how to stop it. In fact they have built it in such a way that all those that even try will be severely dealt with. People literally fear change.

Brazil doesn't just portray the unstoppable engine of Bureaucratic Government but also of an ignorant society who not only can't stop what they have begun but are so infatuated with the swarm of monitors around them, that they have no desire to either.

Their world is lead by monkeys running around with their hair on fire, vainly trying to pat out the flames with paper work, whilst setting fire to everything else.

The protagonist's hope and salvation lies in a man called Tuttle, the only person who seems to see the big picture and know how to fix it. Tuttle is not real in the film. He is never seen by anybody else in the film and always disappears before that can happen. He is a figment of the protagonist's imagination.

More than that he represents the hero's desire to rebel and move freely through life.

In the end when our hero is liberated by Tuttle and his freedom fighters there are a few seconds when you think that maybe there is a chance they have escaped the madness, but it is short lived.

Tuttle strips into everyday clothes, but as he makes to escape he is hit by a piece of paper, it looks like a form. He is hit by another and another. Soon he becomes engulfed by a swarm of paperwork. The hero weakly tries to prize them free, as people pass by, but Tuttle disappears into a mound of bureaucracy and all hope for the hero is lost. The film descends into chaos as our hero flees for his life before the dawning realisation that his hopes for escape were all a fantasy.

What of our Tuttle? Does he exist or does he lay buried by our inattention to a picture that we have painted so big that nobody knows what it looks like. Or perhaps entranced by television... 3 blind wise men and an elephant. Shadows on a wall in a cave.

Big Brother does not watch us, we watch Big Brother.

It is safe to say that were I to believe in a God, I could totally believe we were made in his image.

With all this chaos that we and Him are able to ignore on a day to day basis, he could only be a reality TV fan.

IGNITION!!!

2008-11-19T15:43:00.000-08:00

The Hawk has landed!! Right I'll try and recover a few points from my last blog post, Y'know the one that blogger burnt in front of me whilst I cried on my knees.

The Hawk concept was conceived by Alex Hodge, a designer from New Zealand. The Hawk runs off a Honda hybrid bike engine and should be going into production in the not too distant future. Though don't go buying one to ferry your family round in, the real thing will only have one seat! (I upped the capacity so I get no moans about not sticking to the brief!! If you wanna check out Hodge's plans you can find him on Cloroflot.com. (no I will not post the link for you, you lazy bastard!)

I really really enjoyed modelling this badger, I feel like I'm starting to hit form a little bit more now and hopefully once the principles of modelling sink in a bit more, I think I could be a stronger modeller than 2-D artist.

As you can see it weighs in at a little over 5000 tris and the maps consist of one 1024x1024 diffuse for the Chassis and the other map allowance was subdivided into a 512x512 and two 256x256 for the wheels, seats and interior respectively. All map elements have normal maps and the Chassis and Wheels have a couple of speculars on them too. I may throw an ambient occlusion map on it at some stage just to see whether it will deepen the finish or not.

One really important element that hit home with this project was edge-flow. I totally get it now.

It's all a matter of balance, you can have all the geometry in the right place but if the edges don't flow it just won't look quite right. This is gonna really help when it comes to the self portrait.

I'm also gonna take another swing at the environment project soon to, right after I spend a day watching my new Eat3D DVD!!! 5HOURS OF TUTORIAL!!

To be honest I didn't feel too confident about where the future was heading at the beginning of this academic year. It doesn't matter how confident you are or were in the past you can always take a knocking. But there's peaks and troughs and the way ahead seems a little easier if you wait a minute.

There is always higher ground ahead.

fj ;aslir uhgpiwhgpoasrhgapo;i?!?!?!?!!?!?

2008-11-15T18:56:00.001-08:00

Substitute Blog Entry...

2008-11-15T18:51:00.001-08:00

This is not the blog entry that should be here right now.

The blog that I just spent half an hour writing and linking to the odd bit of information here and there and which stated with sparkling, articulate wit the state of all my current endeavors has vanished without trace.

Blogger is denying that such a blog ever existed. And that maybe I'm seeing things.

Probably a weather balloon or something.

The Prisoner...

2008-11-14T04:19:00.000-08:00

Save the Outline!!!!!

2008-11-10T09:31:00.001-08:00

Rant Mode Initiated.

You see before you in exhibit A, m'lud, a group of concept illustrations from Lionhead studios and NCSoft respectively. Please note the big sodding outlines!

These artists are highly talented, and I am in no doubt that they could easily portray their subject matter in full rendered lushness, however they have chosen not to. The reasons for this are their own, it could be that the subject matter calls for such a style, IE in the case of the two Fable 2 characters up top. Or perhaps it is a style they feel comfortable working in.

