World Building 6 - Christmas Card

This week we were tasked with designing a christmas card, to be printed out on A6.

For this project I was working with Ricardo Costa.

We started off with a rough sketch in order to get the idea and artstyle for the card, we opted for a more blocky/cartoony theme and rather than focusing on just Santa, we decided to have a bit more of a narrative.

For this Project we were going for a mix of illustration and 3d paintover to achieve the final the design.

Ricardo produced and created the major models that were needed, whilst I posed and rendered them, and brought them into photoshop to handle the illustration and paintover.

First we did was put the Reindeer into the scene, once Ricardo finished the model I posed it using the CAT system in 3ds max, then brought it it into photoshop in ordered to be painted. I did the same thing with the Sleigh.

The second model to be added was the child and christmas tree scene. Same as before with the reindeer, though this time I messed with glow effects for the lights on the tree.

Ricardo did a great job on the present machine and I had fun painting the details into it. However as I was working on the image, I decided to drop the tone the background down, as the white was clashing too much with the colours and scene.

We decided to change the angle of the Machine render, in order to make it more 3d/isometric. Unfortunately I had to re-paint it, but we still had time on our side. Next I did a quick render of the desk models Ricardo made.

I illustrated the students in the scene, although I was getting frustrated with how they looked, but deadline was approaching at this point.

The final addition to the scene was the final model of Santa that Ricardo did. I took it into the scene, but this time I set the render to Overlay and painted beneath it, in order to preserve the great lighting from the render.

Once we were happy with the composition of the card, I put together a border and Ricardo produced some text to finish the Card off.

Also did a variant with a different background.

Overall, I had mixed feelings on the result of this project. Personally I don't like the results of my illustrations, we had a lot of work during this week, which made it hard for me to give the project my all, however I will say it was a good exercise in teamwork, and producing a brief with a second person.

World Building 5 - Surrealism

This week in world building we had to produce a piece that was surreal and a bit on the strange side.

I started off with just producing a moodboard consisting of strange and surrealistic pieces. The term surrealism is so broad it was quite hard to pin down an exact theme. I decided to settle on something weird, but a bit colorful as well.

I decided to do a 2d painting for this week, however due to lack of time from working on other projects, I found myself having to dive right into painting the piece.

Started off with a really rough sketch of the characters, I then dropped in some base colours, and minor shading for the background.

I added detail and further adding shade to the environment and characters.

 

When I was happy with the basic form and shade, I began to add highlights, and more shadows, as well as playing with the exposure settings to make the colours less flat.

Overall I was pleased with how the lighting came out on the scarecrow character, but everything else I am not pleased with. I'm not sure why, maybe it was due to having less time eto work on it this week, or that the idea didn't really match the image I had in my head. I would rather start the piece from the ground up, as I cannot really think of anything to add or change that would make me happy with it.

Game Mechanics 7 - SU Textured

The majority of this week was spent making sure the SU model was fully textured and shadered ready to be imported into unity.

Although I'm happy with the results I was fairly sick of texturing the SU, merely because it was so repetitive and dull, but I'm glad of contributing to the project. I am very curious to know how the shaders will look in unity along with the lighting.

Game Mechanics 6 - Texture tweaks and and Map texturing

This week I concentrated on finishing up a few textures I had started on for a few models, along with beginning the process of unwrapping the SU and texturing it.

Stage Model by Paul Simms.

Since the Stage was one of the more important models I had a lot more opportunity of going into detail on it. I had fun with doing the textures as I experimented with using different brushes to create the different scratches, markings and debris on the stage model.

I also went ahead and created a normal map for the BlackSquareBoard model, so we could try and get the crumpled paper texture to stick out more.

This week I only got around to unwrapping the SU mainly, we decided to go for a texture map for the walls and floors, rather than repeatable textures, this was due to time constraints and that we didn't want anything to go wrong with the unpredictability of importing the file into unity and having the uvs and textures mess up.

For the textures themselves, I tried to keep them as close to the SU and reference photo's as possible. My plan is to add normal mapping and specular shaders later on, to further enhance them.