Drawing is Frustrating

As a recap for this week I've been trying to spend time with friends and family as well as doing some drawing and using the new tablet I got for Christmas!

I've finished work now so that's a relief as I now have some money coming and I'm done working until Easter.
Christmas was a tiring day and let's say filling, that's the most I've eaten in ages!

Drawing wise I've been brushing up on my drawing skills until my new oil paints arrive and I can get onto painting. It's been mainly portraits and that's what I used to do all the time. It's been so nice doing personal drawings and studies. 
Digital painting is still something I'm really not comfortable with and I'm always trying to improve. I've done one portrait digitally and it's alright, it's pretty basic but I'm hoping to get way better so all I can do is practice!

drawing bae is my fave

On a final note as I said earlier I'm just waiting for my oil paints to arrive and I'll get onto doing some traditional painting. 

Hopefully New Years will be good and then it's back to uni and onto more projects! 

No Rest For The Wicked

Sadly this week I don't really have anything to put on here art wise or in terms of 3d work (insert sad face emoji)

The reason behind this is because I've been working, earning money very slowly so I can actually pay rent in January and so I can buy people Christmas presents. So it's safe to say I've had no time as today has been my only day off.

Also I had planned to do some painting over the holidays but low and behold I have gone and lost my oil paints. Woe is me. So once I have money it's off to the art store to buy some as I want to do some nice studies if I still have time.

My 3d has been lacking mainly because my laptop ancient and doesn't like to run 3ds max without going at a snails pace or just crashing. 

I have however done some quick studies in the little free time I've had. 

Saying all that, just a few more shifts at work and it's Christmas! Yay two days off and lots of yummy food and drinks!!
I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and eat lots! 

Dichotomy Characters Post Mortem

This project has been difficult in some ways and easier in others. I personally am not a fan of designing and making characters as I find it hard and I’m more interested in making environments and assets. This is the reason I found this project quite difficult, however I think overall the characters turned out ok.

Here are some final renders of both characters although I focused more on the gorilla so it's a bit more worked into than the other one.

I think my time management could still be improved, I managed my time pretty well however having a written management system like a waterfall one would help me much more as I would be able to see what I’m meant to be doing and when.

I also know I could improve the uv layouts and spent more time trying to pack it efficiently, the only reason it’s not is because I wanted to get that part over as soon as possible so I could finish in time.

I think due to the extension I could have pushed the final outcome a bit more and maybe added more detail and just have made it more aesthetically pleasing, I have to say I think due to the extension my process of working definitely slowed down which is down to me and something I should change.
I think as a stretch goal I’d like to go back and animate the gorilla character as that would be more interesting as really show it off. It's already rigged so I don't think it would take too long to make a simple key frame animation.

I also know I rushed the textures of both characters however the hippo was horrifyingly basic and not up to standard so I would go back and put more detail into them and spend more time on it if we were to ever return to this project.

Personally I'm not very pleased about the final outcome and after feedback from Mike and Emma this Thursday over the Christmas holidays I want to go back to one of my original ideas where the hippo was a pope and model it as the hippo character was rushed and the mesh was bad.
I also preferred my initial idea in the end and I wish I hadn't changed it but I now have some time to make the character so I don't think that it's too much of a problem.

Even though with the end of term deadline making this week pretty stressful it's not been a bad week. Life drawing was really good this week! With only four of us for the session there was a really relaxed atmosphere and I was able to chill out and do some drawings that were less rushed and more like the sort of drawings I would do in my personal work which was a nice change. 

2 min studies

Hand and feet studies

Focusing on the hands and feet with figure.

Texturing and Actual Drawings?????

 This week meant texturing and I realised that it's going to take me longer than I thought to become better at hand painting textures. But it's a matter of practicing and expanding my knowledge on the subject. So here's how I've been getting on with that stage of the project although I warn you it's nothing amazing. 

After talking to Mike Kelly in his lesson I decided on focusing mainly on completing the gorilla character over both of the characters as the project brief only really states for one character and of course it's better to have one really good one instead of two average characters.
So following his advice I carried on texturing and adjusting the gorilla character.
At this point I have the albedo, roughness, and normal map done as it will most likely go into Unreal as it looks a hell of a lot better than in Max just down to the renders and especially the final beauty shots.

This is how my character is looking, there is still a lot to fix and tweak in the texture sheets and these renders are only in max so it should hopefully look considerably better in Unreal with PBR. 

I'm feeling alright about this character, I know it could be greatly improved but I find I lose patience with character projects as I've definitely become less enthusiastic about this one over time, however I'm still trying to make it as good as I can. 

As part of this project I also made a physical model of the gorilla. It's made out of a wire skeleton and then tin foil wrapped around it to bulk out the overall shape and then finished off with sculpey. It's not very good as modelling isn't my strongest and I burnt it's feet but I'm still glad it's done. 

Even though I said I was focusing mainly on the gorilla I have also done all textures for the hippo as well so the albedo, roughness and normal maps are all fairly complete however are not finished to the spec of the gorilla as it's less focused. I'm not particularly happy with how this character looks as I think the mesh and overall look has let me down slightly which is all my fault, however I'll still carry on with it.

My next task for the last 3 days of the project are to have the gorilla in particular rigged and set it in a pose for final beauty shots and if I have time also the hippo. Rigging should be able to be done in a matter of hours which still gives me time to fix and anything and get it into engine to be adjusted if necessary.

