Confidence in Art and Life

It's been a long, long time since I last updated, there's a reason for that.

Since last I posted I did some intern work for Wales Interactive and did some free work in my spare time for Irontown Interactive on their iPad game Iron. Both of these gave me experience and confidence in my work as well as some essential industry connections. Ultimately it helped land me my current job as Junior Environment Artist at Oysterworld!

I've been at Oysterworld for around about 9 months and it's been pretty great all round. I've been working on a number of unreleased projects and it's great to be part of an awesome team. It's also helped greatly in one other aspect and the subject of this post...

Confidence

Confidence has always had a strange place in my life, I've always struggled with it in almost every aspect of my life but at the same time it's never been overwhelmingly crippling. My art has always been a part that was particularly bad, never really producing anything I've been proud of for more than a day or so before resigning it to being awful. I know I'm not alone among artists in this respect, it's a hurdle every artist faces and one that many fall at, and I'm far from over it yet.

I have however, improved. It's partly down to having an industry job, where I can get real, honest, face to face feedback on my work. It also helps to see everyone else's work and your place in the chain. Sure, I'm not the best artist, far from it, but I'm a Junior, nobody expects perfection from me other than myself. I've come to see where I stand in the grand scheme of things and it's helped me be confident in what I do at the level I'm at and to seek to improve to rival the people around me.

There's also the personal side to things. I would say my confidence overall in life has seen an improvement. I've been through a lot of the last few months, I've had to face a lot of demons, some of which I didn't even realise were there, and I have many more to face in the near future. I went to the doctors about my anxiety and have been put on medication for that, which has been a life saver really, it's allowed me to 'come out of my shell' a little more, less terrified of every little thing in life. This helped reinforce the idea that I already knew, everything wont fall apart from that little thing you said the other day, that thing you almost did but decided against. No, actually things are better not worse. This has helped me no end in many aspects of my life, but within the context of this blog I think this carries over to the art I produce.

Confidence. Confidence in what I am doing, what I can do, what I should do. All of it is essential in art. Whether it's that one confident brush stroke or the belief that you CAN reach that level of detail if you take the time and think about it. Confidence and belief in yourself. It's not easy, it takes a lifetime of effort to achieve, but if you really want it, you will put in the effort.

I'm not saying all this from a position of complete confidence or self security. Not at all. I've just managed to take a peek over the wall to the other side and seen the light, I still have to climb over the wall to reap the benefits.

Christ that was wordy... and a little heavy...

Let's have some images to remedy that. I've finally got round to practising my Photoshop drawing/painting again, an area which fascinates me but one I consider to be a weak point of mine. To help learn some new techniques and ways of working I've been watching and attempting to replicate the art of Aaron Blaise. He's a personal favourite artist of mine and has some awesome videos on his channel. I took the video step by step, pausing every few seconds and trying to replicate that on my image. I found this much less intimidating than trying to outright copy it and it also offers an interesting insight into other artists workflows.

Anyway! Here they are:

Ultimately I think they are both massive improvements over previous work, and not half bad for someone who hasn't practised this kind of painting in a few months. One of the main things I can chalk it down to is... CONFIDENCE! And guess what, because they turned out well, it's given me more confidence! Time to ride the confidence wave while it lasts...

The Return Of Dean!

So I always said I wouldn't let it get this long between blog posts, but I guess I failed that one...

Work dropped off quite a bit since finishing uni, I took some nice well deserved breaks after finishing my showreel and applied for a few jobs. In the end nothing came back so I'm still searching while working an agency temp job on the side. Working 8+ hours a week 7 days a week for a while I wasn't in the mood to start any big projects but now I have a few days off I'm getting back into that working spirit.

But enough about my personal life, I don't have a whole lot to show but here area  few digital painting I did to practice new techniques.

The first image is my first real attempt at drawing anime, I've recently gotten into some Visual Novels (Katawa Shoujo and Fate/Stay Night) and absolutely loving them at the moment so it was only natural for me to want to give the art style a try.

The painting was a copy of a random image I found on google search:

The second image I have done was a more personal project, it is a copy of some of the official artwork for Final Fantasy X-2. I never really got into X-2 but FFX was one of my favourite games of all time and the character design for Rikku in X-2 is really nice, so I thought it would be a fun project.