The point is that it is a subjective aesthetic and in no way affects the efficacy of such an images function; namely to portray a subject in a clear and direct manner.

There is an attitude that outlines are for cartoons and that we don't all have outlines going around our bodies. Redundant points. We don't have eyes on the side of our face but Picasso still sought to depict his subject in that way! It was his way of working.

For all this argument against outlines though, don't think that I can't see that benefits of going without them, the way I depicted the martians was simply a method of stylisation.

In addition to this the artist's in the three examples I have posted above have used a far greater subtlety in their line, either by mellowing them into the piece or by subtly colourising them.

In any case there is no reasonable argument not to use them, apart from subjective taste, if anybody has any comments, I'd be grateful to hear them.

Outlines Outlawed!?

2008-11-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

Okay here is the martian pilot from the Drone in the previous piece. Er... he's a little naked, but don't hold that against him he's a hoot at parties!

A criticism I received was the big intrusive outline encapsulating our quadruped friend here.

So expect more outlines in future work.

The Martians Have Landed!!!

2008-11-09T05:56:00.001-08:00

Head for the Hills!! I painted up these two puppies last night, took a bit of time but I think it was worth it! Outlines are not a crime!! I was following the Feng Zhu Robot Render DVD in order to get a few tips on how to shade up my ideas, though I haven't got it quite down to the speedy art he has....Yet.

The line from the story I took inspiration from was a description of one of the crab-like construction drones. I particularly enjoyed Well's description of it's 'Glittering integument', which refers to the cell like epidermis of the creature.

In the Second image above I imagined that the Drone could activate a kind of predator-style, stealth armour which would help it to blend in to it's surrounds. I haven't put a lot of detail into the Pilot so as not to detract from the Mechanical part of the form. But a render of the pilot without his robot regalia is on the way today.

In addition to this the idea with the vehicle was that it would act as a kind of oversize helmet so I want to do an additional image of the Martian freestanding with the tentacles either retracted or operating in some fashion.

I'm pretty buzzing from this project, so I'm gonna crack on...

Last Thing...

2008-11-06T18:30:00.000-08:00

Horny...

2008-11-05T11:57:00.001-08:00

This is just a bit of a mess around following a tutorial that I found. No reference used so please excuse the anatomy.

Probably went a bit heavy with the colour dodge but it's given the light a pleasing gold colour. I also called upon my friend sharpen filter many many times.

Paintings before Bed...

2008-11-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

Just messing around with some restricted colour. I've been revelling in Rembrandt's work of late, I love the way he could depict so much with such a restricted palette. I finally get what is so important about simultaneous contrast!

Render-Rama!!!

2008-11-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at how other artists depict skin and far from being the rainbow of colours I expected it to be it seems that many can effect a realistic skin with an extremely restricted palette. These are some painted renderings of some of the skin palettes I came across. Also I've realised that contrary to using purple and blue within shadows, many artists simply use grey and allow simultaneous contrast to create the effect of the contrast within the eye of the viewer. Clever stuff.

Oy! Beadle! That's my Car !!!!!

2008-10-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

I love some of the insane stuff you can find in fashion magazines!! More Manga Hair!! This painting nearly had me cutting my own ear off though. I went away and came back later. And then I went into noodle overdrive. I can still see mistakes in it now but in the main I think I managed to rescue it. Also my new favourite brush is the sharpen filter. Mmm Gritty. Also If anybody knows any common sense tips on painting skin I'd be really greatful if you could impart some knowledge my way!!

Common Sense Obsolete!

2008-10-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

Planned Obsolescence.

Planned Obsolescence stands, for me, as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the world. I first heard this term when I was eighteen in A-level Design and Technology. It stuck in my head because in a way I couldn't describe back then, it just seemed like such a twisted work ethic. I'm still confounded that it managed to win a place on the syllabus because it sounds like something that big industry would pay large amounts of money to their legal teams to deny all knowledge of.

For anybody that doesn't know; Planned Obsolescence is a standard practice within all product industries and though it may sound like some sort of 1984 conspiracy theory, it is a cold hard fact that most people are ignorant of.

Planned Obsolescence, as the name implies, is the inclusion of design flaws with in a product, be it a computer, a washing machine or a car, that will mean that within a specific time frame said product will fail and keep on failing until the owner is forced to buy the new model. Industry has got this down to a loose, scientific art form. They can ensure that a product will not last past a certain date. Any that fail before that time are covered by warranty, any that fail after the warranty are no longer their concern. Any products that last beyond the failure window are, in terms of industrial terminology, 'Faulty'.

It is interesting to note that this trend was begun in the car industry (I think it may even have been John Henry Ford) and products from before this period could last a family several generations. If a product was built right it could last forever. The industry bigwigs realised that once everybody had a car their services would no longer be required, they would be forced to cut their work force down to a size that would only have to accommodate first time car buyers and repairs to the existing car products.

