And so another year begins

Summer could not have gone slower, seriously. Stressful, tiring and lonely – made me remember how much I actually miss having friends and things to do. Sometimes. I probably could have done a blog post or two, but as I don’t necessarily enjoy having a presence on the internet and spouting nonsensical thoughts I found procrastinating in cakes and exercise more worthwhile. I did attempt a group project with some friends, it made me realise how crap my laptop was as in the end 3Ds Max wouldn’t even open on it.. So say hello new desktop – it’s beautiful and I love it. I’ve managed to do some 3D modelling before my laptop went kaput though. I think I improved, although what I produced was worthy of the pits of hell due to her under thought design.

I really need to draw more men.

We’re in week 3 now – coming up to week 4 of the second year, and looking back at the first year I can already see an improvement with my environments. After a huge plateau over summer its quiet nice to acknowledge improvement – not saying that I still don’t need to improve. I do. Majorly. But that’s not the point. I can sort of do perspective now, yay!
             

Values and colour seem to be a bit wish-washy, I can tell undertones in shadows and highlights when looking at something, and I grasp the idea of more distant items having less detail therefore a lower value, but replicating that? It appears I have ups and downs, where sometimes I can get it to somewhat work, and others not so much. It seems to depend somewhat on the subject matter – more organic items I love doing, trains and buildings are boring and too linear. But also time spent on it – thumbnails are meant to be quick but I ended up spending about an hour on some of them from Abbey park. Attempting to avoid doing that for Loughborough train yard and the Guild hall seems to make me want to produce nothing worthwhile.

My 3D has visibly improved, the way I work and think through the appearance of the final outcome – even with something as boring as trash – rather than doing the bare minimum due to wanting to throw myself out of a window from frustration, I’m instantly thinking of ways I can add to the scene. I attempted to give a bin bag a split with stuff falling out, and instantly thought of an environment it could be placed into. I considered two environments instantly, even! That’s new, thinking of possible environments is one thing but multiple ideas is another. Hopefully this thinking maintains itself through the year.

 And whilst I’ve improved and started enjoying environments more, no matter how frustrating the new aspects needed are, I still find myself attracted towards the human form, and characters. It’s still my ambition, unwavering, to be a part of the production line to well-rounded characters who produce some response from a captive audience, whether it be adoration, admiration or hatred.
I feel my life drawing has improved since the first year - however I am too linear still, taking refuge in the definite of "this goes here" rather than suggesting - which could be more worth while on quick 1 and 2 minute gesture drawings.

Week 1

week 3

week 3

The second year is no doubt going to be more stressful – so I’m kicking in and getting on with it. Trying to keep up to date – working through blinding migraines may become a more regular thing but this is what I want to do for a living. It’s time I start making it seem that way.

First year is over, lets review!

The first year is pretty much over, final hand in is tomorrow and a long summer break is looming in the distance. So what better time to reflect on how shit my work used to be in comparison to now – especially after presenting all my work, I’ve had a chance to glance at everything and see that maybe, I have improved in certain areas.

The majority of the first term, I was learning something new every day. It was fantastic, learning new skills and feeling as though I am progressing even after doing nothing. Having never actually done perspective or environments before – or if I had, never doing them in a technical or accurate way – I was producing for lack of better words, complete crap. Getting the basics down was more important than rendering, and when I’d gotten what I thought was pretty accurate line work in a thumbnail, when it was transferred to a larger scale and I attempted to render it, it completely went to pot. In reality I feel I'm still the same as this, and need a lot more work doing to perspective to improve - so much so that it's almost an impossible feat really, but hell never know unless you try I guess. This mainly refers to 2 point perspective - as I've not improved in this in the slightest.

2 point perspective still super needs work

Term 2 was abysmal - I produced substandard, uninspired work throughout it's entirety and ended up with a barely passing grade because of it. I plateaued, with little to no progression in anything - uni work or anything outside of uni, and if anything declined in my works standard. This including design projects and observational ones. I produced a terrible character, a poor nonsensical vehicle and poor studies of still lives involving people. In addition to this, I discovered I can't use marker pens for rendering, nor can I produce quick ridleogram style drawings to a decent standard.

The final term is where I feel the majority of the improvement has occurred this year - maybe that's because it's the most recent and therefore the freshest in my mind, or perhaps because we produced a comparison piece as one of the projects. This was one of the more enjoyable projects, as it has shown the course to be helpful to me, and after the second year I felt that's exactly what I needed. 