I have done a few other small digital painting projects just to improve my technique but most of them are just quick sketches. My next project is a top secret game. I'm currently blocking it out and getting the practical side of it down, making sure the gameplay is reasonably solid so that I can tell how far I can take this. At the moment it is going much better than I expected and I may draft some other people on to the project if they're interested in joining, but I want to get the idea down more so I can give a proper pitch.

In short the game is a side scrolling shooter which uses 2D sprites generated from 3D models.

The ultimate goal of the game would be to get it released on the app store, just as a free downloadable thing that can be a laugh, it may not get that far, but that's the goal I'm currently aiming towards.

More Particles...More Props

Tomorrow... tomorrow is the first submittal deadline for the game, it allows the tutors to see where we are and give us feedback on the what we need to do for the remaining few weeks. I'm feeling fairly good with what I have done, but I feel like I should have a lot more done by now, I can never quite estimate how long everything takes.

For the submittal I have been getting everything up to an acceptable standard so the tutors can see where I am going with it, but it does mean much of the detail has been pushed to the side for the time being.

I have done a quick diffuse, specular and opacity for the Ice Bow:

I have also been getting some of the particle effects done for the game now that I have a much clearer view of where the project is heading. I have already made the staff particles as well as the magic attack so I moved on to some more important areas.

I made a quick snow particle emitter to make it snow, I intend to have the emitter follow the player character without inheriting it's rotation so the snow is always coming from the same direction. If I have it emit in world simulation it should also stop each individual particle from following the player when he moves.

Here is the effect so far:

I also made a snow footsteps particle so that when the Fae is running he kicks up a bit of snow. I want to add some more opacity to it so it is more like the Bark Basher attack later on but here it is right now:

I also made some particles to go along with the Bark Basher's push attack where he uses his large shields in a lunge and pushes the player back. The idea is it kicks up a large amount of snow as they're shoved across the ground:

There are quite a few other props that I've done turnarounds for which I'll upload in a bulk post after the first submittal.

Easter Holiday Fun Time

So I'm back home for Easter and while I will still be working plenty, as I have plenty to do, I have had some time off to spend some time with the family and friends, so it's been a less than productive few days.

First off I did a few books, nice and quick, quite nice and relaxing. They were actually quite fun and I think they've turned out quite well so far, they still need a normal map and the specular map has only just been started but it seems to be working so far.

I begun texturing the instruments although they are in super early stages. It was more a test to see if I could get something that looked close to right, I probably shouldn't be showing this at all, it's embarrassing really.

Other than that I've started a few props but they're too early to be worth showing, I've also made a few minor tweaks to the centaur texture, but barely enough to be worth noting.

I've also been reading up on my anatomy some more and doing some pencil sketches, I'll probably upload them some time when I have time.

My graphics tablet has broken over the last week or so, and as such it's slowed my work down considerably, especially as it's mostly texturing and high poly sculpting I need to do. But it's not really an excuse for how little work I have gotten done, I guess it was lucky I took a week out over Easter in my schedule, so I should be fine still.

First Echoes Sweatbox

The first sweatbox,where we show our work off to the tutors and the rest of the course, is happening tomorrow so I've been getting some quick renders out so people can see my work.  So I thought I might as well post them on here.

I've been continuing to texture the characters, although this has been going slower than I would like as I'm having to work on it in university rather than at home as my poor computer cant handle the stress these days. But in terms of the actual texturing it seems to be going quite well.

The Centaur has a Diffuse and Specular map:

The Fae has a Diffuse and a Normal map:

Other than the characters I have the weapons, although these are not textured yet. 

And I have the instruments from the previous posts although I wont bother posting them all here again as they haven't changed.

I feel like I don't have much to show for saying how much work I have been doing, I am a week or two behind schedule due to personal matters but I think I need to step up my game a bit, especially as the final deadline draws ever closer.

Still the work I have so far exceeds my expectations so there's a bonus there, I just need to work on getting work done faster by improving my workflow.

Texturing Time

Texturing has begun! I always like to switch between texturing and modelling a lot within a project so I don't get too overwhelmed by one or the other. This is particularly true about texturing as I consider it one of my weaker areas. Unfortunately due to the urgency of much of my work I have had to get all of the modelling, unwrapping and high poly sculpting done early, leaving the mountain of texturing to climb.

