Silhouette Creature Creation

A few weeks ago during a digital drawing session we were asked to design a creature based on crustaceans, we were shown a method of character and creature design where you started off by making a Silhouette, because the human eye naturally tries to find objects within the Silhouette I quickly managed to find things from certain animals within the drawings. When we found these we added highlights into the silhouettes and produced some cool looking creatures!

Like Spore Creature Creation. But better!

We added colour to our designs in order to make the best of the bunch stand out, this can be used to guide clients to better ideas or drawings without actually telling them that they are the ones you like the most! I enjoyed making my creatures and think this is an interesting way to come up with ideas and concepts when you are unsure of where to go!

~ Ryan :)

Future Guns and Weapon Concepts

Our task for this week was to produce some weapon concepts for a game, we had some ground rules that the gun had to fire projectiles, so that ruled lasers and plasma out of the mix, it had to be one or two handed and futuristic. I begun by researching weapons that are used by the armed forces around the world and created a mood board showing them as well as different future weapon concepts.

Call of Future: Warfare with guns...

After creating the mood board I moved onto creating some rough concepts for some guns that I wanted to create, this started with making a variant of pistol which had an in built blade and two firing chambers. I thought this would be an interesting concept as it seemed unique in that I hadn't seen it around when doing research. 

Double the barrels, double the firing action!

I then started working on some two handed concepts, a small compact weapon such as the MP5 is commonly used by the british SAS and armed police for its durability and weight, I decided to work an idea around making it as compact and easy to use as possible and came up with a bullpup submachine gun concept with a quick release high capacity magazine. 

But wait, there's more

For my third and final concept I wanted to create some heavy weaponry, this lead me to three choices, a large machine gun, a rocket launcher or a sniper rifle. I decided to choose the latter as I thought it would work best for what I wanted to do. I stated making a concept to do an electric powered weapon that would increase the speed of the bullet, after doing a little research I discovered rail guns, weapons that use powerful electro magnets that fired huge rods of metal at supersonic speeds. I decided to make that into a smaller handheld gun and here is is below

Without Colour!

With Colour!

For the final concept I decided to stick with Navy camo as is was the Navy developing the rail gun technology, I stuck with the bullpup design to improve accuracy and increase the velocity of the metal rod. The ammunition would be fed into the top where the bolt is and fired one object at a time.

~ Ryan :)

Life Drawing Megapost

This is some of the life drawing we have been making during our Wednesday sessions, all of these drawings were done using charcoal and have been created using a variety of methods such as not taking the charcoal off of the paper and using my alternative hand to help me practice my drawing skills, below are some of the best drawings from the bunch that we have done so far.

I really like the way that they all turned out and have enjoyed the life drawing sessions a lot more than I expected to, it is interesting to see how different techniques turn out and how we can improve the way we draw the human figure.

~ Ryan :)

Tentacles!

So this week we have had to make something with Tentacles, I decided to make some sort of a phobia based monster, I first started by researching tentacles and different phobias and discovered that Arachnophobia is the top Phobia experienced by people. After doing this research I decided to make a mood board to help formulate what I wanted my creature to look like

Moodboard Showing Tentacles, Spiders and Other Bugs

After creating the mood board I then moved onto doing some studies of tentacles and different animals after a few drawing I then moved onto doing some freehand drawing of tentacles. After a few drawings I found it much easier to figure out how the tentacles move and act.

Tentacle Drawings

By looking at the tentacles I was then able to move onto a drawing of my design, I decided to merge three animals together to create a hybrid monster. I eventually came to the decision to merge a Spider, Bedbug and Octopus together and came out with something like this:

Clearly the stuff of nightmares

Im still not really sure what to call it, but I am really happy with the idea and moved onto colouring in the base using a few colours, I decided to stick with five different colours as I didn't want it to get overly complicated.

Pretty Colours!

I stuck with earthy colours for the body to make it seem more natural, after putting in the base colours I then moved onto adding the shading at 40% grey because the 60% grey looked much too dark.

Awesome Shading of Awesomeness!

After the shading work I then moved onto adding gradient and lighter tones in order to make it look more three dimensional I added lighter tones of the earth red and added more yellows to make it look more vibrant then I added some highlights to add shine onto the body and tentacles.

And that is it! My finished Spider, Bug, Tentacle thing... It looks great and I really like it!

~ Ryan :)

Learning Maya and Making Fishy!

This is the first 3D work I have done individually on Maya 2014. It was made using a reference photo from a really pretty awesome Lynda.com tutorial. It was really informative and reinforced knowledge I had gathered from University workshops. The only real issue I had with making it was a slight mess up with the view-box which I couldn't seem to fix which required me to restart but I hadn't got too far so it wasn't too bad to get back to where I was.

Fish Reference Picture

We first started off with a reference photo from the Lynda.com tutorial and begun to work on the model whilst learning about the different tools we could use to create the fish such as the Wedge tool and the Extrude tool! After using all the tools I ended up with a model that looked like this:

Fish with Reference Picture

I am pleased by the way it turned out and can't wait to create more complex and difficult objects in Maya!

Under the Sea!

~ Ryan :)

Formalities! Yay!

Hey Everyone!

I am Ryan and I am studying Computer Games Arts at UCA in Farnham. This is the place where I will be putting the majority of my work for people to see. Now the formality is out of the way I should probably describe what I like doing the most!

I love to play games and am interested in pretty much ever genre, I particularly enjoy exploration games in open worlds. I suppose this lead me to want to do CGA, exploring new things and such. I am usually a pretty upbeat person and always try to stay optimistic although I can sometimes be pretty critical of my own work, you will probably see that too.

I may also talk about some games I have been playing too but I haven't really decided on doing that yet. Anyways! Here is the blog, feel free to check back every so often because It will be updated on a frequent basis...

~Ryan  :)