2D Class Week 16 Figure Drawing Turn In

Time Spent: 10:40 hours

In conjunction with my 2D class, the artists and I were given the opportunity to attend a figure drawing class held every available Friday evening. We all studied human anatomy with a live model, and examined the bones of an supplied skeleton model. It was an interesting class to improve my drawing skills and ability to visually see and draw thew defining feature of the female and male human body.

My class's assignment due on the last week of the fall semester, is to create three final figure drawings, combining the skills I developed since my first session 16 weeks ago. I was instructed to create three new pieces or push three previously drawn pieces from class further to a professional state. This included utilizing the lessons from our 2D class to develop clean line work, realistic proportions, and shading values.

I feel this is a good start in developing my drawing skills, but I can still see additional improvement is required in fully understanding and rendering the human figure. I plan to continue drawing every day to aid my artistic career in animation, that requires strong drawing skills in order to become a professional animator.

 
Figure drawing 1 original sketch

 
Figure drawing 1 final - value shaded


Figure drawing 2 original sketch


Figure drawing 2 final - value shaded


Figure drawing 3 original sketch


Figure drawing 3 final - value shaded

2D Class Week 15 Final Delivery (All Material)

Time Spent:
Modeling Well:     9 hours
Bird Animation:    3 hours
Scarecrow Anim:  4 hours

I finally made it to the last week of my first semester FIEA. It has been an awesome and challenging experience, developing my skills in drawing, 3d modeling, rigging, animation, Motion capture, utilizing the UE4 game engine, and working on teams for my RPP class projects.

But even with all that training, the scarecrow team continues to move along developing assets and completing assigned tasks from Nick and my team Lead Baily. The artist team have been merging our levels into a shared UE4 file with an accessible level selection menu, for easier access and collaborative menu building experience.

This week, I was assigned to update my well model with an additional player grab handle, designed to rotate up and down the water bucket attached to the well's rope pull mechanism. 

I also continued animating the bird and scarecrow rigs.

Updated well handle.

2D Class Week 14 Concept Round 04 (Final Color)

This week is my Scarecrow team's final week to create concept art for our main character, his crow companion, and environment assets. This round involves adding color to the chosen 2D concept pieces that my team iterated on over the last couple weeks.

Bailey, my team leader requested I export the bucket mesh from my well model, to add as an additional prop to our environment. I also continued animating our scarecrow hanging out on the fence with the bird. And also create the crow's own idle and flying animations.

2D Class Week 13 Concept Round 03 (Value Pass 02)

Time Spent: 9.5 hours

I've once again continued in my quest to finish modeling the scarecrow teams well and animation. This time around, Doug provided an additional rig for the bird to fly around the character and roost on his hat. I animated the scarecrow in an idle that leads into him accidentally throwing off his left arm to the ground. The crow then picks up the arm and brings it back to him.

Well model shaded.

Well model wireframe

This image shows some of the animation keys I created in Maya of our happy scarecrow sitting on a fence. The crow reacts to the scarecrows larger movements, and tries to flap his wings in order to stay placed on his hat.

2D Class Week 12 Concept Round 02 (Value Pass 01)

I continued animating the scarecrow since last week. I also continued modeling environment assets for this week.

2D Class Week 11 Concept Round 01

I animated an idle animation of the Scarecrow.

 Farm cart shape language environment update.

 Wooden fence shape language environment update.

Water well shape language environment update.

Animation shape language environment update.

Week 10 Concept Discovery With 3D

Time Spent: 5 hours

This Week our scarecrow team worked on modifying our existing assets, and additionally created new assets for our world. I modified the scarecrow stand, fence, and bushes. Afterwards, I created new shape languages for a well and cart. I modeled and rendered the cart with Maya's toon shader.

Modified fence Maya render



Cart shape language


Well shape language


Cart model

Cart toon shader rendering

2D Class Week 09 Shape Language

Theme Wizard of Oz
Artist Style: Tim Burton

Team Scarecrow:
Bailey Steggarda (Leader)
Anthony Ballinas
Doug Halley
Matthew Trupiano
Michael Vogel 
Ryan Hill

My 2D class Scarecrow team worked on a complex project, developing a series of shape language reference guide lines that define our character and environment props shape Design. We also got the chance to create referential proxy models set in a scene in UE4. And the groovy part of is assignment is the use of the HTC Vive VR system to visually place our team members in this world that we created.

I was in charge of environment props such as the bushes, fence, and scarecrow stand. I created three versions of the bush to add variation to our environment's vegetation.