So it was that the failure time was built in to products which meant that manufacturers could invest in cheaper materials and boost profits. Genius. The products kept on failing and bolstered by absurd amounts of money ploughed into advertising the industries can thus ensure that they can keep on selling thanks to the throw away culture that they have also engineered. Nobody asks why people buy a new car every couple of years, it's normal now. Back when this was first thought up people would have thought you were rich or insane.

And now we find ourselves up to our armpits in disposable mobile phones, cars, computers and the debts ploughed to acquire them.

On the flip side this has made me paranoid, I bought a cheap CD player for my room, it lasted a week. I had already binned the receipt and the box. Many people would have said, "Well what do you expect from something that only cost you a tenner!?".

What I expected was a CD player that might have lasted me at least till the end of the course!! Not a week!!

Bex has had similar misery with Dell (the computer company, not the DMU student.) Who have visited to repair her year old laptop about three times since she first got it and are about to receive another phone call to their overseas helpdesk because shortly after the third repair man left it Blue Screened a final time and went blank.

Could you imagine if the great civilisations had pioneered Planned Obsolescence? No more Wonders of the world! And lets hope that the process never makes it into more critical fields such as the houses we live in!

If you ever wondered how an intelligent species can put a man on the moon, Create energy from dividing atoms, open black holes in Particle Colliders and yet can't even design a laptop or an economy for that matter, that doesn't crash,

You can consider yourself enlightened, it's all in the design!

The Joy and the Misery of Other People!!!

2008-10-25T04:31:00.000-07:00

They say that Hell is other people. Yet another person said that 'Hell would be an eternity trapped in a room with your friends'.

Though I don't feel the same way as these wordsmiths, I do understand.

But I wondered if the same thing that can make a person ignorant, can also make them wildly creative? An individual that I live in close proximity to confounds me in his ability to be oblivious to the mess that he creates around himself daily. Though that said the other night I sat and watched said individual create a two minute animation (all hand-drawn) that would have won him a distinction on an Art Foundation course! The same individual, creates his own music and during the couple of weeks in September leading up to the 'Beginning' of the course he created a 2D one-on-one beat 'em up.

It's not that this individual is being messy on purpose, it's just that he doesn't SEE the mess! In the same way I just don't think he sees any limitation to the ways he can be creative. The idea of learning how to use a games design software just to make a comedy beat 'em up, doesn't seem to be an obstacle!

Creative by any means.

It immediately made me think of Takahashi (the creator of Katamari Damacy and Nobinobi Boy) from last year's GameCity. The guy did an entire presentation without once having to resort to Powerpoint. It might of been an eclectic collection of photos, videos and scribbles, but if you looked at the big picture then you would have seen that he was demonstrating his most fundamental creative skill, being able to pick up anything and just creatively play with it until you get something. Damn the mistakes. Whether Takahashi was intentionally demonstrating it that way is open to interpretation, I like to think he was.

Takahashi is a valuable commodity in his games company.

So why is it that our games course does not engage the aforementioned person? What does it take to motivate an individual like this? How could he tune his talents to the work set on the course? And how can the course accommodate a person like this?

Look! What's that up in the Sky....!?

2008-10-25T04:17:00.003-07:00

This is a design for an Airship that I came up with for last year's Layout pad project. It's amazing what you can come up with from a scribble! The process that I've applied to it is (no prizes for guessing!) a Gnomon DVD technique that utilises the path tool in CS2. The most labourious part is plotting out the paths but once you have them penned in you can use the fill tool to colour and then it is just a matter of painting in some more form definition and texture. To finish off I overlaid the original pencil drawing which added an unexpected colour to the piece.

The ship's design was intended to be quite a 2D vehicle, so perhaps this technique would be better applied to a more a design with more dimension, also I may have gone overboard with the saturation of colour.

A Painting Before Bed....

2008-10-19T18:27:00.001-07:00

Okay I went over board on the hair...

Something to Talk about...

2008-10-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

I generally like to write when I have a task to focus on, so the idea of reflecting seems a little wishy washy to me. However I will attempt to overcome my pre-conceived notions and write a little about gameart, the universe and everything.

The two aspects of the course, namely 2D and 3D, have been having a stand-off for my time since the course began. I dearly want to be a concept artist (don't we all?), however due to Blitz's generous feedback on my sketch books, it has been brought home to me that I still have a long way to go in terms of producing not only work that stands out, but work which meets up to the base entry criteria. So it seems to me that I really ought to bend over backwards to meet that. However another nagging voice is telling me that maybe I ought to focus on 3D, because much as I hate to admit it, even after a year of using it, I still don't feel like I know it well enough to use it creatively.