I began by going to the Centaur. It had been a while since I had worked on him so it was nice to be reunited with him again. I began by blocking out the base colours, then adding some texture detail. I then went on to render the normal maps and ambient occlusion maps to help give it some of that high poly detail. This was a bigger problem than I had hoped and eventually took me around 3 days to get to work...shame on me...I have always had trouble rendering these maps out and always waste too much time on them. In the end I used xNormal, I program I had used a bit before but this was the first real use of it.

Anyway, here is the current centaur texture so far. It only has the diffuse map on at the moment and it isn't finished, I want to work on the colours so they compliment each other more as well as adding detail to areas I haven't had a chance to yet like the quiver.

I'm quite pleased with certain aspects of it so far, such as the skin, which I normally have trouble emulating on my models. The ice has come out reasonably well so far as well considering the small amount of time put into them so far. The AO map has also massively helped to sell this texturing and I'm looking forward to doing more high poly sculpts and adding ambient occlusion and normal maps to my future models.

There are areas I'm not so pleased with as well, such as the leather straps. I always seem to have some kind of leather on my models and have never been able to get it to look quite right, I may got back and redo the leather completely. The rune like marking on his skin are also more like place holders at the moment rather than final ones.

I have also begun the Fae's textures, although these are in a much earlier form than the Centaur. As it stands the Fae only has blocked out colours and and AO map applied, this is because I get the centaur one working and I decided to get the Fae's AO done quickly while it was fresh in my mind.

Absolutely nothing about the Fae is final, and there is some AO cleaning I have done which isn't in the screen capture but it gives a nice first feeling of what the Fae will be like. The AO worked surprisingly well on the areas that varied a lot from the low poly to the high poly, such as the forearm detail and the roots on the feet, and could almost pass without a normal map, at least as a static, unlit mesh anyway. 

The textures are looking promising so far and it's certainly boosted my texturing confidence. I seem to have started this project with quite a bit more knowledge and expertise than I had before, which is strange as I'm not sure where it has come from, most of the work produced between last years game and this one was quite poor, but I seem to have pulled it all together for this final project and it is going much better than I could have expected.

Turnarounds, turnarounds, turnarounds!

So pre-production is in full swing for next weeks deadline, I don't feel like I'm going to be able to get enough done for a great mark, but I can definitely produce enough to make production run smoothly. As well as this deadline I have a business studies deadline on Friday so I have to work on that too, so there's no shortage of work that's for sure. The business studies project doesn't have much to show yet, when my business card is finished I can put that up here, but I need to do some renders before then.

So for pre-production I have been working on the turnarounds for most of the characters and props as well as designing some of the props, it may seem late to be designing, but a lot of the props are very minor and don't require too much design, unlike the characters.

So I'm just going to post a load of turnarounds for you to look at, drawing is not my strong point but they seem accurate enough to be useful in production.

The Centaur's Ice Bow:

The 'Tholos Arch' building:

The Player Character's Staff

Ruin No 1:

Recorder Prop:

Violin Prop:

And the Centaur himself:

Quite a few things will be changed before the end, and some things will be changed when it gets to production as there won't be enough time to change them in pre-production now. But some things like making the instruments more unique and less like ordinary instruments, but for now I have something.

The ruins will also be split up into smaller parts, such as separate pieces of broken wall, rubble and floors, so they can be adjusted if gameplay requires it and also so they can be mixed and matched into different designs. This gives us some more freedom and also works as a safety net.

Christmas Pre-Production

Hope everyone has had a good Christmas and you're having a great new year.

So, with just over a week left of pre-production things should be a rush, and I do have plenty to do, but I think being at home means it hasn't quite hit me yet. Especially as the first hand in the business studies is in this week as well. I should be on top of everything though, I'm sure it will come together.

As the beginning of production is almost here my excitement is rising about the project and seeing everything come together from different members of the group is giving me a great sense of scale and seeing everyone putting so much effort into the project is making me feel like we could do what we've set out to do, maybe even more.

But on to some of the work I've been producing, some of it I'm quite pleased with, it's not great, but it's a weakness of mine so average works for me.

I began by doing a digital paining of the player character's head. It's a new style of painting for me, using a low opacity brush and building it up to darken it, creating lighter and darker spots. Nothing special, I quite liked it.

I did a quick Mudbox sculpt as I've met with some success using the different basic meshes to get my idea across. I'm still no expert at sculpting and I generally like to start with a 3DS Max model and sculpt in the form and detail, but to save time I just try to manipulate the mesh as best I can in Mudbox which is quick but I sometimes struggle to get across what I want.