The newer bradgate drawing shows that I've improved on the concept of levelling within an image, and whilst I feel the final for this year is somewhat lazy and empty looking, it shows I'm beginning to gain a grasp on the level of details between the foreground, mid ground and background. Also apparently I can somewhat draw rocks. Cool beans.

 

Another comparative piece is the 3 hour final piece produced at the end of the year - this being done at the same museum in which we did rendering techniques on dinosaur bones in the first term. For me, it felt a lot more fluid in producing the second - coming together a lost smoother. It would have been nice to do a true comparison between the two - maybe produce another bone based final as opposed to taxidermy.

In addition to these, I feel my ability to design characters, or other objects, has additionally improved - going from substandard "I hate silhouettes they're stupid why am I doing this" to a more accepting "okay maybe they're worth it" view, and this representing itself in my work. From the interesting character in term 2, to the Reef and then finally the 1970's inspired character, I feel I've not only gotten better in my drawing ability, but become more thorough in my research, as well as my ability in representing certain themes, and acquiring said theme to begin with.
My technique is another thing I have felt improve. Normally I'm really anal and neat - I enjoy seeing clean line work before I start doing a painting, whether it be digital or traditionally. The masters study has shown me that I can do different styles without catastrophic results. Choosing Jenny Saville was definitely the right choice as it's pushed and challenged my abilities. Normally I dislike recreating artists - I understand it's a brilliant way to learn new techniques and styles and that "imitation is the best form of flattery" or whatever, but most of the time it just feels like I'm ticking a box with it - doing it because I was told I had to to get the grades, it feels pathetic and cheap - like cheating... then again, I feel the same about overly referencing for images I create, and I know I'm definitely wrong in that view. However I enjoyed doing this project, and may play around with this style of painting again in my spare time.

Although I have improved in some areas, there's still a lot to improve upon and I'm looking forward to seeing myself progress further. One thing I super enjoyed was the modelling in visual design, so creating the reef character and dare say it, making the weapon. More to the point where it gets you to visualise something in a completely different way, and makes a project more solid when there's a transfer from materials from a 2D design to a 3D sculpture. In addition to this, it makes modelling something on 3Ds Max a lot easier as you have a physical sculpture. It's another aspect I'm looking forward to improving on in the future.

Game production improvement has been more noticeable than in visual design - my topology has improved, as well as my construction and my patients whilst creating. In addition to this, my texture application and unwrapping has improved - but this is something that has been done every project, so has had a lot more time to improve in comparison to 2D's projects with varying aims. One thing that has somewhat bugged me with 3D is the limitations on texture and tri limits - however at the same time I understand how the lower budget on these allows focus on learning.

1970s Character project

I really do enjoy character projects most of all. Fine detail observation as well – my two favourite things, suiting my need for things to be detailed and neat.

I’d like to say I had no idea what I was doing, started from a completely blank slate and could fully develop my work in an interesting way and push my capabilities but.. well, that didn’t happen. I wanted to do something opposite of my original idea, but I liked that idea too much.

My initial idea was to design someone based off of 1970s punk bands that I liked - thinking either Subhumans, Bad Brains or Crass. Eventually I decided on the Xray Spex - my moodboard consisted of Poly Styrene and Tank Girl (even though she emerged in the 1980s, she was a good influence for the personality aspect of my character).

  I found that some of my designs ended up orientating to a more 1990's/modern day crust punk influence - this being mainly due to what I'd consider a lack of research. As I wanted to do a "DIY or die" influenced character, I wanted to put her in somewhat typical,simple fashion clothing - more of a Poly attire, but then convey a more punk/tank girl essence about her. This was more difficult than I originally anticipated, as in some cases she ended up too cute or fashionable looking. It was also said I accidentally drew myself - the bottom right design. Oops.

For the finalisation it was a choice between the middle two designs, as I felt they were most like what I wanted to convey within the theme. I ended up going with the more Poly Styrene styled outfit - adding the jumper and socks from the other design as they just seemed to fit. I somewhat wish that I'd gone with the other design - adding more tears and some patterns onto the skirt, however what's done is done now - in future I think I'll have to consider more possibilities from further developments in order to properly design my final outcome.

