Stay-in-the-chair-3D-Challenges!

Recently I've been setting myself challenges to make something 3D without taking a break. Nothing stops the challenge!

1 - Make the first thing you drew in Adobe illustrator

2. Make the ship from Xenon 2 Megablast

3. Make something with some artistic value

Thank you and good night!

The beginning of the end.

Tuesday was the first official day of working on my final project. I'd already spent a week or so testing a few technical things out but now there's no drill...this is the real thing!

I'm starting off by creating the first jungle environment. Once that's finished along with the model for "Mark" himself I can quickly finalize the first 2 images.

And here's my modelling so far! (Textures are currently temp)

Vidya Gaems - Now with trees and rocks!

Too bright!

...Too dark!

Big lumps of rendering rock.

Major things on the horizon include dissertation work to do, handing in of all the production work for my ideas and getting started on making it all!

First off, a mountain.

Whipped it up in the past hour. All I need to do is make about 20 more along with a couple of trees and I can start piecing the environment together and get a start on making the final 8 images!

As for my dissertation, I'm having such a great time researching I have been pushing back the horrid thought I'll have to academically write all the things in my head. In a nutshell I'll be taking a psychological look at some of the most well known and played video games today and find out how and to what  level they condition the player and encourage more playing...I'd best go get started.

Peace out!

HDDammit

Updates have been rather slow due to the time I had to spend on getting ready for the Fridays big presentation. On last Tuesday, due to series of unfortunate events, my HDD was out of action and about 2 weeks worth of work became MIA. For that day I worked 9 hours straight to ensure all the work that had gone would be redone. With that out the way I had just enough time to practice the presentation with the peace of mind everything was up to scratch.

Here are those final images.

And there we have it! now I have till 11/11/11 which is of course the release of Skyrim, but also the date I hand in all my production work for all 3 ideas so I'll be going back and re-doing at least 1 of the 3 ideas to see what I can come up in the last wee bit left....watch this space (bear)!

So many bloody bricks.

T minus 3 days and counting till the final presentation, that's 3 days of finishing, tweaking and last moment changes left to the 8 final images. The first thing to address is what the bloody hell is "Mark" because  at the last presentation I was convinced that I should present my idea with the intention of it being a film. It sounded like a great idea and I was all for it until it finally clicked, I'd have to redo all the compositions again to fit 16:10 otherwise there would be bitter unwanted complaints from the markers...I realized this a few days ago meaning I had less than a week to redo a vast amount that I couldn't possibly get done so I've met it all in the middle.

The ultimate bottom line = Mark is a video game....what kind of game?...you'll have to wait and see! :D

With that out the way I've been re-working 2 images, the first and the city image, here's what I've done so far.

...now back to more work.


Thanks for dropping by!

21st Oct - Doodle

Todays doodle! one of the possible designs for a character from "Mark", the old wizard. Here my intention was to see what I could get done in 30 mins, here was the outcome!.

 
Yes this is how I'm spending my Friday nights, coloring wizards.

20th Oct - Doodle.

  I gave back the Intuos4 Large I was borrowing a few days ago but today my own Intuos4 Small landed in the post (yay!) It's a fraction of the size but has the same technical specs. Here's the first doodle on it! 

The previous doodle I found myself drawing on the reference to get the line within Photoshop then removing it before painting it in, this time the reference didn't see the light of Photoshop and I had it floating round my desk, this time both painting and drawing the line by eye. What you're seeing is about 1 hours worth of efforts.
Reference obtained from - http://fineart.sk/ (http://fineart.sk/photo-references/comic-artist-various-close-photos/7597200908barbarian2punchinground03jpg)

Now back to dissertation research :(

Thanks for clicking!.

Doodle - Update

Tonight I felt like practicing some shading styles I picked up over the past couple of weeks. After about an hour I churned this out. 

Most of the focus went on the face, something to continue working on as the next step is to try shading the cloth.

(Background image - http://www.mannpictures.com/Art/images/nyc%20alley_jpg.jpg)

EDIT - After another hour -

I think it looks rather swell all things considered.