And where does my own work fit into all of this? Frankly and rather frustratingly, it can't.

It feels that less might be more where as work is concerned. At the moment the idea is that by overloading us poor bastards with as much of both as possible we will some how benefit, that a higher percentage of skill will filter into our screen burned brains. This tactic may work for some. However, both areas of study suffer from the student not being able to put a measure of quality into both. If both were balanced, in smaller amounts it means that the student could put more effort into a smaller number of pieces of work.

Who was it that said of portfolio work; 'Low Quantity, High Quality'?

And so somebody is going to lose out. Will it be 2D? Will it be 3D?

Neither, it will be me.

_____________________________________

I have recently been burying myself in library books, having unearthed a paperbound treasure trove of knowledge in the library. Most recently the geometry of design, which is a fascinating dissection of technical composition and proportion for the designer and artist and has really opened my eyes to the basic skill of dividing ones canvas to add a sense of balance and design. However it is important to support this knowledge by knowing that it should be used to support your subject, not to dictate it.

I also found an amazing book by David Hockney called Secret Knowledge which charts what started out for him as a quest to illuminate the skills of the old masters. What he found via his research was how the use of camera obscura type devices were propagated throughout the artistic community in but a few centuries and completely transformed the face of painting.
Hockney illustrates in full colour how painters became beautifully photo realistic overnight by applying these devices during the planning and painting of their work. Quite amusingly he also points out a few glaring mistakes that artists have made during the deployment of their new toy, namely perspective errors when they had to refocus the device between foreground and background. A highly recommended read.

My current read is Painting Techniques of the Masters by Hereward Lester Cooke. Hereward was a curator and painter working at the National Gallery in NewYork and has compiled a basic training regimen of skills that the old masters from Rubens to Degas would have known and applied par the course in making their art.

The Devil is a DJ!

2008-10-18T07:15:00.000-07:00

Unique Landscapes 2...

2008-10-08T13:24:00.001-07:00

Here is the next one in the series. Though they don't look that different in blogger the second one has atmospheric light added, but I wanted to show the original because I felt that the shaft of light disrupted the overall value design. Now I look at it in this window it looks pretty much the spit of the other one!!

But again I'm pretty happy with the overall look, it's simplistic but I want to concentrate on the basics and then work up.

Hey it's one year since I started digi-painting. Happy birthday me.

Practice, practice, practice...

2008-10-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

The Climber's Triumph

2008-10-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

Okay here's the first of many, of which I am extremely proud. Okay so the composition's boring but the background was already hinting at a mountainous landscape so I went with that. It's really low resolution at the moment and the micro composition I took it from was even lower still but I'm going to get a few to this level of completion and hopefully by that point I will have a bit of feedback and can take a number of them to a higher level of detail.

Unique Environments

2008-10-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

These Mini-compositions came from a new technique I found on one of Scott Robertson's DVDs. It involves working into tracing paper with copic markers and then scanning and layering them in Photoshop. Once layered the idea is to layer blend them at random and by organic process come up with a starting point and more importantly an original palette from which to create a so called Unique Environment. These are still at the pre-development stage but I wanted to pin them up just because the colour styles are so different from my usual selection, it should be a challenge.

The next stage is to zoom into each composition and find interesting micro-compositions which can serve as the jumping off point to the next level.

To be continued...

Same Same but Different...

2008-10-03T05:57:00.000-07:00

Some speed paints inspired by an Imagine FX article. The last was colour adjustment of the former and is easily my favourite. Time taken 1 hour.

Keep it Simple Stupid!

2008-10-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

I had a bit of a philosophical crisis over the summer. My personal philosophy as regards education has of late been of an Autodidactic slant. But the problem with that is once you start to educate yourself the world becomes a giant sweet cave and knowing where to start and more importantly, where to stop, can be a giant head/toothache.

To cut a long story short I got a long way off the beaten track from Art. I did, along my travels, research other individuals who were 'self-actuating' as Maslow put it, and what I failed to realise until just the other day is that they didn't study EVERYTHING. They were masters in their field and if they had gone into many fields it was as a result of the ONE subject they had started off with and mastered and then this had branched off.

I was until the other day the Jack of All Trades. Stood at the cross roads trying to go in every direction. But I have made one small promise to myself, to put everything else away, that does not matter for the immediate future and actually commit to my art.

To own it.

To build my house there.

And that way no matter what tangents my travels take me on I have something to comeback to.

The point of all this is that I am putting more effort this year into painting and modelling. So here are some of my efforts, it may not be much now but I guarantee by the end of the year I will be hitting above my weight.

I trying to do a bit everyday here is yesterday's Skillful Huntsman inspired Costume concepts and my value composition for Chris's one-point Homework.