Colour selection was a pain. I decided to limit myself to a selection of colours gathered from my mood boards - entirely from the 1970s stylised posters, the majority of which being from Jacknife posters. However because of this, I found myself limited in my colour combinations, as well as the majority of the colours coming out too bright for the theme I wanted to convey - a little too disco for my liking. In the end I decided to take the 2nd design in on the top row and adjust the colours of the jumper, and dirty her up a bit - accidentally going a bit too crust punk/street rat for the original theme I wanted to convey. However, it made the in situ easier for myself as I could think of a definite location to fully complement and express this underlying street rat appearance.

Weapon Project

I'm ignoring a term 2 summary because of reasons. This reason being that I hated everything I produced.. also ignoring I forgot I had a blog.. so let’s move on.

During term 3 we had the weapons project, which combined both visual design and game production to create some uber project. I hated it to begin with – we had to physically make the weapon which was pretty bad to be fair. Construction really isn't one of my strong points, which is definitely obvious from the final outcome. This being said, considering I've never actually done anything like this project before – drawing weapons, making them, so on – I don’t think my final outcome was as bad as it could have been.

To begin with, thinking up weapons was difficult.. the whole underlying construction was interfering with any idea generating process because fundamentally, the project limited you to the shapes you could use due to it having to be made out of found objects. Also, not knowing the basic anatomy or workings of a gun made it more difficult because I don't really like nonsensical aspects on mechanical objects - random wires, leather straps and bits of metal for aesthetic purposes doesn't really float my boat whilst designing. In reality, I'd have to shove this aside to begin designing which was possibly the hardest part. I'm too anal for a project like this. 

 From the moodboard, I gathered I wanted to do a Fallout-stylised weapon, maybe a shotgun or some form of blaster.Thinking about it now, I would have loved to do some form of over the top super gun stylised like it was from Fifth Element. But no, over done post apocalyptic theme was the easier choice for this project.

Silhouettes made me decide I wanted to do some form of shotgun..thing. Well, that was the aim. Combining what I found on a scavenge and in pound stores - which consisted of a can, shower gel bottle, hairspray cans, other hair product bottles, a shower hose, wire, a staple gun and various bits of metal. And tape, lots of tape - I furthered the design, then combining them further to create the final outcome.

The construction, as I said, didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, and in the end I ended up spray painting it completely black - which I found way too boring, and would need to do a paint up in order to help myself gather textures for the 3Ds model.

Photo of constructed weapon

Paint over of 3D model for textures

 Overall, I'm happier with the 3D modelled version in comparison to the constructed version - it's a lot cleaner and just generally more aesthetically pleasing. For this project however, I would have preferred to have a larger texture budget - as adding omissive textures would have been nice for the display on the side, as well as the canister. Or even a colour specular would have been nice - there's one applied for these renders but for hand in it had to be removed, and needlessly said it didn't look as good - or more specifically, how I wanted it to.

Final 3D model

Reef project... it's like it was made for me

So.. I like drawing fish people. It's a bad habit, I'm pretty sure it's why I'm so crap at drawing legs and getting proportions right on any drawing due to my love for unbelievably slim-build merfolk.
A project to essentially design a character based around reefs, coral reefs, whatever inhabits them?

Needless to say I did the predictable.

But that's what worried me, due to this stupid pass time of mine I was worried I'd underdevelop my character, and although I still feel I have and have time to further develop it, I fear having to relearn 7 years worth of Korean words and facts about my tae kwon do organisation is somewhat interfering with my ability to focus.
Thanks grading, you're the best and not stressful in the slightest, honest.

But I digress, I started with basics - moodboards looking at reefs, fish breed for tropical reefs, as well as female characters based around a more aquatic appearance, featuring Aeryn from Farscape for her Pilot DNA infused appearance.

 Initially I wanted to go away from the typical mercreature, I'm feel that I'm too comfortable with them and a set appearance I've given them, this being observed in the image to the right. Slim, flexible and bald with fins for ears and on the head. I wanted to focus on the coral reef itself, look into the textures and its ability to inhabit creatures - possibly develop some form of coral creature who hides within the reef, or focus on more forgotten creatures like sea anenomes.




That idea failed when I started adding tails and looking more at the creatures inhabiting coral reefs. They felt like the stronger silhouettes  with the more possibilities as I could take any fish, and aspect of any fish, any colour or pattern and apply it to this flexible form that I could apply to any situation with multiple possibilities as to its "purpose". In addition, it allowed me to consider the scale of the character, two of the silhouettes take items of rubbish that could be found in the sea - carrier bags, those plastic ties that hold cans together and tin cans - and add them to the creature, both featuring a different scale due to the way the props are applied.

