DMUGA Week 33 - All work handed in!

Oh wow, time to take a big breath in and relax for a couple of weeks. My 1st year work is handed in and of course it feels good. This will be a short blog to wrap up this last week.

Monday involved the 2hr drawing session back in the New Walk Museum. I would have liked to have added some more details but it isn't too bad. Looking back though, it is a lot better than what I was doing much earlier on in the course when we went there.

In addition, I did manage to finish the master's study but I spent a very long time trying to get it looking as accurate as possible to the original. I think the only thing I found disappointing when doing this is that again, I realised I need to work on faces significantly. I had to tweak them around so much it just got a bit muddled and wasn't exactly what I was going for, but in the end, it doesn't detract from the overall image too much.

This painting took up pretty much all of my time up until Thursday night. A few bit more of re-organisation of folders/files ready for disk on Friday morning and that was it...

Well, that's the first year's work handed in. Now, I know for a fact that I need this time over the summer to improve, so I will practice my weak areas in visual design I.e. Characters/faces/anatomy, and work on landscapes. I also need to do some 3D modelling and have got a few ideas in mind as to what I want to do. This is my last dmuga related post for 1st year and I have had a wonderful time so far, I just hope I use my time wisely over the summer. Enjoy the weather guys & see you all soon! :)

DMUGA Week 32 - Quick update on projects :)

This week in terms of lessons has been almost non-existent due to a) Bank holiday b) No lectures/seminars. At least we had Game production? Not exactly...

In terms of visual design work, I just carried on with the Chicago project and spent a good day and a half trying to make a digital painting with orthographic drawings of my final design. This took me up to Wednesday morning and I was pleased with the outcome.

The reason why it took me a bit longer is because on Tuesday we came in as usual expecting to hand in the 'texturing project' work, but no-one showed up by lunch-break. I therefore spent that morning slightly improving on the texturing project, and then attempting to use one of the graphics tablets. I say 'attempting' because the ones I used had a very annoying circular animation which lagged and froze as I painted. Instead, after lunch I just went back and worked in my flat. Anyway, here is the final result:

I was very pleased with this because it was my idea and I made it look pretty decent, which I had previously not achieved in my eyes with previous projects. I hope to add some more details/decals to it in the future - perhaps even do another design! :)

So, that covers up until Wednesday... Admittedly, I took it easy for a couple of days, but it was not wasted at all. I took this time to sort, re-organise, re-scan and re-name all of my work I've done throughout the year. Believe me, this was not a task for one day as I would have lost my mind repeating the same procedure again and again for around 350 images. Visual design one day, life drawing on the other; at least now I have all of my work together and named appropriately on my computer + disk, ready for the hand-in day on the 16th May.

What about the weekend? Well, I have spent most of my time starting the 'Masters project' which we have to do as our last one. I chose to do "The rapture of Psyche" by 'William Bouguereau'. I chose this because I love the idea and it will give me a challenge with finding the colours.

It's not yet finished, but to give and idea of what I did to get proportions generally right and breakdown the image to understand it, this is the layout (Real one on the left, mine's on the right):

I have to admit, I am not great with colours because I almost always pick ones too saturated, but this image isn't saturated a lot. In order to learn from doing this, I decided to sketch it out with just a black brush on a an isolated layer (which took me quite a long time to get correct), and sampled 8-10 base colours from the image. WAIT! I know this is bad, but let's be honest here, I'm not at that stage yet, and I need this to learn. This stage provided me with a starting point, I then went and tried to find them myself and compared to the original... It took me a while to get an idea but once I got into it I was getting better at picking the similar colours. Some were a little off, but I just used hue/saturation/brightness/contrast adjustment layers used to correct tones which were a bit off. It is unfinished at the moment, but will post it in my next blog.

So, that's it! That was my week, not too intense, but I have learnt a large amount about colours and sketching using a graphics tablet. :)

DMUGA Week 31 - Deadline's fast approaching!

I hope you all had a lovely Easter and now we'll get back down to business. Over the break we had to make a small scene for UDK using our game assets that we've made throughout the 1st year + any additional things. I found it difficult to incorporate all of them into one scene, so I decided to just select a couple and go with it. I decided to keep the gladiator and the trees, then put the others to one side whilst I make something up just to do for fun. Here's how the scene turned out:

I loved making the dragon's head, and it gave me something to just play with and see where it took me. Granted I only spent 1 week of my Easter holiday doing this, but I had so much fun! I am now also getting into UDK more, and trying to learn as much as I can in my own time through just watching video tuts.

Here's the other assets I made during Easter which you can't see above:

Simple armour display case + Sword/Shield plinths.

I also did a bit of drawing & digital painting over the break:

(There's more traditional but wouldn't upload correctly)

Anyway, now that's out of the way, not many days left until May 16th (DEADLINE)!!

Monday - Visual Design

Only a few things spring to mind for me when we get given the subject "1920's Chicago", especially when it comes to environments. So, out of the three areas (Character, Vehicle & Environment), I chose to do a vehicle. I have had a lot of fun looking at a lot of the car designs back in the 1920's and what previously didn't interest me, now I strongly like the aesthetics of them! One of the things I have decided to keep is the wheel arch... it HAS to be there in all its glory. After doing some moodboards/silhouettes/plan, I cam up with 6 ideas:

I liked ideas 2 & 5 so did a mash-up of them:

Unfortunately I haven't produced a digital paint of it yet, I will have it done by tomorrow but will start work on it tonight. This was my fault, I should have started it sooner.

Tuesday - Game Production

Well, today certainly came with a surprise for me. I didn't know what to expect since all of our projects were submitted & done, but we just received a 1 week-er to texture & rig a couple of character models we're given. Here's how that turned out (Not too well!):

They actually look better than what you see here.

Admittedly, I hoped that we would be able to come up with a theme and just practice making assets for whatever, putting emphasis on getting materials looking right and learning how to create them properly in UDK. We'll see what we do for the next 2 weeks, but hopefully we can do something BIG! :)