Week Summary - BA1b Week 9

Damaged pillar

After finding I could use zspheres to make creating the tree much easier, I opted for a slightly different approach to the model. After making the base cube structure in maya, I brought it into zbrush and constructed the tree around it, as if it had grown up through the already existing pillar and damaged it, moving the blocks out of place and scattering a few.

It was at this point that I was advised that the design was probably too ambitious for the time frame, so I cut back the tree structure somewhat, and then began adding damage to the pillar sections and texture to the tree. I focused mainly on water damage and on structural weakening, and looked for areas where the fallen blocks might have destroyed sections of the ones below on their way down. In hindsight it would have been nice to have some more worn debris on the ground, but also time consuming.

Photoshop session

As our group was a week ahead of the others we had a free session this week. I chose to do a screencap study to try to help me with environment painting, to help me speed up and build my confidence. The image I chose was from an animated series with its own style, so I tried to blend my own style with the already existing one to create something new, as well as making it more realistic.

While I'm proud of the final result and think I captured the atmosphere I wanted, I think that I could have pushed the colours further to make the image more dynamic. I feel that I should have aimed to improve on the original image instead of just copying what was there, which is something to improve upon next time.

Week Summary - BA1b Week 8

Damaged pillar

These are my initial tests for how to create something of this type in zbrush, by creating a basic shape in maya and sculpting in detail. I found the process really interesting, experimenting with the morph target tool and different alphas produced some really interesting results that I can see a lot of use for in the future.

I wanted to try something organic for this project, so I came up with an initial design that I thought would be fairly simple and started modelling it in maya using the follow curve tools. The idea is to have one base trunk that supports the structure, with the small cubes as additional decoration.

Life drawing

Life drawings from this week, I really enjoyed having some costumed models as a nice change of pace, and they really helped me to figure out some things with regards to clothing folds, which I normally have a lot of trouble with. The knight outfits and swords also made for some dynamic posing, and having two models allowed for some interaction and narrative, in addition to being a good exercise for setting up a scene with multiple figures. Getting the scale right was one part which I had some difficulty with, and I think I need to work on.

Dog 

I was curious about rigging so I built a basic model and played with rigging and animating it a little using some lynda tutorials. It's a little broken due to what I think is an issue with weighting, but I managed to rig the dog to move as I wanted to a certain extent, things like getting the head to look at a floating point. I'm really interested to see how this integrates into a game engine and whether I could use this model as a player character.