Considering this "purpose" to the character, I probably should have looked more at the themes I looked into - warrior, gatherer/herbalist and seer/psychic - rather than focusing on some idea I had in my head. Warriors focused on having more predatory fish - Lionfish, Eels and Black tip sharks. Adding their skulls to the heads added to this feel, as well as allowed a setting on the scale of the character. The other designs for alternative themes weren't as strong in my opinion, taking any fish I thought looked pretty and adding bits of coral, or sea urchins to seem all mystical or collection-based didn't seem to work in the way that I did it. However, some of the aspects would work on a warrior type character.

Final design - no skull

The final design features a Lionfish tail, and fins, with coral and limpits from the seer/psychic theme. The head shape ended up being influenced by images on my moodboard, as well as myself accidentally applying my predetermined mermaid design to her. Oops. I decided against a patterned tail, due to the limpits - less is more on merfold in my opinion. 

The colours were all taken from fish. Exciting stuff. Gradient looked better, moving on.

Final design coloured with skull

For the in situ, I wanted to represent a proud, strong warrior, poised and ready for action. This would have been easier if I had researched, and had gathered references to refer to for correct stances and staff grip. The final, was a draw between two of my thumbnails - far right on the top, and middle on the bottom row. They showed two aspects of the warrior character, an aggressive and a calmer side towards sharks, however aggressive made more sense due to the skull headdress she is adorned with.

I'm still to model her, which will either be annoying or fun.. more likely the first one. But over all I'm happy with how the in situ turned out, so at least that's something.

Elements of game design: Part 4

Oh boy, last in the series so it’s the hardest to write… procrastination in the form of my sister showing me MS Paint drawings and coffee runs can only happen for so long so let’s to this…

Environment designs in games are hugely important, with so much going into it in order for it to create a realistic, lore-friendly, and immersive feeling for the player. The correct colours, theme application and referenced material in order to make a place seem realistic, and if not based on the real world, logical. Generally done by a team of designers, ideas are thought up by each individual, announced, and pros and cons are picked of the idea. This solves issues with ideas, and generates a team-fuelled single mega idea with aspects of all solutions. Team work is awesome.

From here, a flow diagram is depicted of a level plan, and then the juicy parts can begin. The narrative can be applied to a level, with the lore/backstory of a level being able to be told in multiple ways. That’s what makes a game level and environment a success really – the ability to merge and provide story and context-relevant gameplay.
Research is super important for environments, whether the game’s genre is realism focused, or whether an art style is stylised. If an environment is more believable and more logical, then a player is more likely to be immersed and connect with aspects surrounding the environment and the story. I can only imagine stylisation can make the production of such an environment that little bit more difficult, due to everyone’s individual construction on what the world is like – their schemata (thank you a-level psychology. You were good for something in the end). The immersion relies on the environment fitting multiple peoples’ schemata, which may vary dependant on what country someone is from – so huge amounts of research and judgement would generally have to be made in order to create an awesome environment design. No pressure, right?

An environment that I truly fell in love with is that of Fallout 3. The vast wasteland, desolate but full of hidden treasures with a minimalistic colour scheme but yet it works so well, and really sets the theme of a post-apocalyptic wasteland well. The destruction to the buildings from neglect and raiders, I feel so immersed in it it’s brilliant.
The designer for it, if I’m not mistaken is Rashad Redic – whose responsibilities focus around architecture, props and other various physical structures of the world alongside non-character animations, lighting, landscaping and where art is concerned the level layout. The research gone into the environments to represent a pretty convincing layout of a destroyed America where it counts is fantastic, with such a huge focus on the lighting and colour overlays to allow the environment to reflect the theme superbly.

“I love gathering reference, it's kind of like having a blank slate, and as you see all these cool and interesting things, a plan starts to come together. I don't think I have any one place I'd consider a favourite for references or texture sources, I've been building a database of refs, textures and inspirations going back to college, now numbering about 350,000 images.”

The main inspiration in his work are his co-workers, looking at the AAA titles from other publishers and picking apart how they do stuff and visiting the website CGSociety.org sites and ConceptArt.org and a handful of art blogs. The way I worded that, it’s like a dating ad..

(Information gathered from here)
But seriously.. just look at how beautiful the environments are.

