Wednesday 20 November 2013

DMUGA Week 8 - Building handed in! :D

I've just realised that basically all of my blogs are me talking about how stressed out I am... I have to change this!! So, this time I'll try to be a bit more upbeat & happier :) - Don't get the wrong impression, I'm still dying, just wanting to be enthusiastic about it!

Still life in the morning session was really enjoyable, I didn't get almost anything drawn (just a lamp & thumbnail of the scene), but the shading that the lighting gave was great. I used a soft-ish 3B pencil and got a nicely toned effect on a small picture of a lamp which I was pleased about, and I also produced a bigger version of just the lamp's shade and tried out an effect with the rubber which turned out alright (not the greatest though). We also did some blind contour drawing whereby we split into groups and drew someone every 6-8mins. Now, I was expecting some really wacky things from this... And I was right! However, I wasn't expecting any of my drawings to even be any good; especially since I dislike most of my 'people' drawings, but a few of them turned out kind of alright! So, I think that it was a pretty good exercise which let me 'feel' what I was drawing, as well as entertaining to see what weird things come about.
Life drawing, where everything I do is terrible... Actually went ok! Once again don't get me wrong it's hardly amazing, although, all of those times that Heather told me to "draw bigger!" had finally had an effect. For the first time, I can actually say that I attempted to draw the figure with tone only and it wasn't horrific! Even though others already do this 5x better, I actually noticed an improvement in my own work so that was nice.

Finally, the building is done! I'll be honest, I didn't think I'd get it done in time but that was because I had no idea about how to do textures properly, material ID's, tiling etc. But I got something in that wasn't a major fail - despite nearly missing the deadline as I used a non-rewrite able disk and broke my 3ds max file... Oh well, a quick nip to the shop fixed it :)
The tutorials for the trees were interesting as there was 2 different ways of approaching it. Once gave more control but needed more cleaning up as the end, the other had less control, and less cleaning up after. Our brief is to make 2 different trees and keep it under 1000 triangles each, and I've already used half of that on just the trunk & a few branches! I am curious since we didn't cover how to do the texturing for the leaves/twigs, but if it is all just planes & alphas, then I could potentially have around 250 textured planes, which sounds like a lot to me, so I'm hoping it'll be ok.

This week's lecture on the rest of the video game history was quick and simple, Michael went through a lot of the most popular game which were released in the 2000's, and expressed what he called 'nerd rage' towards angry birds in the seminar. Some of these games/consoles obviously included: the PS2, PS3, Xbox360, Wii, Supar mario galaxy, Halo Franchise, Call of Duty Franchise, Resident evil etc. I loved how Michael described Angry Birds to be a game whereby the player "fires cr_p at other cr_p" & found it quite amusing. Furthermore, something which I had noticed, but not really noticed was the deal with guitar hero. It was released is 2005, dominated the market for the whole 'rhythm gaming' genre, then sort of disappeared around 2010/11, so it had a very intense but short life - which is surprising to me since I still really like to play it as well as Rock Band. Just to make a comment comparing the two games, Rock band's drums only having 4 pads is annoying as hell, so I prefer GH for that matter, although, Rock band has a much more diverse list of dlc which supports more of the music that I like.
I found the seminar to be very interesting as they always are! We discussed what our futures my be like as game artists, which included different possibilities that are open to us that we can try in order to start our careers. For example, we could use the final year project as an 'incubator' to test-run something that could have some feet. Another thing to try would be to learn simple coding & try and make mobile based games which have low start-up costs, but just mean profit all the way if you hit big. Or, try the usual route whereby you gain a job for a small company, work up to bigger things, then move on to potentially anything (since the big company will most likely go bust...).

Anyway, the things I need to do this week by next Monday are:
-Still life for visual design
-Life drawing homework for visual design
-Add to my blog of games history
-Finish modelling both of the main structure of my trees & take reference images for textures/modify them to seamless/make normal & specular maps.
-Plus any extra things that need doing
Overall ok so far, hope I can get this all done for Monday; wish me luck! :)

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