DMUGA Week 2 - Film interior problems! What scene to choose?

The second week into my second year at DMU studying Games Art, and it still amazes me how each project teaches me something new & improves me as a aspiring Games Artist!

The next project for 3D that we received on Monday was to start modelling the interior for our movie scene. I was really excited to just get stuck in and I did! We were shown how to use the new perspective tool in 3ds Max and I built a block-out for the scene in that morning. Here's the first block-out I produced:

Even though I was pleased with how it looked from the one camera angle, the room looked 'wrong' and out of proportion. At the time, I was reluctant to do it again, but one of the most important lessons I've learnt whilst being on this course is that if something doesn't have the desired outcome, and you potentially have to time to do it all again, then make another iteration. If anything it will be great practice! Therefore, after getting some advice from Steve, I re-blocked the scene out the following day and this is how it turned out:

As you can see, it is a lot more accurate and not only from just that one camera angle. This block-out was accurate enough for me to start modelling the structure of the house on top of it, but properly.
I must apologise, I didn't include how the first life drawing session went in my previous blog, so I'll mention it here. I didn't expect to just come straight in and draw anything too decent, but my drawings weren't a complete failure. However, I was a bit rusty and I'm really excited to get back into the swing of things and hopefully continue to improve! This current week, we produced drawings using charcoal, a rubber, and a charcoal covered sheet of paper. This is to focus on tonal ranges with the charcoal. I love this technique, however, I always find it difficult to get the range purely because the tiniest smudge using tissue paper will lighten up the black areas quite a lot, making it look flat.
Here's what I mean:

Week 1

Week 1

Week 2

Week 2

I am enjoying life drawing more so than last year, and I can see how much I've improved, but still have a very long way to go! I.e. My 2 minute drawings are very unfinished, and not aesthetically pleasing so I really need to improve on speed & accuracy.

In the afternoon session with Mike, we were told that for the movie project, we have a extra week. This is fine because it means we'll have more time, however, we only have this extra week because on Thursday they'd go through what movie we've all picked and give us the thumbs up or not. At this time I was just hoping that we could still do our scene because we've already done a fair amount for it. Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the day struggling to come up with other ideas that we could possibly do for this project. Here's all the mood boards for this project:

In addition, Mike showed us a colour palette technique which allows us to see how balanced the colour palette is of an image using a CMYK colour wheel:

I think Moonrise Kingdom is a good choice and I can't wait to make a decent start on the 3D side of things - Of which I started the next day by modelling the walls & side door frame.

We had another "Cool Sh*t Wednesday" presentation in the afternoon by Emma and even though it was a revision from a few months back, it was nice to see again what Emma has worked on and the kind of process she had to go through to make/animate little characters I.e. The horses from different angles made by an old painting program. Emma mentioned that one of the reasons why she loved her job was because you could change dramatically between art styles and what you are making in a short period of time, keeping it exciting and "fresh" each time. This is also one of my reasons I'd like to be a games artist!

Wednesday evening was spent making another mood board for other ideas we could do if Moonrise Kingdom got turned down. I have to admit, the past couple of days I didn't do much for the film project because I didn't want to put loads of hours in and have it be worthless to the project. However, the next day came and it turned out that Moonrise Kingdom was fine! Woohoo!

The lecture on Thursday Morning by Mike was re-enforcing what Joleon's presentation was about on Tuesday. The message from them were:

-Goal
-Audience
-Iteration

These are terms which we can all apply to many different projects in order to make them somewhat successful. A clear goal is needed (with the audience in mind/who it is for), and make many iterations of whatever it is you are doing to hopefully find that jewel of an idea.

The rest of Thursday was sent doing some 2D stuff and scaling the model in 3ds Max so that it fits to real-life. This means that for Friday's lesson with Jack, we can use the 3ds Max model to make it out of foam board and card by just scaling down using a conversion of 1:20. E.g. if the room is 8000mm across, the model's room would be 400mm across.
We measured all the aspects we needed to using a cuboid in 3ds Max:

I managed to get it all measured up and walls cut out whilst the group worked on modelling/unwrapping. We have also created a plan of what we need to do and with deadlines - this is very good because it'll give us something to guide our time to ensure we are doing things on-time:

I also did a little bit of modelling on Friday night, but not too much as I was pretty tired by the end of it... I need some downtime to relax!

Over the weekend, I got a fair amount done on the scene and this is what is looks like so far:

We also all got together as a group on Sunday night and tried to put together our physical model which is being made out of white card and foam board. It took way longer than expected and we still need to finish it at a later date; hopefully on Friday next week during Jack's lesson. Here's some of the process:

So a rather good week expect for the 'waiting period', I'm just glad that we could carry our film on and hopefully do it justice. There's a lot of work ahead but I'm sure we can do it, it'll be a painful process on the texturing of everything in our scenes though, as we have to make them super realistic as well as finish it all within the deadline! Ahhh, I'm not panicking... :)

DMUGA Week 1 - Year 2 begins! :)

Intro: First day back, time to get down to business! I attempted the 3D summer project which involved making a map under the subject of "Ancient Ruins". There were so many things I had to consider and I think I was a little bit too ambitious. Not to mention, I personally feel that not enough planning went into the design of the map itself. I began with a central scene and built around it, however, in retrospect it would have been better to plan the layout of the whole map first. I could write so much about the project which would be in a future blog post. Here's a sneak preview:

In the mean time, my first week back has been a rather interesting one...