Elements of game design: Part 3

"To create a truly immersive game experience with a compelling fantasy world, you have to populate that world with real characters. Not just characters that behave realistically on the screen, but characters that ARE real to you, the game’s creator. The more you know your own characters, the more real they will become, and the more they will help draw the player into your game’s imaginary word.
Tim Schafer"

One aspect of games and there designs I truly love is character design, and in regards to the above statement I agree whole heartedly. I personally find it easier to play a game where a character has been given such an immersive back-story  motives, dreams, on-going character development – whether it is an NPC or the PC. It encourages – for me – interaction with the environment, and a feeling of connection to the story, plot, and world itself.

Clementine - The Walking Dead

A way to express this point further would be to select a character from a game, so let’s go with a popular franchise in which the game produced many “feels” for those playing it. The Walking Dead. A game composed of 5 chapters revolving around Lee – the PC – and his survival in a zombie apocalypse. Within this game, there’s a female child character that features heavily throughout the story - Clementine. Personally, I struggle to connect with child characters in games, I dislike children in real life so why would I like one in a game where their scripted dialogue and actions revolve around an over emphasised childlike naivety and “innocence”? Clementine appears to compromise this view – she’s quietly composed, smart, driven to help the group whilst maintaining some aspects of nativity which add to her female person and humorous aspects of the game. As the game focuses on decision making through dialogue and point and click puzzle solving adventure game design, I found myself going out of my way to talk to Clementine before everyone else – making sure she was happy and changing decisions based on how it could affect her characters happiness or personality. Then, when a decision choice made me have no choice but to negatively affect her – causing her to either be grabbed by zombies, or for a text box saying her negative emotions in the top left corner of the screen – I found myself cursing at what the game was doing, wanting to go and restart and try again just to keep her happy. This aspect then compared with the moronic example of a kid in a zombie apocalypse – Duck – furthers her appeal and wish to complete the game in a way which would please a certain character.

Tiny Tina - Borderlands 2

Another example of a child character that’s just bad ass is Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2. Although not completing the game due to time management with work, her dialogue takes a good combination of adult-based humour and 13 year old girl-ness and creates an essentially awesome character who’s missions look entertaining to complete.


These aspects are mainly dependant on the script and voice acting quality applied to the character. Certain phrases – for example when you ask Clementine if she licked a salt lick, and she responds “I don’t know” – slowly introduce character traits, character development, scenery interaction and then later on when the same object is used to kill someone, makes you cringe when you think to the mix of emotions applied to a single object due to a child's curiosity. As both Clementine and Tiny Tina are female child characters – granted of varying ages – their appearances actually hold quite a few similarities which is interesting due to the completely different scenes. Both emphasise their femininity through clothing and not overly luscious eyelashes or any form of suggested makeup. Both have similar face shapes to emphasise their youth and their hair is both wild, linking with the environment, with the addition of ribbons or hair ties to keep in line with the fact they are female and that doesn't change due to the environment. Their personalities somewhat coincide in their aesthetic design which stimulates interaction with them more, both designs are pretty awesome if you ask me.

I personally find that stories are really influenced by the characters, I enjoy stories which involve and revolve around character interaction to further story and stimulate environment exploration. I enjoy the playable character either having a strong personality, which is developed on constantly dependant on the story and occurrences in a game, or essentially a blank slate of which I have complete control over. I enjoy decision making open world games which allow me to view every aspect of a games design, choose how I play and allow my short attention span to constantly be focused on the game. I like feeling the repercussions of my decisions in a story – like despite the fact I'm simply playing this pre-scripted design, it feels like I'm creating my own story and my own world and connecting with everything in game on a different level to say a game where everything is definite with the same outcome.
Even games with a definite outcome – for example Assassins creed is somewhat linear, more so than say a Bethesda game, it still has open world aspects to it with the decision to explore, collect and then the additional experiences of 100 percenting each memory segment. Then again this doesn't really rely on character design in a game… off topic a bit. Oops.

But all in all, character design is such a huge aspect of a game – in my opinion it motives a play through to be completed, and every other aspect in the game could simply be ruined by shoddy NPC’s or an incorrect PC for the environment. A lot of thought must go into the design of a character in order to make sure the production time of a game is correct, and it must coexist harmoniously with every small aspect of the game. Voice acting and dialogue must match so seamlessly with a character for it to fit so well, and it seems like it must be such a difficult task but it truly seems worth it in the end. Honestly, if I ever do get into an industry where I am influencing the design of a character I hope that I’d be able to produce the same or similar reaction in another that I have to character design.