I have a WIP of the Fae's turnaround, it has the proportion there so that other group members to can use it for their work, but this is top of my priority list atm, along with the centaur turnaround. I want to add a three quarter view to the turnaround if possible but it's not essential for it to be a working turnaround.

Finally for the Fae I have begun my maquette which acts as a final art piece for my character, this is still reasonably early in development with the shape and forms still being worked on, but it shouldn't take too long to finalise.

I also did a sculpt of the centaur by taking the basic human mesh from Mudbox and a downloaded horse model from the Mudbox store into 3DS Max, cutting them up a bit and then meshing them together before bringing them back into Mudbox to sculpt. I quite like this as I sculpted the muscles from memory as I have been doing a fair amount of anatomy research but having the basic proportions there from the initial basic models certainly helped no end.

I can use these sculpts to get a good feel for how the model will work in a 3D space as well as help me to get the proportions right when it comes to producing the turnaround and producing the final 3D model. As character proportion are what usually let me down (just look at my Thor character from earlier this year) these will be invaluable in ensuring that I produce a high quality work that will do the game proud. Well I hope that's the case anyway...

There's also the beginnings of a turnaround from the centaur here:

I have also begun the centaur maquette but as of now it is still only half covered in sculpting clay and the forms are far from complete, so watch out for the centaur maquette coming up soon.

Considering how much time I've taken off from Christmas and New Year to see family and friends I was concerned I hadn't done anywhere near enough work, but it seems that the time I was working was actually productive so I don't think I've fallen behind too much, I should have it under control and some hard work over this last week should secure it. So lets bring on production, I can't wait!

Specialist Animation 2

It's been a while since I have posted because the project I've been working on is not the most visual project. We were doing an assignment in Unity in which we had to get certain game elements working. This was good as one of our biggest concerns for our major project game was that we do not have a programmer to create gameplay elements.

I'm pleased to see that the project went much better than expected, not just for me but for our entire team. We have gotten much more done than we expected to and it has allowed us to widen our scope and hopefully add even more to the game. We managed to get a lot of the puzzles done, as well as some we were not sure we had time to do and we managed to get certain elements like the camera and the AI working to a decent standard.

In the project I made a camera with 3 levels of zoom and a special fixed camera position for the boss fight, it's also possible to look around using the mouse. I created a door in which you need to pick up 2 keys, walk over to an object and press the F key to open a gate and I created some 'dragons' which attack you by breathing fire, this does damage and has a 1 in 4 chance of causing burn damage over time. The final thing I created was a box which you can go to, press F and it heals you to full health and stops the burn damage.

Here's a quick gameplay video:

There are a few problems such as the boss camera has a weird flick to it when it transitions between views but for a couple of weeks work in a subject I don't normally dabble in I was quite pleased. There's plenty more to do but between the members of our group using Unity we should have it under control.

We have also been using Playmaker, an add-on for Unity which you can get from the Unity Store which allows for scripting in a more visual sense, similar to Kismet in UDK.

We have now got until we go back to uni in January to finish the pre-production for this game so the pressure is on but I can't wait to get started on the production.

Here is a WIP of the Centaur:

I still need to do more work on the head, hair ect but I'm pretty pleased with it so far as drawing is not exactly my strong point, but I can see the improvement over last years major project work so that's always motivating.

I also found a digital painting I did over summer which I never got round to finishing because I ran out of time so I might as well post that here too. I attempted to recreate someone else's art work as I saw it as a good way of working outside of my comfort zone and to see how other people have done things.

This is my drawing:

Here is the original made by justaman78 over on DeviantArt. It was produced for the game HAVEN.

Mine is clearly better... what?.. fine their image is much better, but then learning from people better than you is a great way to improve.

I enjoyed learning some new styles during this drawing and I think it has helped prepare me for pre-production and even helped with the above centaur picture, so time well spent I think.

Specialist Animation Project Part 1 Complete

So it's been a little while since I updated my blog, this is due to the rush to get this first assignment in and then sort out a 10 minute presentation for the next day, so things have been a bit hectic. But it's over now, it turned out well and I get to have more of a laid back week now, which I could really do with. Well probably not...but it's nice none the less.

Anyway, enough babbling, time to show what I handed in for Spec Anim 1.