I was expecting a personal project just how we've been doing it in the 1st year, but good news; the course structure has changed to incorporate 50% group 50% personal. I think this is a very highly beneficial way of working because it allows our individual work to shine as well as our collaborative skills in groups. In addition to this, the group projects allow for a much larger scale in a shorter period of time i.e. more gets done, and faster.

Game production on Monday's this time instead of Tuesday, and our first group project is called "Asset Swap". The brief gives us the all the details (tri count, texture specs etc), and rather than a diffuse, specular and normal map as the standard - it has now changed to: An albedo (just colour), metalness, roughness/gloss, and normal. This is the new way of rendering for the game engines, it's called PBR (physically-based rendering). This method makes much more sense to create better realistic materials and I don't think it's exactly hard to adjust to. However, that doesn't mean I have had a straight forward time texturing in this project.

I began with a very quick concept for the bench before we had to pass it on to the next person. I was randomly assigned the bench to concept, and since we decided on a skyrim-esk type scene, our assets were most likely going to have a lot of dark, worn/splintered wood on them as it's only fitting. In keeping it clean and simple, the bench was very basic to model to the 350 tri budget but included some kind of carvings on it:

It's not the best drawing, or even a rendered one, I just wanted to get the idea across for the next person to understand and model it. I then passed that on and began to model the hog on the plate that evening. Today was a very relaxed day for me as the thought the project was good for just 1 week.

The model of the hog was finished on Tuesday morning as you can see:

It didn't take long at all to do but I was happy that it was 600/600 on the tri count - that is mainly due to the apple because I wanted to be able to get a decently round apple which we can then instance later in unreal engine 4. I received the plates, cutlery, and tankard to unwrap which was a very fast process.

Not a lot happened during the day today in terms of the asset project because even though I finished the hog & tankard, I had to wait until later that night for the shield to be sent to me for texturing.

We were given a brief on the visual design project which is 4 weeks long and in groups. The first week is concepting/2D, the last three weeks are for modelling/3D. We were initially told to find a movie scene interior which we could build in 3D and improve upon/add our own little touches to it. This changed a couple of days after where the brief is to now literally make a movie scene that appears interesting.
Our group made a couple of mood board that night to get some ideas for what we could do. I loved the idea of "The Mummy", "Harry Potter", and "The Matrix", however as we later found out, that they use a rather short range of colours as you can see:

I would love to do the Great Hall in Harry Potter, but by Thursday another group has already chosen it unfortunately. I might make it myself as a personal thing however because I think it will be really nice to model & texture and a whole scene.

Wednesday: I carried on with texturing the shield throughout most of today and finalised the textures in the evening, ready to be put into Unreal 4. In the afternoon, Joleon kicked off a weekly lecture whereby the tutors and/or students bring in a presentation of something that they generally find fascinating or just want to share with the whole year. I really like this idea, and it was great to see Joleon's new project he's been working on and the process on how him and his team have gone about making it.
I wasn't a fan of the end video, but the presentation was good to see. Next week is Emma's turn, so I'm excited to see what it's going to be about!

Thursday was the day we found about that the ideas we initially had for the movie scene were not what they are after. So we had to come up with another idea to do. We finally decided on a scene from 'Moonrise Kingdom' on Friday - here is the set:

We picked this because it has a number of texturing challenged and modelling challenges, but we think it is do-able in the 3 weeks we'll have to make it. The wallpaper and rug will pose a challenge in particular in terms of the texturing as we'll need to draw it all by hand.
I am excited to start modelling this scene; I just want to get stuck right in and begin making it.

On Friday, we had a very interesting talk from Jack about projects he has previously worked on and displayed some of his work to us to see his process/sketches. It has got me even more excited to try and build the movie scene out of card first. We picked 'Moonrise Kingdom' for the movie scene as mentioned above, and began thinking about how we're going to spread the work load when it comes to modelling/texturing.
I also spend a couple of hours trying to figure out a problem in UE4 with Steve about my shield. For some reason the textures weren't acting how they are supposed to. I haven't got an image of UE4, but this is how it looks in Marmoset with the maps applied:

The problem in UE4 is that despite the roughness map, the shield is very glossy, the albedo is very saturated, and the matalness map makes the shield rather dark. So, there is a lot of problem to sort out.

Here are some extras for the Moonrise Kingdom scene:

These were to help me get a better idea of the scene itself in preparation for the modelling/texturing aspect of the project.

To sum up my first week back, I have thoroughly enjoyed it and it has been a much better start in my opinion to the course than week 1 in year 1. I am very excited to see what the course holds in store for us because it has all been changed! I can't wait to get in and start making lots of visually pleasing, cool 3D universes!

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! :)