Engaging Environments...

2008-10-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

So I've been thinking about the environmental project Heather has set us and I've settled on a patch of land that always used to catch my eye on the way into Uni from last year's Hell hole.

It's the side of what used to be an industrial building, but what caught my eye was the knots of pipes and chimneys all over the place, you can't see it from this angle but the rooves form a set of stepped platforms heading back out of view which would make for an interesting rooftop setting for a game.

Originally I really wanted to do a temple complex which I had visited in Japan but from the photo's I had taken it would have taken quite a leap of imagination to make a detailed model from them. The beauty of doing the model of this derelict factory, while trite, is that it is just around the corner and it's been unlocked for renovations so I can get in and have a look around. That said I may attempt the temple complex after this project. I didn't realise I would find an environmental project so inspiring. Maybe I should look into Environmental Art for Games?

I went along today to try and estimate the rough measurements for the site, but I couldn't get over the weird shape of it, so it occured to me that I could use Google Earth to set up a floorplan of the site. As you can see though there's a problem with the angle of the shot but it'll serve as a

rough guide. It also tells me where to place background buildings in order to fill in background details. That said I need to ask Heather whether it is better to place background buildings relative to where they would be in real life or whether I can cheat and place a scaled plane right up close to the environ.

A Bat

2008-09-28T12:14:00.001-07:00

New Years Lo-Resolutions...

2008-09-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

You Game....?

2008-09-24T17:34:00.000-07:00

Wake up Mike, it's time for school...

Aims for the new term:

More Painting,

More Modelling,

No more half measures.

RENDERAMA!!!!!!!!

2008-08-05T05:57:00.001-07:00

UnderSea - ReCrop

2008-08-03T05:27:00.001-07:00

Here's the undersea composition again after a bit of an advised re-crop and vignetting. The focus is brought more onto the craft being depicted, but I think the tentacle has lost a bit of character in the process. However the craft certainly dominates the picture more.

More Scribbling....

2008-07-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

Here's another colourisation from a Value comp I did a while back, a little more impressionistic, mark-making orientated this time.

...Even Deep Down Grime

2008-07-24T05:19:00.000-07:00

This series was created to practice a little of what I've been learning in the Loomis books and a few other sources.

Loomis advocates the use of value design in a piece of work, the idea being that you design the tonal pattern of a piece before laying down colour. Until now I don't think I really recognised how valuable this technique is, I think my paintings, to date, had really lacked tonal depth. I was scared that simply colourising a greyscale composition would look a bit bland but I'm proud of the result.

The last stage incorporates a bit of cheeky texture overlay and a heart breaking crop which lost the wicked but distracting detail from the forground.

The Mark of a True Artist is being able to Colour inside the Lines...

2008-07-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

Sunset Raid

2008-07-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

The Wii II !!!!

2008-07-22T04:44:00.001-07:00

Was reading a piece about new concept designs and stumbled across a new concept for the next Wii. I think Nintendo have unwittingly just invented a new ailment; Wii Neck.

Found in Translation....

2008-07-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

In trying to identify my artistic weaknesses and patch them up, I thought I would give the whole mental engine a tune up and as a result I find myself more and more drawn to any little challenge I can get my greedy little brain on.

A lateral thinking puzzle here, a crossword there. The other day it was the IQ test on FaceBook which promised to help you understand your IQ and compare stats with your online friends.

I know, I know and before you breath a word please consider shutting it, I've heard it all before...

The general consensus about IQ tests is that they don't come close to testing the broad spectrum of human intelligences. 'What about EQ?' 'What about Kinesthetic understanding?' blah blah...

I agree. In fact the polarisation towards the specific slice of intellect tested within the confines of the IQ test draws parallels with the polarisation of computer input devices towards alpha/numeric people.

But that is not the point of this post.

But it did set me to thinking about how we interact with the world around us and quite importantly how we interact with computer technology.

I, to date, have always considered myself 'number blind'. The notion that I am not a numbers person has been drilled into me by every teacher driven nuts by my inability to 'think in numbers' and my gifted ability to sit and look them in the eye while they talk and not hear a damn thing they said, because they were talking about boring numbers again...

But I do well in IQ tests and a large proportion of IQ test content is geared towards numerical based shenanigans.

I'm starting to think that maybe my problems with mathematics as a whole are nothing to do with numbers......

It's to do with language!

Namely fluency and comprehension of number as a language, the grammar and the punctuation.

I've been wanting to learn a second language for years but for years I've been sitting on the fence about it. If I learn Japanese then I can go to Japan and talk to Japanese people! But if I learn Chinese then I can network with an up and coming Economical power! But if I learn French then I can build on a base that I already established in school and that would imply less effort on my part!