First off there was Mjolnir, Thor's hammer, and Loki's Sceptre. I already posted up the basically finished screenshots but now I have some with proper lighting as well as turnarounds so here goes.

Mjolnir, 379 Polys:

Loki's Sceptre, 655 Polys:

The image renders are quite low quality, I do apologise but these were screenshots as I went along rather than final renders. Hopefully the turnarounds will turn out better.

Overall I was quite pleased with the props, I think they came out at a decent quality even though I felt I could have improved on them quite a bit given more time, but I need to get into the workflow of producing things faster so this was a good practice for me and I'm happy with it.

After we had produced these we had to model and unwrap a a character that went along with the props, and I'm afraid this is where my work goes downhill. I would claim it was getting used to Maya or something, but I think it was my own fault, I rushed into the character way to fast without getting the basics down and this had a pretty bad effect on my model, I managed to improve some of it, but I fear the damage was already done.

In my haste I appear to have submitted the screenshots without making a backup for myself...smooth...but they were only basic renders anyway as we haven't textured the character yet, but I still have the turnaround so here you go.

Thor, 6813 Polys:



It's not all bad, I was quite pleased with how the face turned out, even if it doesn't look much like Chris Hemsworth (The actor who plays Thor in the Avengers and Thor movies) I still like how I managed to get a level of detail out of the face I haven't been able to previously. It's all learning and everyone has their bad pieces of work. No point in hiding them and pretending they didn't happen when you can learn from these moments.

Just to touch on the presentation as well. The feedback I got from the tutors seemed promising, especially as nerves usually get the better of me during presentations. I think I was pleased with the quality of work I had in the presentation so I didn't feel as nervous about presenting it. The presentation was to pitch the idea we have for the final year dissertation, mine was titled 'Aesthetics as Metaphor: A Study of Embedded Narrative' which is a study of environmental storytelling and how subtle background cues can influence how a play experiences and game and what emotions they can evoke.

If I feel confident enough I will post my dissertation on here for people to read, but I've never been a very strong writer so we'll have to see how it turns out.

Loki's Poki Stick

I've had the last few days off in terms off university work as my Mum and Sister came up to visit which was nice, and we went out on Sunday night to see my comedian Ross Noble for the first time and that was a pretty awesome night.

But as for work, I've mostly been texturing my props for the current project, got to have these completed by Thursday so I have the last week free to model and unwrap the character. I've spent a fair amount of time these past few days trying to render out an ambient occlusion map which I have had partial success with. It is working but I have seems around the edges of the model, even though i have turned up the 'fill seams' option in the baked map setting.

So here is Loki's Sceptre, with the not quite working AO map:

So far it has a diffuse and a specular map on it, so I still need to start my normal map for this as well as finish these maps, but I'm pretty pleased with how this has turned out so far.

I have done some work on Mjolnir as well, but I have spent the majority of my time on the sceptre as the work seemed to be flowing quite well on that prop.

The hand strap is going to be changed, as having it all the same texture makes it look very boring, but the normal maps are working to a certain degree without spending too much time on them, and the tweaks that need to be done should be pretty simple. The spec map is only basic at the moment too so that will require some changes, but overall I think I can have both of these to a pretty good level of quality by Thursday, which would be great considering I've been learning a new program throughout.

I've also been posting bits and pieces to Polycount which is an awesome website based around game artists. Some of the work on there is incredible and it's a great community. Eventually I'll start a thread of my own work...but I think I'll build up my portfolio a bit more before then.

Year 3

Well it's back to Uni next week, really looking forward to it although I am quite nervous, what with this year's grade is basically my final Uni grade...so yeah...no pressure...

Honestly though I can't wait to get back into it, summer has been a nice break but I really should get back to work now

In the past few days I completed a tutorial from Digital Tutors which came free on the CD that came with my 3D World mag. It was quite an interesting tutorial which focuses on the basics on unwrapping and texturing, but it has made me rethink may workflow and I was pleased with what I got...so it can't have been bad

This is the final image, the model was not done by me and was supplied with the tutorial, as were the photographic textures, the unwrapping and texturing (Diffuse and Ambient Occlusion) was done by me:

I think this turned out well for saying I consider myself to be a weak texture artist and I always rush through the unwrapping stage which makes texturing harder. So hopefully this will help me with my projects that start in under a week