Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Week 5 Silhouettes

Time Spent: 8 hours (Over an hour was spent drawing each silhouette's white line marks and clean up.)

This is an interesting project based on the design of creating silhouettes of characters and environment objects. Working on this assignment has also shown me that I in general draw very slowly. I tried to stay focus on the project and draw as quickly as I could. I'm not sure how to best speed up my drawing skills. But I know I can't keep operating a this speed for long.

I chose to draw a futuristic warrior character holding a rifle. I was inspired by the character designs and poses seen in the game Destiny.

Professor's Silhouette Example

My Final Composition

Monday, September 26, 2016

Week 05 Modeling A Prop

Modeling 3:30 hours
Rendering/lighting: 1 hour
Polycount: 932 Tris

Today I handed in the start of a four week modeling project, creating a cannon mesh in Maya. I spent an hour watching Nick's Maya modeling videos to get a sense of how to best development this piece in a timely. Then I imported Nick's prop concept images and set the mesh's scale to the rough dimensions discussed in Nicks modeling tutorial videos, and an appropriate height to UE4's Third Person character mesh. I found myself needing to retopologize the mesh while I was modeling new parts in order to control the polycount and form of the piece. I decided to bore out the cannon's tube to improve the cannon's prototypical design. Before exporting the mesh as an fbx file, I quickly set up an automatic UV map of the now combined cannon's pieces.

Once modeled, I pushed it over to UE4's third person level, save as a copy level the level, and set up my cannon with a couple copies set around the third person figure. Finally, I added colorful materials to the cannons to test out the look of the mesh when applied with different materials instances.

Next week, we plan to properly UV the mesh and create a high poly sculpt from the lower poly cannon model. 







Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Week 04 Composition and Layout

2D Class composition and Layout:
Drawing time: 5 hours

Today, we practiced creating a 2d composition in Photoshop. I themed my piece on a long dead dragon resting on a mountain cliff, still hoarding his pile of gold. I mixed the layout of my piece utilizing circular, radial, and rule of thirds guide lines to frame the piece. I included another dragon at the center view of my circular dragon rib cage bones to draw the viewer's eye to the intruder walking onto this site.

Sample composition layout sheet, illustrating the grid line form choices that we want to follow while constructing this piece.  

 Reference

Final Render Shop

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Week 03 One,Two, Three Perspective

Work Time: 5 hours

For this week in my 2D class. I researched first second and third perspective drawing. We are assigned to draw a third perspective composition based on buildings photographed at a very low or high perspective. This camera placement shows the effect of the skyscraper tapering off to a distance point above in the sky.


Blocking out the three perspective points on the reference image.


Final render.

3D Week 04 Lego Project Part 02


Character Team
Ryan Hill - Alien Commander
Matt Young - Police Officer
Chelsea Ziu - Space Engineer
Kay Ghering - Robot
Melissa Almirall - Alien
Lindsay Green - Astronaut or spaceship pilot
 

Development Time:
10 hours spent on Minifigure UV layout and multiple export tests and importation in a UE4 blueprint.
5 hours modeling alien head, material set up, and solve import/transfer of character figures to the environment team.

This week, Nick assigned teams of six artists to construct more Lego 3D models themed on creating a future themed Lego world environment in the Unreal Engine. Each artist on my character team will be tasked with creating unique Lego figures based on the Lego figure I create last week. I’ve been requested to build a skeleton rig and skin weighting it to my character's mesh. While I’m rigging the character, my fellow team members will need to build accessories, materials, and textures to supplement each of their character’s design.

Reference image of Lego alien characters design.

Maya character renderings


 UE4 minifigure materials and asset library showcase.

Below displays the rendered snapshops of my alien character posed in engine.






Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Week 02 Basics of Drawing Shapes

Time Spent: 6 Hours

I'm still a little new to digitally drawing in Adobe Photoshop on a tablet device. In the past, I used to focus on editing and blending raster photographs in Photoshop or use Illustrator to create clean vector graphics. I may be rusty at digitally drawing artwork. But, I'm taking another stab at creating raster graphic drawings, and adding highlights and shading to a set light source. I hope spending the time now working on these two mannequin figures will help me further improve my skills in 2D artwork and character composition.


Week 03 Lego Project Part 01

Team: Ambitious But Rubbish
Ryan Hill - Team Captain
Michael Vogel
Boo Roseman

My Lego Minifigure Modeling Asset
Asset development time:
Modeling: 11:30 hours

I really wanted to challenge myself by developing a 3D character based on a well-known character design. This project had a short deadline of four days to complete, and I basically started it on the third day. I do not recommend delaying the start of such a large scale project like this if it's your first time modeling in Maya.

Before I started creating this asset, I examined the character’s design and found it manageable to construct with it simple shapes utilizing cubes and cylinders. The hardest sections to model are the arms and legs. The cylinder shape of the arms have a slight organic form that bents at the elbow, and is relatively flat along the torso. Each leg has three holes that are designed to position the Minifigure in a standing or sitting position onto other Lego pieces in our library of Lego pieces.

Special thanks to Yanjun Chen, and my teammates Michael Vogel and Boo Roseman for their support and self-confidence on this ambitious project.

 
Concept Lego Reference


Maya Minifig Model

 Import & render of my Minifig in UE4.

The images below display my team's utilization of creating a library of 3d models, and position them into a cool scene, such as this Formula 1 racing inspired environment.







Monday, September 5, 2016

Week 02 Mincraft-ish Level



Project Time Development:
Modeling Cube in Maya:                                15 minutes
Textures in Photoshop:                                   2 hours
Rendering Cubes in Maya:                             40 minutes
Research and lecture review:                          70 minutes
Developing materials in UE4:                         75 minutes
UE4 cube environment scene development:   4 hours

This is an interest assignment looking into continuing our weekly 3D and 2D software creation experience utilizing Maya 2016, Photoshop, and the Unreal Engine. I created another beveled cube in Maya, similar to the last assignment. But this time I laid out the cube’s UVs in Maya’s UV editor. I exported that UV data into Photoshop, where I started created small pixelated textures for setting the Minecraft-ish art style look of the cubes in UE4. I applied the textures to material editors that change aspects of the textures reflected in engine. I also moved, rotated, and scaled the cubes in these scenes.

Below is a collection of my work creating the cube, adding lights in Maya, creating multiple textures in Photoshop, displaying my Minecraft-ish world landscape, and showing an additional sculpture of a military tank made out of these cubes and textures.