Normal Map Turret

Class task to model, UV Unwrap and then Normal Map turret.

 

At first I did not quite understand the task and went about making a bump mapped turret. I am pleased with the result of this version of the turret which is why I am displaying it.

 

 

Now moving on to the actual Normal Mapped turret I have created.

 

High poly version on left and low on right.

 

 

High Poly version on right and low poly version on left.

 

High poly on right and low poly on left.

 

Low poly side

 

High poly side.

 

Once I had got the hang of using Xnormal I enjoyed creating this turret.

 

To improve on this I would have liked to have designed my own turret but due to spending so long on creating the bump mapped turret I ran out of time.

I am however still very pleased with the final outcome of the Normal Mapped turret.

 

 



CAT Animation

Introduction to CAT animation.

 

To begin with we used the CAT animation provided with 3DS Max, I decided to use a Lizard, Onu and Crab.

 

 

 

This second CAT animation I used the human CAT biped to animate this skeleton.
To do this I added a skin modifier to the skeleton mesh and attatched each skeleton part to the CAT bones and adjusted the weight of vertices accordingly.

Then using the CAT Animation tool I changed the pose, walk and movement of the skeleton while animating.

 

Mudbox

Two sculpts, my first an Old Man's face and second a zombie/ghoul.

 

This is my first sculpt made in Mudbox. I was unfortuantly unable to attend the lesson so I had to work on this on my own with no introduction to Mudbox. However I found it to be a very easy program to pick up and use.

 

 

I was not able to finish this sculpt, it was entirely done free hand using reference as a general guide. I was focused on trying to give the face some emotion which I belive I acheived.

 

To improve I need to understand how to create mouths and eyes in mudbox as this is the part that I struggled the most with and spent a few hours tweaking until it looked right.

 

 

This zombie task was to practice correct anatomy. To do this I started by painting a skeleton structure on the basic human model provided in Mudbox by use of stencil and reference and then proceeded to sculpt according to the painting.

 

 

I believe that this worked well to make anatomy as close to perfect as possible. However I found it to be extremely time consuming and would have preffered to use a stencil as reference and sculpt by eye as I beleive I can sculpt and make adjustments as I went.



Life Drawing 6

Sketches from the previous two life drawing sessions.

Pencil sketch of life model. I was focusing on the folds in the cloth for this piece which was difficult due to the  fabric being transparent.

An attempt at full body sketch with pencil, I decided to do a focus of the face which is a surprising close resemblance of the model. However I should have focused more time on drawing the entire body.

Moving onto charcoal I was now aiming to paint in the entire body, the focus being the pose.

Three minute pose warmup sketches

A 35 minute sketch done in pencil, I spent a lot of time trying to get the pose and the weights right in this sketch. I am still trying to speed up my workflow so I can start to pencil in shadows.

I attempted something different here. Using charcoal I used only angles and deep lines to give some levels to the picture. I believe this worked but of course it is not a good resemblance of the model and I did not finish it entirely.

2 minute sketches in charcoal. Again I was trying for angled edges which i felt worked well for clothing folds.

An interesting exercise to draw with my left hand, I found it very difficult but for some sketches it worked very well. The looser the clothing on the model the better I could draw seeing as my left hand is not very steady.

2 minute warmup sketches.

A few different attempts using cylinders to build the pose of the mode, It worked to a certain point but they are very uninteresting.

My first attempt at using compressed charcoal. I found it very difficult to move around unlike normal charcoal. I could not work very quickly with it also.

Moving back to charcoal I tried to rush the general shape and get into detailing. Again i need to speed up my workflow so that I can add more depth to the sketch.

Muscle Study

Male muscle study

I kept these sketches very simple and rough as I want them for a general reference toward future projects and did not want to spend a huge amount of time on them.

Characters

This task was set to get correct body proportions on different sized characters, these being an Elf, Human and Dwarf.

I started by planning out how tall each character would be by using heads and lines to show how tall they should be.

I then created a simple sketch design for the pose and armour of the characters at the correct height. This took me several attempts to get the anatomy correct to match with the head system. 

Once I was happy with the designs and the size of each character I painted in some simple values.

Once I had an idea of how my characters were shaping I began to paint in detail and using the levels tool to bring out my characters. This however took me an extremely long time, in particular the faces. I had to research facial structure and look at many references to build a convincing character face as I wanted each of them to have some kind of personality. I believe I achieved this but only barely.

The next step was to add fine detail such as adding textures to the armour, colour and a background to make them all look as if they are standing. The cast shadows were created by making a selection over the values layer and filling it in black, then distorting it until i lay flat and stretched out behind the character.

I am very pleased with how these paintings turned out. They however did take me an extremely long time, I had even left them for a month without touching them because I had spent so much time obsessing over details I was not getting anywhere.

The textures definitely give a difference to the armour and cloth sections of the costume designs.

I feel that the colour has taken some away from the painting such as the faces no longer seem as clear as they were black and white.

I would improve this next time by painting a single character at once so I can focus on them rather than trying to paint them all at the same time. 

I would spend some more time on the design stage so that when I came to painting values I would know exactly what I was doing and I would keep in mind how light would reflect off of different textures.