Catching up.

     It is coming up to the end of the first week of our Easter holidays and the last seven days havn't exactly been productive. There are several aspects of my course that I am struggling with at the moment and this has made approaching some of the projects more difficult. One of the things that is bothering me most of all is the sessions we have begun to help us with digital modelling, and more specifically my lack of progress in these sessions. One of our project briefs for this term is to study the architecture within a particular game, and then create it as a digital model. To prepare us for this we are going through practice session trying to create the "companion cube" from "Portal", which should hopefully teach us the skills we need in order to create our own door/window etc. The main problem for me has been that in the last session I fell behind right at the start and was unable to catch up, making virtually no progress throughout the entire lesson. To try and make up for this I have set aside some time today in which to tackle this project and try to catch up.

     The image above is of the evasive little sod I have thus been unable to create. One of the things that held me back at the star of our second session was that my workplane images of this cube had disappeared, and I had forgotten how to get them back. To document my work today, and to help me remember these steps, I will list instructions on methods such as these which I have previously forgotten. To get this workplane image up one should: switch to orthographic view> click view> image plane> import image. Once the image is loaded up you can adjust height/width etc from the right hand side.

          I now have my work plane images in place, and can use this as a guideline for creating the other features of the cube. As you can see from the image, I have also started creating the first small extrusion on the cube. Our second session focused on shaping this extrusion so I will begin this now. After completion of this I will then be up to date with the progress of this work.



My character

     I have now come up with a rough design for the character I will be creating for the "armed and dangerous" competition. I knew I wanted a large Samoan character to fit with my tattoo design and so started out with a very basic sketch indicating the form and posture.

     From here I began to further the design, adding features such as armour. I knew a large part of my character would have a strong tribal theme so for the armour I tried to make it more mechanical, so as to contrast slightly with the rest of the character.

     I liked the idea of a more permanent armour that was fixed to the character's body, hence the metal plates are bolted to his skin. I was inspired slightly by the characters from the film series "Predator" where you see a charater that initally comes across as primal and somewhat primitive, but have at the same time been equippied with futuristic sci fi armour and weaponry. Whilst I would not consider my character's armour to be overly futuristic I still feel that it holds certain familiarities.

     With a design in place I will now begin to plan and create this character in mudbox.

Armed and Dangerous

     I am currently brainstorming for ideas of an "armed and dangerous" character. The competion rules specified that this could be taken literally ie. a strong warrior character, or this could be implied in a more humourous manner, eg. doctor with a large syringe.
     Recently I have had an interest in the type of heritage tattoos used by Samoan and Maori cultures. I decided to start off using this as a source of inspiration for a character. Deciding that one of his arms would be covered by this type of tattoo I decided to design one for myself.
                         These are the reference images I found to give me an idea for the kinds of patterns I should use

   

     This is the design that I then came up with:





      I will now be focusing on creating a character which which I can incorperate this tattoo design

Starting BA3

     Since my last post we have handed in our final work for BA2, and started our third and final projects in BA3. The first work we were given was to take part in an online competition which in someway required using some of the skills we learnt in our previous project, Three suggested competitions were
the 2D drawing challenges at CGHUB, digital sculpting at CGSOCIETY, and animation at 11SECONDCLUB. The one I was attracted to at first was the digital sculpting competition, therefore I will need to start coming up with ideas for the "Armed and Dangerous" competition.