But more important than any of them is a person's ability to communicate in number and in order to communicate you must first learn not just the language but the way in which it slots together. And once you know that, that's when you can compose poetry.

It was only when I started to handle cash as part of a job that I started to understand numbers in a way that years of schooling never managed to impart on me. What changed between school and sitting behind a till was the way I interacted with that number. I hope that when I step up to re-learn mathematics, that I can use that change in interaction to my advantage and utilise it to help me truly understand number. Even if it was simply the act of endlessly repeating mental arithmetic in an everyday life situation.

Meanwhile on a not totally unrelated subject I just watched a documentary about Bill Gates and how he built his way up to being one of the richest men in the world. (My favourite quote fm the program concerned Bill Gates's philanthropic aspirations being seen as an attempt to buy a Nobel Peace Prize!!)

What struck me most about the entire program was the leap it had taken to go from Gates's original programming language based DOS to the infinitely more user friendly Windows.

DOS required a huge knowledge of programming language in order to even begin to interact with it. The beauty of Windows is that all of that is behind the scenes. Now it is mainly a matter of using a mouse in order to click virtual buttons. You would be hard pressed to find a commercial program that doesn't use this simple kind of interface now.

However, you still need time with windows in order to fully get to know it and navigate around it. It is also far from being truly universal, in that you are required to understand the specific language it is set to. Example, if Windows was set to Arabic, could you navigate back to the settings menu to set it to English again? If you don't know the location of that specific setting by heart you would be hard pressed to find it again if you don't speak the lingo.

Please note, this a wicked practical joke if somebody leaves their mobile phone lying around.

My point to all of the above is that language can be the biggest stumbling block to any type of interface, whether it be with number or with an operating system.

But there are however artifacts that can transcend language barriers, things that are so universal that to employ them with in (for instance) a computer system that many types of people would have to use would negate the need for lengthy translation procedures that computer games have to go through, would speed intuitive work flow and would be far quicker to learn.

The kind of terms that transcend language tend to be visual cues, take for example the 'okay' sign made with the finger and thumb circled together, it is understood virtually everywhere. And how about the symbols on the front of your DVD player? It is understood by the entire family, my gran would know how to operate one and she was in the second world war.

Of course this would only be a way of speedily interacting with button based programs, text displaying and producing programs would naturally still have to use the written word.

The main problem with implementing a non language based interface would be finding a visual language broad enough to describe all operations you would hope to achieve through your computer and still be comprehensible to the maximum number of people regardless of language (bar people living in the Amazonian Rain forests).

There are instantly gonna be complaints from the literacy campaign front and the British Language and Grammar preservationists. To them I say that language is never static and is constantly going to evolve, the same people who are derided for using terms like 'lol' and 'rofl' are pioneering a new and efficient language for the online world. When the first dictionary was being penned for the first time, there were a dizzying variety of ways to write words, generally in a phonetic way, but in spite of spelling the meaning was still understood. Preservation of tradition is great, but just understand that you will rapidly find yourself defending a language as widely understood as ancient Aramaic.

Meaning is key.

The beauty of having a non-language based interface also means that you can have a far more open way of interacting with the programs functioning, IE not having to use an alpha/numeric device to operate a graphical program.

An ideal way of interacting with the computer would be the widely visualised 'gestural interface', which allows maximum interaction with the minimum the kind you can see in the film 'Minority Report' and which is already in development in many different arenas, for instance the Eye Toy. Also really exciting is Bjork's new musical toy!!

This little bad-boy is known as the 'Reactable' and is the future of technological interaction in my opinion. Intuitive, simple to learn and master. More about this and devices like it after a little more research.

One can only hope that as technology evolves and becomes more complex, we have the sense to allow our ability to interact with it to become more simple and accessible to everybody, even the number blind.

Fleshed Out...

2008-06-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

Here's what that skull looks like once you fill in the musculature, skin and add a nose and ears.

Is it just me or does it look a little bit like Charles Dance?

(Y'know you know the face, he's been in millions of films and as many theatre productions but he's never been good enough in anything to bother remembering his name...)

Deteriorating Values...

2008-06-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

Andrew Loomis is God, I've decided.

That may upset some people who up until this point were convinced it was Buddha or some other anthropomorphic personification of dire consequence, but I'd just like to let those people know that Loomis is really rather good as deities go.

He's in the rocks, he's in the trees and he can also be found on http://www.scribd.com/ in free streaming photocopied form.

It kind of vexed me that in all of the Gnomon DVD's I'd been wading through, that all of the instructors seemed to have access to some long since past reservoir of art training that we contemporary trainees are not privy to. Gnomon, for all the good they do us are dissecting this reservoir up into bite size pieces and selling them to an ignorant, hungry audience for quite a business savvy profit.

Bad Gnomon. But I forgive you.

