Wolverine paint

Whilst my BA5 project was ongoing I decided to dedicate a little bit of time to something unrelated, I find that it helps to work on something different every now and then to prevent me getting bored or frustrated on time consuming tasks. I decided to do a digital paint as this is all still good practice and will help later in my project. I found a picture of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine to paint, this is a character who has been one of my favourites from a young age, particularly in the film versions. Another reason for picking this is because I am aware there is a detailed digital painting tutorial on youtube which I intended to use, I am aware that my methods are not the only way, or indeed quite often not the best way to achieve a result. However I find working through different tutorials I pick up many different methods and from these I can pick the ones that suit me best.

The tutorial I used can be located here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5DbDecn16o

Although I wanted to replicate the methods used in this tutorial I did not want to produce the same result therefore I based my drawing round an alternate image 

My work is not yet completely finished but I have a work in progress image to display what I have done so far. There are some areas I am really pleased with, Particularly the likeness in the face, the texture of his vest in the lower half of the image, and the definition in the arms. Some areas I can see that need improvement already are the left side of the neck, some of the shadows and making the material on the upper half of the body look less rigid and more natural.

     I am also finding the claws difficult to get right, hence they are not yet include however I intenfd to finish this piece of before to long and will update my progress then.

Tank Trial

     As part of our new project we are required to create something where there is some kind of interactivity. For example design a level layout, or a small playable part of a mission. I have chosen to further some of the work I did in our last project and model the amphibious tank I made. As I am still not all that experienced with maya I have done a quick trial version to help me prepare for the real thing.

I began with pretty basic shapes with not too much detail which I have used to build the turret and the main body of the tank.

     Using the "chamfer vertices" tool I learnt how to make rounder shapes into the faces of the model from which I could extrude a rounder object like the gun, this is an improvement as before I would have just unioned another object onto it which would leave me with more difficult geometry.

These next two pictures demonstrate how I began making my tank track. I followed some steps that I found in a youtube tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtG7vdwZsKw I basically started with a cylinder that I began to extrude faces from. The benefit of starting with the cylinder was that the pivot was already centralised within it which was handy when it came to rotating the tracks as in the picture below.

This picture shows the tank tracks all positioned, the next step was to place the wheels within them.

The wheels were pretty easy to make but I quite liked how they looked. This is where I decided to leave my model and begin working on the actual version, as I am particularly aware of the impending deadline.

Colour and Lighting

     Yesterday was our first day back at uni. We had a lecture on the use of colour and lighting within artwork and were told to analyse two images of our own on our blogs.

   
     The next image gives a basic example of refraction, demonstrating how travelling through a material can affect the movement of light.

  My second analysed image, from the game "Far Cry 3" has examples of purple fringing, something brought to our attention in the lecture.

This often occurs in photographs with intense sunlight. Whilst technology such as cameras aim to remove this as much as possible, it can be included in artwork to add atmosphere of realism.