WIP - Dr.Venture

Poly painting, something I've wanted to try out for ages Seeing as it may come in handy in the near future I thought to give it a try and dig out the Dr.Venture model I was working on. 

An incredibly quick way to get some nice shading on models which I imagine you can export in a UV form...more experimentation required!

Doodle a day.

It's sinking in that with no plans of the life drawing class for us 3rd years coming back, I need to keep up with sketching and painting to keep these hands active. SO....I'm going to sketch something/paint/re-work an old piece each day until...I dunno :D

With my final presentation of my final project (finally) on Finalday...err...Friday 2 weeks from now I'll most probably be posting my changed compositions in the near future.

Todays doodle -  

Hope you all enjoy your Sunday and see you Monday!.

Late night digital doodling.

2 presentations down, 1 one more to go.

With Friday over, I have 2 weeks to push further still the idea I'll be working on for 6 months. Not that I would be unhappy working on the other idea but "Mark" definitely took precedent whilst chatting. The lecturers reaction to my work was rather positive and with is advice "Mark" might just be end up being pitched as a film rather than a video game. I have plans now to change at least a couple of the compositions and tweak the last few details in the story. I must say the high point was him saying he loved my work and art style also that he could see it as a "beautiful Russian/Czech animation"....which was nice!

Right now I'm having the night off working on it but I did use my new found confidence in Photoshop to mess around with a few tests tonight -

 

I do like the shading on the belly....time for bed I think...good night!

2nd time the charm.

2 weeks ago I presented my 3 ideas that received a mixed bag of criticism.  One Lecturer was completely hung up on my lack of story (Which was written but I described it in a rather roundabout way which was very confusing), he made it very clear I needed to re-work the story. and the another gave some genuinely good advice and some subtle hints on how to improve my visual stuff. 2 things rang out, "I had to sort out the story, make is easier to understand across the board" and "Re-work the images" For the record, here is a sample of what I first showed.

Over the summer I was working on these and experimented with various things in Photoshop. I sketched and developed the characters and went about creating digital versions but the Photoshop stuff turned out rather flat and underdeveloped. After the presentation I set about redoing all the compositions with a re-written and re-worked story. I also began re-developing and even removing characters. I took all this new stuff and using what I'd learned from the first batch I started on the digital counterparts. Here is what I'll be presenting for Idea 1 - "Mark"

So that's 2 weeks work.
For the 2nd idea "Save The Vidya Gaem". Here's some of the reworked pieces I'll be showing

.

The stories have been written, the images drawn and the presentation on the way...here goes nothing!

CYZ advert.

To keep me busy over summer I contacted the local "Carlisle Youth Zone" too see what I could do for them. As well as doing weekly volunteering for them I edited together  them an advert.

Mr Joel Baker and I went down during one of the Zones open days and shot some footage and here was what I managed to get done in a few days.

Thanks for the work CYZ!

WIP - Dr_Venture

Being a massive fan of "The Venture Bros" (a superbly written cartoon on the adult swim lineup) I thought it was about time I tried to add to the few 3D fan images that exist on the Internet. Seeing almost all them are the hulking tank of a man Brock with his muscles sculpted in Zbrush I thought Dr Venture himself should transfer into the 3D realm quite nicely. Here's the glasses beginnings of said model!. 

WIP - Batman

Whilst working on Wolverine I had Batman the animated series (Or Batman TAS for short, which makes me think of Batman tassels which then makes me think I should stop thinking)

Anywhoo because of having that awesome series running in the background I thought it'd be great if Wolverine and Batman had a fight for...some reason (Something to do with Batman's curtain tassels) so here is what should be a simple but effective Batman model. Stay tuned!

Publish Post

WIP - Wolverine

First post! :D

Work in progress - Wolverine!

I've been working on this model for about 3 days now and today I slapped on a basic texture after a very quick unwrap to see how some bits of geometry are looking and then it's back to pushing polygons and making his shoulder pads + belt. Thanks for viewing and here's to the first post on the MSB blog!.