Weak Nine : A tale of Two Developments.

This week I've been redoing my concept art for the Dichotomous Duo project. It's been interesting, to say the least. I've made a fairly interesting duo of characters and managed to start off modelling already, which is great. The biggest fear I had in this project was going to be my time, and at the moment I believe I'm mostly on track.

This is what I've started with, a whole bunch of Silhouettes. It was a far more powerful start for a project than before there is no denying that.

After a very rough starting place I started to note down some ideas. Now we as a year were told to use less words and focus more on the art. Totally smart idea personally and for some reason it's not completely intuitive. The biggest thing was focusing on drawing ideas and not writing them.

Taking the silhouettes further gave me alot of room to play around. I wasn't sure what sort of world or setting I would explore, or style. I had no idea but just focused on making a duo of interesting characters. The clear choice to me was idea number 2. The short, monkey like bodied, Jester with the obtuse obese rich character. 

Taking this further was great fun. Making character for the bodies is always my favorite past.  I based this almost entirely off Venetian Masquerade balls and celebrations. It was amazing fun, and somewhere I wouldnt usually look at. So it was interesting. I based these characters slightly off Gothic Literature for the sake of it; The fat character the Marquis based off The Bloody Chamber the Gothic novelette and the Jackal based off The Cask of Amontillado. This gives my characters some real depth.

From there it was just taking everything further to get a real character that can really work. There was alot of focus on Masks, especially ones that capture both the Venetian look AND the character I want to portray. That was great fun for me, far more interesting than their costumes. But with these characters their body shape is far more interesting than their outfits so I got to focus less on that.

Colour I'm still not sure on, and as I'm starting to build it all in 3D max. But that I'm going to explore this more when it comes to Texturing. But that isn't what I want to look at right now.

I wanted to look at my design processes. I've done this concept twice now. Concept Two is this, my Venetian styled characters decedent and fancy. Concept One was my mage and her familiar.

I don't exactly want to look at the end results, but more how I got there. I was told to redo this concept, and I want to see whether that was a deserved decision. The major differences in this were in Concept Two I did far stronger silhouette research. I think that this does make my second concept have alot more strength to it, indeed. By redoing these processes I found out more efficient ways to do and explore these things. But I started these projects in very different ways. 

Concept One I started off with two words. Mage and Monster. This gave me an extremely wide area to explore. Now in Concept Two I didnt have that, was told not to do that as it would ruin my character processes. Thats the part I look back on, and now disagree. Giving myself somewhere to start I think made designing more efficient.

 In the end starting from nothing in Concept Two did take me in unexpected places. I was fist looking at a tribal cave man type idea with a father and son and ended up completely different. But that also happened in my first Concept, which apparently wasn't believed. I originally considered using a victorian court dress sort of design and really exagerated evil and a rock Golem look. Of course not as big a change, but thats because I was focused. Being focused let me make something stronger that I've been more happy about, and still push myself. Concept Two I don't feel happy with. I feel that starting from nothing and just seeing where it goes is a far weaker process, for me anyway. 

I just wanted to write this part of the post to explain that, now looking back at it after trying both. Both ways are good and have their merits. I'm glad I did both and I do see why I should of restarted. But personally I think starting with some prompt even if its just words is far smarter. It seems more professional more industry oriented and just gives better results, in my opinion. FYI this isnt an angry blog post. I just wanted to explore and compare the last few weeks. 

Week Eight : Week cannot be found.

So this past week and a bit I've been designing a Dichotomous Duo Design. Turns out these aren't the ideas I will go with as I have to restart my project, but this is what I spent my week on.

This is my scrapped Duo. I love them. I usually don't do standard Fantasy so I challanged myself to make a MMORPG styled character in a fantasy environment. I am really happy with how the style worked especially with the mage woman! Her elongated body helps make her silhouette look refined and powerful and fits the Wildstar powerful I wanted! I used alot of assessment from others and others opinions to help come up with this and they thought it was great.. But it does end up that I have to restart my project.

Turns out because I got too stuck on this idea from the start I have to restart and challenge myself. My processes weren't strong enough which is sad. I would agree though, I did rush the designing for this last 8 or 9 days of work. This is because we were informed that the concept had to be finalised for Thursday. Not an excuse by any means but slightly why I think I gave myself trouble. I believed that starting off with a very wide and malleable idea would give me a stronger designing process. Really we'll have to wait till the end of the project to see if thats true or if starting with nothing helps out more. But It doesn't really matter. I still like what I made and I'm proud of these designs.

And really by having to start again I can only make something better It's time to challenge myself and do stuff in a new process, making a far stronger character duo in the process. Of course I'm concerned whether I can get this all done in the time frame, considering I do have to model this in the end. It does mean this entire week has been essentially wasted, aside from learning things. The entirety of next week is going to be spent designing more and more, trying to make something better. Only time will tell if I have enough time for efficient modelling time.

Starting off on a new project with nothing but this! Lets see what happens.

Week Seven : Dichotomous Beginning

So this week begins with the finishing up of my Sentry Gun. I've been pretty ahead here so It was mostly just tweaking and having fun here.

Here's my sentry looking pretty dapper. I'm very happy with it. My main goal was making it look cute and people are thinking its cute! So I chock this guy up as a success.

 The main thing I wanted to change was the projectable. This was my first one, and it looks fairly rubbish. I wanted it made out of planes so it could be some kind of laser blast, but then I realised it just wasn't good enough.

This was my redesign projectile. This one looks far better slugging out of the gun barrel and fits the whole neon orange energy I've been designing. I then moved onto fiddling with particle effects. Mostly just because I wanted to try them. 

