Perspective and Composition Practice

To start off the new term we practiced our perspective, lighting and composition skills, and produced the paints below:

Battle Arena Statue FInal: Rigging, Posing, and Implementing

After attatching a premade human-shaped skeleton to the mesh (which acts as the "Skin") I posed the arms and placed a sword, I also used the "Paint Skin Weights" tool to adjust which areas of the model bent to which joint. I found this to be rather difficult for the hand but eventually I got it figured out, here is the final pose:

I then implemented the statue into the maya file and made some adjustments:

The floor of the plaza has been changed to blend in more with the environment's theme.

I used a particle system to create a fire effect.

I animated a fish to leap out of the water at the end.

I also added vines to break up the sameness of the maze, and also replaced the other statue placeholders with colourless versions of the centre statue with no fire.

Overall I am happy with how the statue came out, but I do feel that it differs greatly from my original model sheet, and there are a few low-poly elements which make some edits difficult. Rigging also felt hard. Perhaps in future I could attempt to use the knowledge I gained from this into making another model with more style.

Group Project: Final Build

Since our last major build, we have spent time on amending assets, fixing bugs and trying to polish up some rough areas. In the end the game does feel a little bit clunky, however this is briefed to be a prototype so this level of quality is at a quality standard for the requirements. In our project folder some assets have been replaced and some are left in the project folder to show development. When compared to the paper prototype I would say that it matches it quite well, and if I were to develop this as a full game I would implement randomly generated rooms with more shapes than "squares" (each room has a square walking plane), I would also polish out the battle system to implement an options menu before a turn similarly to standard RPGs so the player can use items, talk or run. Personally I enjoyed this project as it involved a lot of discussions, and an idea being developed into a game before us felt very satisfying, below are screenshots of the full game in the final build:

The game's icon is now of the main character: Marie.

Title Screen has been tweaked to appear more balanced.

The starting room has been redesigned, and Marie has a fall animation.

Reggie has been moved and has been given an animation, and the door has been redesigned to fit in with the environment.

The storage room has been changed to a more interesting design.

Marie has a battle animation and her weapon is visible in battle.

Spider room has been redesigned to appear more menacing.

The cursor for using items is glitched in the final build unfortunately.

There is a results screen in the final room that will display time and score.

Here is a working game over screen.

You can download the game
HERE

Credits:

Mathias Holmes - Background artist, Designer of Reggie and alpha battle scene,

Ashlee Page - Character artist, Designer of Marie and change room script.

Elze Nel - Creature artist. Designer of enemy monsters and mini-map script.

Brandon Jackson - Programmer. Designer of GUI and chest.

Sci-Fi Military Vehicle Assignment

As with every assignment, research is key, and so I began this with doing research on existing Sci-Fi vehicles. However this brief requires the design to look like it would be believable created in the next 100 years, so anything that would involve extreme fictional themes would have to be ruled out:

http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-sci-fi-space-transport-ship/831002 (15/03/16)
http://conceptships.blogspot.co.uk/2013_02_01_archive.html (15/03/16)
http://digital-art-gallery.com/picture/4384 (15/03/16)
http://digital-art-gallery.com/picture/gallery/spaceship (15/03/16)
http://vladgheneli.deviantart.com/art/Sci-fi-Ship-448725598 (15/03/16)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268402/Flying-car-developer-says-hes-80-million-closer-making-sci-fi-dream-reality.html (15/03/16)
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?348409-Sci-fi-Concept-Vehicle (16/03/16)
http://jcobes.deviantart.com/art/Sci-Fi-Vehicle-3D-Render-ATSV-Savage-419482364 (16/03/16)
http://whatzitoya.deviantart.com/art/Sci-fi-Transportation-Vehicles-353371122 (16/03/16)