There had to be someone out there who had recorded all of this secret knowledge in one place, a herald from a time when art wasn't considered a lesser element to the Three 'R's'.

And there is...

'Successful Drawing' Begins with all of the very basic stuff that we are all expected to know, and includes the stuff that seems so obvious that it doesn't bear teaching today. For instance, scaling everything in a drawing so that its the correct in proportion to the size of a human. Loomis demonstrates this in a one point perspective picture where he draws a human in the foreground and a house in the background, he then projects the human back to where he would be if the had walked up to the house and it turns out his shoulder reaches almost to the second floor!!

I would never have figured this out on my own!

I appreciate in Foundation art diplomas they aim to get you away from this kind of convention, so that you are free to produce something truly original outside of this frame work and then by experimenting you should be able ,through observation, to pick up these rules yourself.

It's all very well meaning.

However...

Expecting art students to pick this stuff up on their own is like expecting science students to go out and rediscover the rules of physics!!! Nice idea I'm sure, but why would they need to do that when such knowledge already exists?

Again, thanks Loomis.

The next, extremely lengthy tome, is 'Creative Illustration' which goes more into the creative side and how to plan a successful image using formal and informal compositional design, and Value design which I had never heard of before but which it is obvious now that they teach in the Art Centre syllabus. I haven't even reached the section on colour theory yet!

I'm pretty grateful to have found these goldmines and anyone who hasn't been within earshot of me repeatedly extolling their virtues would do well to check 'em out! It's a wealth of knowledge we would do well to preserve.

Above are some quick, very sketchy value compositions I was inspired to do with a new set of custom brushes I downloaded. There seems to be a running 'tentacle' theme!!

Amongst other things...

2008-06-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

So in between trying to save the planet, Blitzkrieging Brighton with my Curriculum Vitae and generally enjoying being back home, I have also been enjoying the virtues of Zbrush!

Sooooooooooo much fun to use!!!! I hope this is the future of 3d modelling! Pixologic Rock!

I'm also thinking that maybe Zbrush would be the way forward in gaining a 3 dimensional insight into anatomy at all levels. After modelling this little skull-shaped badboy based on 'Anatomy for the Artist', I feel like I understand it far better than I could if I had drawn it a hundred times, because I can rotate it and get to know it as I carve it out.

I set myself the task of obtaining a better understanding of anatomy by the end of the summer, I think this is the way I'm gonna be able to do it.

GENIUS!!

2008-06-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

To be honest, nothing had made me say Wow, recently until I saw this! A car made entirely out of fabric!!!!

It's All in the Presentation...

2008-04-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

Presentation day came and went, the pressure is off, but why do I feel unsatisfied with where I am at?
Tying all of my stuff together made me cringe. Not so much the 3D stuff, although I have already roasted that in a previous blog, but the 2D.

>Although I've used a plethora of creative techniques to develop stuff; Dice Games, Background Story, Originality of Form; I'm still unsatisfied with the visual product of those things.

It just seemed immature...

So my resolution over the summer and over the next couple of years is to try and find out what it is that the professionals do to add that little extra polish to everything they do.

Dan H recently suggested doing our own take on a Brothers Grimm tale; The Wonderful Musician. Hopefully he'll post the brief he sent to me on one of his numerous blogs! Good call Man! I was kind of dreading trying to string together a number of disjointed projects over the summer, but this idea means that we can develop a number of characters, environs, props etc with in the control of a single project. Actually it's a F*king great idea! So further to my 3D aspirations my plans are gonna run thus...

Divide up my work time into 2Week increments; Week 1; I develop 2D elements; Week 2; I convert that into 3D and try and develop a little more of the stuff I dissected in the previous blog entry.

So I have made a start with the project and started developing ideas, whilst trying to go in a new direction with my development style. I really liked Bex's idea development for her layout project. She used a very simple additive/subtractive style using just black and white on a variable opacity. The results were inspirational to say the least, so I decided to adopt a similar style on traditional media to start developing characters.

The good thing about the style is that it is more impressionistic, so when you play around with layering marks and eating into it with a rubber at a more frenetic pace you instantly start evolving unexpected results. I'm much more satisfied with these last few drawings that anything I have produced on the course so far. Hopefully I can lend some of that energy to my paintings without my computer having a fit!!! Enjoy!

Budda-Frickey-Bing!!!! The UnderGround has Landed...

2008-04-24T15:49:00.000-07:00

Okay UNDERGROUND SYLLABUS is up and running...

This little puppy is the product of a collective ongoing development project inspired by the Art Centre syllabus depicted in the aforementioned book/prospectus "In the Future."

The Aim is to develop our own skills in support of the learning that we are receiving on the course.

Collective participants so far include Del, Dan, Bex, Phil and myself, But is open to anybody that wants to develop or contribute.