Environment concept images by Bailey Steggarda


Shape language environment description slide by Bailey Steggarda

This slide discusses my contributing bushes shape design.


Shape language environment description slide by Bailey Steggarda

This slide discusses my contributing scarecrow stand and fence.


First bush proxy model by Ryan Hill


Second bush proxy model by Ryan Hill


Third bush proxy model by Ryan Hill


Fence proxy model by Ryan Hill


Scarecrow stand proxy model by Ryan Hill


The first look at the overall environment design, shape, and lighting for our scarecrow character. 

This shows my fence and bushes in our forest this side of the level.




Cool render of our character set on my scarecrow stand, inside our fenced in wheat field.

Week 08 Working in a Game Engine with Final Prop

Time Spent: 5:30 hours

I’ve slowly lost my speedy development pace these past couple weeks for my 2D and 3D assignments. I think contributing factors have been lack of focus, time management, and my lack of sleep during the beginning of each week. I need to step up my game and complete this 3D cannon prop modeling project on a high note and on time. This post is going to cover the incomplete work from last week’s Substance Painter assignment, and then turn in the fourth and final cannon prop modeling assignment. I’m also going to update my previous weekly posts with their associated high poly cannon rendered images.

For week 8, I export my cannon’s texture maps from Substance Painter and then import them to my low poly model in Maya.

Emissive material self illumination test.

 Stencil and texture map.

Substance Painter Cannon Render.

Week 07 Bake Maps and Digital Painting for a Prop

Time Spent 1 hour

I'm excited to start working on this section of the project. This week, I'm assigned to import our Zbrush cannon model into Allegorithmic's Substance Painter program. 

First I imported the low poly model into Substance, and started following along with the class tutorials on learning the program's interface.

At this point, I started running out of time to complete this project with little work to visually show for it. I understand I'm having some time management and focusing issues with this project. I hope to continue working on this project over the weekend while I'm attending the OrlandoiX conference.

Week 08 Artist Discovery

Theme Wizard of Oz
Artist Style: Tim Burton

Team Scarecrow:
Bailey Steggarda (Leader)
Anthony Ballinas 
Doug Halley
Matthew Trupiano
Michael Vogel
Ryan Hill

I've had another good opportunity to partner up on six member team to develop a known character from the Wizard of Oz series.

This project involved researching the scarecrow character, team discussion on the character design's key detailed focal points that we were all looking searching for, and the development of the character's performance and use of expression.



Team Scarecrow Pinterest Main Page




My collection of character animation reference sketches stored and share amongst the team on Pinterest. I also shared some found scarecrow sketches on the character page and art dump board.


My Animation Reference Page

Week 07 Basic Lighting

Time Spent: 7 Hours

For this project, I choose to draw a HO scale model of a New Jersey Central Railroad Company tug boat.

 Compositional 3 point directional lighting, with a light blue LED light bounce an additional blue color to the model's surface.

Observational line work study and value drawing.

Applying primary colors to the piece.

Final Piece with developed shade value and highlights.

Week 06 Value

Time Spent: 7 hours

This was a great exercise for me to develop my 2D value and form skills. I always felt I didn't have enough experience in creating these tonal versions on an organic character in the past. I'm really glad I found the time this week to work on this to its completion. Our other art classes like to focus mostly on 3D asset creation and implementation. So, I'm glad to work on this ever now and then.  

I studied Valve's Dota 2 Character Art Guide and followed along with class to create values for this line art piece.

Line art masking out white backdrop for new compositionally good mid tone gradient backdrop. Includes my directional lighting placement.

Line art gray scale fill and shadow placement.

 Final piece displaying my characters values.

Week 06 UV and Digital Sculpting for a Prop

Time spent: 7 hours

This is week two of my continuing build of a cannon prop. This time I distributed the cannon's UVs on a grid in Maya and scaled them evenly using Maya's UV checkerboard. Next I duplicated the model and created a high resolution polygon version. Mainly, I'm adding more polygons along the hard edges of mesh in order to sharpen the edges of my original low poly model. This is important because this week I'm then going to import the mesh into Zbrush, and start sculpting fine details onto the prop's surface. 

I spent most of my time UVing and creating the high poly mesh. 

 

Side by side Maya snapshot of the low and high polygon models, with wireframes.

Snapshot of my cannon's Maya exported obj file mesh that's imported into Zbrush. This is my current progress on sculpting the cannon in Zbrush. I plan to continue working on this in the coming week with our third week developing this prop.