The beginning of production!

Pre-production is finally done! Hurrah! Now its time to start the production...and boy is there a lot of it...

Yesterday the advanced techniques project started and I have started to create the head of my Mongol warrior, this is going reasonably well but quite difficult...maybe because I haven't done any modelling in a while

Tomorrow we will be taught how we should be creating the rest of the models so I will begin modelling that tomorrow...then if things go according to my original plan then I will have the modelling done by friday so I can take it into Zbrush over the weekend and play with it in there to see what I can produce. Although looking at how long this head is taking to make I will be pushing it trying to model it all in a day and a half.

If this doesn't go to plan I might put a day or two aside during major project to produce a better normal map using ZBrush.

I'll be keeping a record of it all again as I did with pre-production over at The Paupe Project.

Lighting and Compositing & Major project

Hey everyone, bit of a late update but hey ho...I've now finished my lighting and compositing project and I'm quite pleased with how its turned out.

To start we had to light a scene with materials such as metal and glass as well as do reflective lighting all with standard lights so there was no use of global illumination ect. We had one day to do this although we could go back and change it, in the end I left it how it was to concentrate on the bigger parts of the assignment.

Then we moved on to the lighting of the untextured hand model that was created at the start of the year, this turned out fairly well and I only used 3 photometric lights in the scene. Here is the finished result.

Then we had to move on the the compositing part of the assignment, this was the part I think I was most successful in but we shall see when I get the grades...I decided to do an exterior night time shot and an interior daylight shot as they would show the widest variety of skill if they worked out well, although I did only add one model to each (or 2 of the same model) to keep it simple so I didn't try to bite of more than I could chew like normally. 

Here is the exterior shot...

And here's my interior shot...

Hope you guys like it and feel free to leave feedback in the comments about any improvements/things you like, its always welcome :)

As a final note I now have to keep a blog or diary of the major project to hand in for marks at the end of the project. The link is here if you interested and I'll try to add a tab at the top of the page. I've created a new blog for this just so people who follow me don't get spammed with updates :)

Textures and Grades

Hi everyone, sorry its been a long time since my last post, didn't have the internet at all over reading week, then I was busy handing in my texturing assignment for uni, then....well I just forgot...

But anyway to start with I got my first marks of the 2nd year and the first marks that count towards my final uni grade... the project was the modelling texturing and skinning of a hand (which is on this blog) luckily I managed to do well with a 2:1 at 68%, so only 2% off a first which is great for my first art project, it was a really confidence booster :)

Now on to more recent stuff, I finished the texturing project on Monday and was pretty pleased with the results, texturing was always the bit I was most concerned with when I switched to art and I've had some decent feedback off peers so it should go well

First off here's the Beer Keg turnaround...

Then the Shipping Container...

Now the deodorant bottle...

And finally the jewellery box...

Overall I'm pleased with what I produced, but there are a few problems such as the smoothing groups on the deodorant bottle and the jewellery box wasn't great in the end, but i did have quite a few problems when transfer mapping and generating ambient occlusion maps towards the end of the project.

I'm also working on a side project at the moment while the the work load isn't too much, I'm quite excited about it personally although it's not really a big thing, ill post an update showing it over the next few days.

So a fairly successful start to the year! Bring on the rest of it!

The Movember Update

So I'm now half way through the current uni project of creating 2 boxes and 2 barrels of any kind with the emphasis on the level of texture detail. This is something pretty new to me so I'm fairly pleased with how its turning out so far

With all of the models I have just gotten the basics of the textures down so that they can be checked over by tutors and given the okay before I start adding smaller details. this is what I've done so far...

My Cargo Container...

My Jewellery Box...

My Beer Keg...

And my Deodorant Can...

I've only just started texturing the deodorant can so its just block colours at the moment to test its working, and most of the models don't have a working normal and specular map yet, and if they do its not finalised

Also as I side note I'm taking part in Movember and shaving off my beard and moustache to raise money for charity, I have a donation page HERE if anyone would like to help out towards a great cause, thanks :)

Art, Crates, Skulls and Tings

Hi, all been a while since I updated my blog so I thought I would give everyone an update on whats been happening.

First things first, I've decided to take the plunge and swap over to the art side of the course...I'll be completing the art assignment for this years minor project and at the end I can either stick with art or switch back to animation if I find I don't like it, so that's reassuring.

So for this years minor project (which is 4 weeks long) I have to create 2 barrels and 2 boxes which have diffuse, specular and bump maps on them. I point of this project is to do as little modelling as possible and rely entirely on the textures to carry the project so it will be a good test to see if I enjoy it enough to follow it through for the rest of the course.

Today we had a quick lecture on texturing and got given some photos to work into our texture, so I made this crate in an hour or two...

In other news I have been trying to improve my drawing by doing an hour or two every night. So far I have been working on anatomy and trying to get character proportions right, but today I decided to try something different and used Photoshop to sketch some skulls to try and help me with facial proportions and also to work on my sketching in Photoshop using a tablet as its something I've never really tried before.

It's not great, but then that's the point of practising, so if I keep it up I'll hopefully see an improvement *crosses fingers*

Another Hand

Hey everyone, it's about time I did another blog post as I haven't done one since the end of my first uni project since I've been quite busy with my 2nd project...the storyboarding...but I'll explain that another time...

The first assignment lasted 2 weeks and we have to model, texture, rig and skin a hand (as well as create the bug posted in the last blog post)

First off here is the low poly model of the hand

Then the mesh smoothed hand

The low poly turned out to be 999 polys, which was quite lucky as we were told to keep it below 1000. I was really happy with how the modelling went and so I'm thinking about doing this years minor project as an Artist to see which path I enjoy more...I'll let you know what I decide to do later

After this we had to texture and skin the hand, this is the skinned model

And here is the final textured model of the hand

I was quite pleased with how the skinning turned out but I didn't have time to add some of the fancier skinning techniques like the tendons as it took a few days to get the skin modifier to work...as for the texturing it was done quite fast as I didn't have much time for that but for the short time I had to do it I was reasonably pleased

100 Faces

Well uni has gotten off to a great start, really enjoying myself now I'm back and getting loads done, the hand modelling we have to do for our assignment has been so good that its making me consider switching over to the art side of the course even though I will be somewhat behind...but that's for another time...

As for this post I'm going back in time and submitting something I completed over summer but never get round to putting up here, so here are my 100 faces, which was a task set over on the Ctrl+Paint website where they suggested you pick something your bad at and then draw it 100 times to improve. And I hate drawing faces so this took me a while to do but I hope you'll agree that I have improved at least a slight bit since I started. :)

Sorry about the poor quality and poor Photoshop mashing it together, you cans see a bigger image Here, and then click zoom, but its still not great...

Maybe I'm just embarrassing myself by posting about switching to art and then  posting some badly drawn faces at the same time but you know...

Ill be posting the model of my hand over the next few days so everyone can say what they think I'm better at doing, will be interesting to see what people think :)