After I made this moodboard, I watched the film Elysium for inspiration on Sci-Fi vehicles. The reason this film was chosen in particular is it is set in roughly the next 100 years, as well as having been conceptualised as a believable science-fiction film. Below are some concepts from the film that stood out to me:

http://www.artofben.com/ELYSIUM (16/03/16)
http://skul4aface.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/elysium-artwork.html (16/03/16)
http://cargocollective.com/christianpearce/Elysium (16/03/16)

Since Elysium based it's concept on real world assets I feel it would be sensible to do the same and also do a moodboard for military vehicles to establish a theme and look into similarityies to carry over into my design:

http://www.aishtechnologies.com/products/military-vehicle-components (16/03/16)
http://www.copybook.com/military/companies/goodwolfe-energy/articles/goodwolfe-supply-mission-batteries-for-military-vehicles (16/03/16)
http://www.army-technology.com/projects/tmv6x6/ (16/03/16)
https://wall.alphacoders.com/by_sub_category.php?id=57255 (16/03/16)
http://www.extremewest.co.uk/military-vehicle-driving-experience/ (16/03/16)
http://militarygearr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/military-vehicles.html (16/03/16)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2275172/Britain-leave-3-000-military-vehicles-worth-2BILLION-frontline-pulls-Afghanistan.html (16/03/16)
https://www.armourgeddon.co.uk/military-vehicle-driving.html (16/03/16)
http://www.military-vehicle-photos.com/picture/number3821.asp (16/03/16)

From these I produced a couple of sketches of hovering/flying vehicles:

Out of these I decided to create a 3D model of the first drawing (top of page 1) in Maya 2016, and then lit it:

 

 No lighting

 Top angle with basic lighting

Lower angle with night lighting

Although the lower angle shows a less clear form the lighting makes it look more interesting. Despite this it would be easier to do a paintover with the top angle using the below textures. I also tried different colours and designs:

http://veryshareimg.com/free-seamless-metal-textures.html (30/03/16)
http://seamless-pixels.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/free-seamless-metal-textures_28.html (30/03/16)

I feel that my favourite variation is the dark blue one, as not only did I experiment with overlaying text but I feel that it's a more interesting concept, although strictly speaking it would be a "Police" vehicle and not a "Military" one. So in conclusion the variation I would choose is the green one. I felt that paintingover was rather difficult despite trying it before, although it was quicker there are some areas which are rough around the edges. In the future I could look into tips on the paintover technique.

With background added 

https://www.pexels.com/search/landscape/ (30/03/16)

Perspective Drawing 2

To practice the use of 3 point perspective we redrew our 2 point perspective room in this fashion, doing this made the room look more expressive and pleasing to look at but takes a little bit more effort to establish a 3rd vanishing point. For this redraw I only added the main features and tamed the colours down into a blue theme:

Next we applied 2 point perspective to a 2D designed vehicle and translated the blueprint into a 3D drawing:

It took a while to create the box shape, and the sketch was done rather quickly and therefore doesn't fit well, next time I should try a simpler shape.

Colour Theory

In this session, we watched a video that explained terms and meanings behind colour such as value and saturation (which I knew of before hand) and the ways in which colour can be used to achieve different effects, as well as the different combinations of colours based on their locations on the colour wheel:

Using this knowledge I produced 2 colour sets of this Yoda illustration, one with analogous colours (A set of 3 colours next to each other on the wheel) and complimentary colours:

I like these equally, as they both give off a different style: the left one gives one off surrealism and cartoonishness, wheras the right one looks more natural with the colours making a nice match.

Digital Painting: Blob and Whale Boy

In this session we were given a plain black blob and had to add depth to it using light and shading:

I feel this demonstrates how much I've picked up on shading techniques, and giving a sort of texture. After this we had to recreate an image by Bobby Chiu:

We started with a low resolution version of this image and had to shape out the basic colours of what we could see:

After this we were given the full size reference and added additional detail and shading:

In conclusion I feel that the face looks too muddy and the eye doesn't look defined, however this was developed from a technique I haven't used, and I think that the result overall was alright.