We're All going on a Summer Holiday.....

2008-04-15T12:19:00.001-07:00

I've been so tied up with upping my 2D game that I almost forgot the 3D componant!

Just of late I've been compiling all my models from the year gone and I've realised how poor they are. I realise this is my first year, but hindsight is 20/20.

Technically at every point along the 3D process something is substandard. And then they start to become accumulative; Poor reference leads to poor model; Poor unwrap leads to poor textures; Poor textures lead to poor Normals and the list goes on.

The technical ability isn't the main problem, my main issue is just that they turned out so boring!

SOOOOOO BOOOOOORIIIIIING!!!!

I went back over the weekend and tried to raise the standard of my textures because a little bird told me that a good texture can save a bad model.

So here's my apocalyptic water cooler, I also pimped-down my van with some grunge and my FatDaddy logo (If Mathis can get away with putting his logo all over everything so can I!!) but no render on hand for that.

So here is the plan, I'm gonna discect 3D.

You start with what ever your object is gonna be and gather reference, decent orthographic reference and preferably in muted light so if you have to you can use photographic componants in your textures (though I'm gonna look into whether this is good practice or not).

Next you use your orthographic reference and model away making sure to adhere to correct geometry for when it has to deform. I just got through reading a piece saying that it is good next gen practice to model highpoly in order to project a bake onto your low poly piece. This is something that I've just been too lazy or too busy to try. To be rectified.

Next the unwrap. For me the most laborious part. Planar/Pelt and there are others which I havn't a clue about. Is it good practice to use external programs? Will potential employers allow you to use your external unwrap tools!?

Texturing. It seems that on this course the subjects of Unwrapping, packing those parts and then texturing them for best effect are subjects that really havn't been taught to us in a great amount of depth. I'm all for going and learning from other sources, but why is that? Is it a grey area? Because either Chris or Heather could teach this in more depth.

(Actually Mike, here's another perspective, if you will excuse the tangent. I agree that the artistic area of this course requires a very self directed approach to it from us, but I'm wondering if maybe the modelling could be a little more structured in the specific areas above. My reasoning is that this is a technical segment in the course and technical courses tend to be quite specific in the skills that they teach. Example. Architects. An architect is taught a very specific approach to making a building, for the simple reason that if he is bad at his job, buildings fall down and people die. That's a bad thing.)

Ahem....And of course there are the other texture areas Normals/Specular/Emissive/Occlusion.

There might even be more I just don't know about!!!!!!!!!

Now that I've got the separate areas laid out, what I'm gonna do is try and address all those areas over the break. I'm going to grab one of those big wall calendars and develop a plan. No! A regime to get a good working knowledge of all of these areas!! The main place is gonna be GameArtisans, it seems like their forums and tutorials could be really helpful so I'm gonna bite the bullet and start submitting my crap. I've also really got to stick my toe in the water a little more. Del has been doing a great job of it at the moment, for any body listening he's stuck a really insightful document on the KDrive written after badgering millions of operational game artists for everything they know. What he has found out is an eye-opener to say the least.

And now for Something Completely Different....

2008-04-12T04:57:00.001-07:00

I'm loving this course.

When I see the standard I was producing at the beginning of the year, compared to what I know now, I realise that I'm developing faster in terms of artistic skill than I ever have in the past.

And in no small part thanks to the small, dedicated hardcore in the first year who are in that lab pretty much everyday and who are so willing to share what they know and who are so passionate about levelling up too. Many thanks.

We all like looking at the concept art standard that we have to measure up to in the future. Jason Chan, Feng Zhu, Daniel Dociu etc etc...

Concept art is fantastic, but it is easy to forget that it is not the only interesting art out there, I came across some interesting characters on my foundation so I thought I'd link a few here for anybody interested.

ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

This fella rocks. And leaves. And twigs. Andy Goldsworthy is a sculptor who has rejected the idea of conventional media in favour of going out into nature and using whatever comes to hand to produce some truly individual structures. I could post pictures of his stuff all day, there is just so much and it's all really interesting. Something else which is fascinating is that he'll keep coming back to his sculptures through out the year and photo them as nature starts to erode and disintegrate them once again.

FRANK GEHRY
I saw a documentary on Frank Gehry the other week and I was fascinated by his creative workflow. He will literally sit and fool around with bits of paper, sticks and even coffee cups until he has created an overall building shape that pleases him. Then he works on little details, like how to get into the building.

Dave McKean
Dave Mckean is probably the most imitated illustrator of modern times. His stuff has to be the most individual and wildly creative body of work in illustration history.

I'm gonna try and make my artistic research more rounded in future. The concept artists that we follow state time and again that they look at conventional artists to learn there skills. So more to come.