So now my sentry gun ejects a stream of particles when it fires! It also shoots some out each time it fires. Are these particles actually good? Nah they're kind of rubbish but considering I've never used it before its a bit of fun. It's always a good way to learn by just fiddling and messing around.

Last of all for my Sentry Project is my new poster. I had already made a poster idea for my final just for fun.  But this time I researched before hand which of course makes it better.

Now we move onto this Dichotomous Duo project! I'm very happy at this brief, it sounds like great fun. Although there are downsides. First of all, this starts off overlapping with our Sentry Gun Project. It doesn't really effect me much as I finished off my Sentry but I know alot of people are really struggling now because of this and basically will start this project behind. That kinda sucks.

 Secondly considering we have to present our designs on thursday we dont have much time to concept. Again this shouldnt be an issue but in my last project I didn't spend long enough concepting and now I have less time than before for two characters! That is kind of completely terrifying. I just have to see it as a challenge.

I've started off by making a massive reference folder, after mind mapping some very rough ideas. Currently at 440 pictures and I know I'll get more at some point. It's not all Pintrest images so I decided to save them all for my project folder, which seems to make more sense to me than just using Pintrest. I'm currently a good few moodboards in.

These are just 2, and I've been sketching on what I've liked. It's a good idea and will probably help me design in the next week.

Week Seis : Worky work work

This week has been a good and productive one! After finishing off my concepting at the end of last week I had all of this week to focus on 3D modelling. Or so I thought.

It turns out I managed to get everything done far ahead of my schedule! I had put this entire week aside for 3D modelling work but I managed to finish it all by Wednesday. I'd say thats a success. I really think the whole week has just been good and productive with alot of hard graft and work. It's a good thing.

My little turret looks good and adorable in 3D, just as I had planned! There were no real issues when it came to modelling this. I was wary about making the curves and smooth parts looking right but it also wasn't really an issue. Maybe I've just started getting comfortasble at 3D modelling. Maybe that's just crazy thought.

Then I had the fun challenge of making my little turret dude work in Unreal Engine 4. Suprisingly it was quite easy. It's been set up in a way where basically as long as you follow the instructions you can simply plug parts into the right places and it all works straight away. It's really impressive how easy all of this stuff works. I think I'll spend some of next week messy around with the blueprints and coding just to see what I can get working.

Then we get to texturing. This sends me all along till today, getting this all done and working right. It always takes some tweaking to get the roughness and metalness looking right with PBR. Trying to make this look all shiny and retro-futuristic did take alot of tweaking. Adjust the brightness on this, the contrast on that.

But I'm happy with my end result here. I've got it looking shiny and smooth but theres some texture there as well when you look nice and close. I've got some emmisive glow and importantly it turns and follows and shoots me like it should!

Next on the agenda for next week is making myself a real life model. It's almost good I have a full week for this because I am particularly bad at making models. I also want to play in Unreal Engine and learn some more. I always find that playing around with programs like this can be the best way to learn. For example I want to try and mess around with particle systems. This is a laser weapon after all and trying to get a cool energy effect would really complete the gun I think. But this is all for next week. We'll see what I can manage to get done.

Week Five ; The Late Update!

Oh man I'm slightly late to the party today. I've been swept up in the spooky scary tidal wave of Halloween! But it is always nice to celebrate the scary for  abit, I think.

Anyway the Sentry Gun Project. I am very happy about this! Right now I've finished off all of the concept art and literally about to start making the thing in 3D Max. So lets have a look.

Starting moodboards are always good to look at. This is me just splurging my ideas down to see what sticks. I came into this project with an idea to make things alittle more interesting, I wanted to make a tiny mini-sentry gun. A baby one. Focus on the Cute. Thats why I looked at some old toys and various things. I also took in alot of Retro-Futuristic designs. That's the sort of genre that stuck because it felt the most powerful to me at making an adorable little turret. 

Its important to know that we were meant to design this using real life objects. So here I used combined Microphones and Camera lenses together. I put all of these into the bashkits because that seemed like the best use to me using their default shapes.

I love this Bashkit technique we were taught recently. It was great fun to use. Simply you take parts from our mood boards and slam them together to try and make a turret. I think this was a great way to quickly do some designs for mechanical assets. Sometimes you get some great ideas to go further on, things you wouldn't of thought of before hand. I will definitely be using the future for some designs. 

These little doodles were quite useful to me. It's odd how this can sometimes happen, short little doodles can be so useful. By doing some rough looks at how these guys would look in 3D it made me notice how some of the designs look far cuter than others. After all cute is what I'm looking for in this turret design.

I'd like to preface this crazy colour design deal by saying I was VERY ill when making all of this. SO I probably made some crazy weird decisions. Not that it really matters, sometimes that can be good. I wasn't really sure what design to take further so this helped me so much to find. Through the bashkit designs and this getting the perspective of other people via facebook and just generally asking was really important. It helped me so much. It's always awesome to get another set of eyes on a design.

This was the turret design I went with! I'm really happy with it. Not only does it look cute, like I wanted, but it has some really interesting colours and contrast. And really wheres the fun in design something without sweet colour. 

My little Final covering the turrets design doesn't look half bad. I wanted to cement in my design right now before I started building it. I think it's going to be quite strong! Now It did take me some time to realise that considering we need to build this model onto building blocks for it to work in engine I might of made my job hard for myself.

This will be our first time working on Blueprints in Unreal Engine so we'll see how hard it really will be but I'm still excited about it. It will be fun to play around and get him to work. So I'm totally psyched for the rest of this project.