Fish Rigging and Animation

During this week we were tasked to rig a fish and make it swim. To do this we used Autodesk Maya and followed the Lynda tutorial we were given. The fish was provided and all we had to do was put the skeleton a mix of joints and bones underneath in order to rig it.

Overall I found the rigging difficult. If I was to do it again I would try to make the fish more dynamic to make it more realistic. 

~ Ryan :)

Insectiod

For the past few days I have been working on creating a insectiod creature design that could be used to help a 3D modeler create a model for a game. I first started with research and a mood board to help give me some ideas for my creature.

I them moved onto creating some silhouettes much like the ones I have previously posted in order to get a feel for what I could draw. I picked the best looking one and started to work off of that by drawing some loose poses in my sketch book in pencil. 

This is my final silhouette. After completing this I then moved onto adding detail and colour to produce my final creature, which is based off of a stag beetle's colour and a worker ant!

Ryan~ :)

Gas Pump: American Style

For the past few weeks we have been working on a gas pump model, in which we had to follow along with tutorials and texture the model ourselves. Below is a few pictures of the basic model mapped out in Maya. After creating the model we had to do a UV Unwrap in order to lay out the UV shells in an organised way.

After doing that we then moved into Photoshop in order to create the specular, bump and colour maps for the model. For mine I wanted the user to know what the object was so I included GAS in big letters and made it look bumpy to stand out!

Below is my finished Gas Pump and texture maps:

Textured Turret Model

Today for our 3D lessons we were tasked with creating a normal and occlusion map for our turrets using a program called xNormal, first we had to create a detailed high poly model in Maya. Mine consisted of over 200000 tri's. After baking the high detail model I was able to reduce it down to around 200 tri's. We were then asked to texture the turret using Photoshop using images from the web. Here is my final product!

~ Ryan :)

2 Hour Speed Painting

Today we were tasked to copy an image and paint it again in Photoshop, we were given two hours to copy it and had to work with different layers and tools to get it done quickly. The lesson was primarily focused on teaching us the importance of layers. Below is the image of the different layers used overlaid one by one.

If I had more time I would of tried to work more on the girls in the foreground of the image, if I was to do it again I would focus less on drawing the background and try to focus on the foreground more.

~ Ryan :)

Perspective

This week we have been working on perspective drawings and have been following on some tutorials to help with our perspective work. We have all started doing one point perspective and practicing that before moving onto other perspective works.

~ Ryan :)

Halloween Monster Madness

For Halloween we were tasked to create a Monster from imagination and draw/create it. I started the process by creating a mood board based on other peoples work and monsters from video games, as I am massively into the Fallout series I begun to look at some of the mutated creatures in that as inspiration, I found that most of the creatures from the game had taken inspiration from real life animals and even humans to create some of the mutated monstrosities.

After creating my mood board I decided to make something as gruesome as possible, I always found that the human monsters from games scared me the most because of the resemblance to actual life so I stuck with that theme. I still found it hard thinking of ideas so I used the silhouette method taught to us a few weeks before to help me generate some ideas. 

I came up with three silhouettes and decided that this was the one I wanted to take forward to be my final design. As you can see from the drawing I decided that the top bit should be the head as it most likely would be considered as the dome of a head or skull. After working out where bits should go I decided to draw my idea down on paper ready for it to be scanned in a painted.

I decided on beefing out the proportions a little bit on paper to give me more of a meaty creature that resembles a human being that has obviously had something happen to it. I wanted the look of the creature to seem mutated and melted with some small boils growing from it. After deciding where some of the light would be cast I moved onto painting over in in photoshop and making it look even more disgusting.

There it is my horrible. Oozing. Moist... Bleeding... Mess of a mutated human monster disgusting thing. You can even see a bit of arm fused to the torso... Yep. 

I really enjoyed creating my monster and had a lot of fun drawing out silhouettes and trying to make the most disgusting thing I could imagine at the time! I think I did well at that, if I was to do anything different I would probably work on making it look more realistic.

~ Ryan :)