Also an update on life drawing from the last few weeks. I've been enjoying doing different things like focusing on the figure and skeleton together to see how it relates and also focusing on feet and hands. 

I've been using chalk pastels a lot recently and although its sometimes really hard to handle, as I'm more of a generic pencil user, it's been really good trying out new media and getting the hang of it.

A week or so ago I also got the chance to go into Geoff's life drawing class and I feel I got some nice dynamic poses and quick sketches out of it. I definitely want to go again when I have the time and there are classes open.

I also did a really quick shoddy Interstellar drawing as a break from work. I strongly recommend you go see this film. For reals. 

Modelling and Stress

Carrying on from last week I did some more drawings and studies to get the feel for my idea more and to finalise some design choices like the style and appearance in general. I then had to really get on with refining the idea as it had changed throughout this week.

So for my dichotomous pair I had decided on the pope hippo or better known as the "hippope" and the scientist gorilla. Dichotomous in their ideas and views these characters worked however I found that as a pair they didn't look like they would ever come across each other in their world as Steve pointed out. It really made me think how would you ever see these two together if they're practically enemies and have oppositional ideas? Taking the idea of religion and science and seeing the disputes between them I realised they probably wouldn't actually ever see each other and the idea was fun and interesting but just wouldn't work.

Steve then suggested a really good idea, an assistant hippo with a professor sort of scientist gorilla. They may not look particularly dichotomous or different in their clothing or appearance but are different in their personalities and actions. I have decided on  a serious gorilla scientist and a clumsy and rather clueless hippo who is destructive and a bane of the gorilla's life. I find that this makes the pair more dynamic and whilst still be dichotomous they work together in a weird way. 

So here's a final concept drawing: 

I also painted some really crude colour palettes which I haven't quite decided on but I'll have that finalised before I start texturing. Sadly I found that I couldn't change much in colour as if the lab coats are lost in the colour palette the characters kind of lose their identity as scientists.

For this week it's been mainly modelling. I have to say it's been a slow process deciding how to model it depending on the style I wanted took me forever.
I'm getting there however as I've finished modelling and just need to refine some things like topology and making the characters look more dichotomous.

I'm quite happy with the gorilla at the moment as I think it looks pretty nice aswell as staying to the low poly idea. The hippo however I find doesn't look as interesting or as dopey as I want so I'll probably go back and mess with it a bit.
Here are some basic renders of the characters so far:

Sadly I'm kind of behind on this project which is slightly stressful however I think once I have the unwrapping done and start texturing I'll feel much more on track. I think unwrapping will be tomorrow's job as I don't have 3ds Max at home however that can be finished in a couple of hours so I'm confident I'll finish to give myself more time for texturing as it's all hand painted textures. Thankfully our deadline has been extended an extra week too so I'll definitely get finished which I didn't think I would with the previous deadline. 

Drop in next week to see some 'amazing' hand painted textures from yours truly. 

Dichotomy Everywhere

Dichotomy characters are the talk of the week. They’re practically everywhere now I’m thinking about it and actually paying attention. That leads me to my next project which I’ve mentioned before which is to create dichotomy characters. These are two opposite characters which could be anything from appearance to personality.

For this project we’re required to concept two characters which would live in the same universe and work as a pair, however due to the short time period of three weeks for this project we only have to model and texture one of the characters. We can of course make both if we want and have the time with stretch goals being an idle animation.
So to start off this project I headed straight to Pinterest and pinned absolutely anything and everything that inspired me and related to dichotomous characters. So as you can see the Pinterest board was obviously very varied and ranged from sci-fi, cartoon and low poly 3d models. From the Pinterest board I had made I made a few moodboards in Photoshop and I highlighted parts each one that I found interesting like style, budget, dichotomous characters and clothing on the characters.

I also made a mindmap real quick of different opposites that I could use to make my dichotomous characters. In the end I picked out big/small, good/bad, rich/poor and religious/extremist.

Following Mike Kelly’s lesson on Tuesday where he told us that a helpful way of coming up with characters is to make the head out of shapes as silhouettes and then draw over the top of them, I tried to do this however I feel like this isn’t a way that helped me at all. But I tried it anyway and this made me realise that I didn’t want to make human characters so I focused my ideas on humanoid animals.

So after this realisation I went to work making more silhouettes. I made some silhouettes of animals that looked more humanoid so I had them standing on their hind legs. I also had decided that I wanted the characters to be big/small so I made a bunch of small animal silhouettes and a load of larger ones. After making the initial silhouettes I paired the smaller and larger characters up and gave the some attributes.

From the pairings I had made I had narrowed down to four pairs and then I did some iterations on each pair. After iterating a few times and adding some detail over the top of the silhouettes I had decided on a final pair of characters; the gorilla and cat. 

However following the presentation in the seminar with the tutors they preferred one of the other characters which was the hippo. So I took their advice and took that silhouette and started pairing it with other animals. 

I have most of the work done for this other than my final concepts, orthographics and colour palettes. I also haven’t decided on whether this is going to be a stylised project, however I think that due to the time scale and what I want to do maybe half and half is the best way to go so in between stylised and realistic.

The plan for Monday is to start modelling as soon as I can but I need to have the orthographics.