Month 7: Character Design and Creation/Geomotry and Measurnment

Just turned in my final submission for CDC, and starting my new classes tomorrow. CDC took the lions share of this months time as it required a lot of learning. I also finally went to IKEA and bougha desk... its pretty amazing going from working on my lap.

Here is the new command center.

We were to create a medium resolution realistic character model based on a real person. The class provided all the reference pictures of our models body parts, from there we had 2-3 body parts due each week. By the end of the month the character had to be turned in fully attached. What made this challenging is that everything had to be modeled a specific way. Certain loops had to be in certain places.

Here is an example from the early stages of my model. All the colored areas here were very specific on how they were to be laid out. They are laid out in a way that makes the model functional if they are to be animated. 

Here are some of the progress pictures as I modeled my character.

some early renders

I had my character fully modeled by the end of week 2. I spent the next week or so trying to learn a software package called zbrush. Zbrush is primarily a modeling package that aproched modeling like digital sculpting. You can take something you model in Maya, bring it into Zbrush and sculpt it like its clay. I used zbrush to make my characters hair. Its going to take a lot longer than a week to get a handle on Zbrush so the hair came out so so. To me it just kinda looks strange, but here are the hair progress pictures.

We also had to UV the characters, meaning we had to cut up all the geometry so there is no stretching/distortion if we were to paint textures on them. Here is what that looks like

The UV collage.

When I had the project completed I did a few renders and gave it a bit of color. The eyes/facial hair were not necessary  but I did them anyways.

I also did some extra credit and posed the character out and modeled her some boots.

 We had in class speed sculpt challenges with a free program called sculptress.

Here is an ear I made in like 20 min.

10% of the classes grade was kind of an artistic project. We were directed to a website where it randomly generated  a character. The one I generated was Medieval Demon Hunter from the Past. We had to develop all the clothing ideas, draw them out and for each article, lay out the specifics regarding materials used ect…

I spent a lot of time on mine and revised it a few times.

Progress pictures..

Here is the final submission

Here is some zoomed in shots... the total resolution is like 4000x2000

This took a LOT of time and I was pretty pleased with the outcome considering its my second time using the digital pen.  95% of this is free handed.. a few things like the hood embroidery, original face, background castle are mostly traced. All the textures were created by me not copied/clone stamped.

So that was it for CDC just turned in my stuff so have no clue about grades.

Ohh yeah there was also my geometry and measurement class.
Nothing really to say about it.... pretty much what you would expect. Perfected the final, finished with a 98.8% in the class.

Next month is 2d animation/physics =)

Month 6: Method of Design/Personal Projects

My kush one class month comes to an end. While it was nice only having class only 3 days a week, I am sure I could have made better use with my time off. I did go back a bit to practice, and improve on my texturing, as well as lean how to use my digital drawing pad the school provided me in art 1.

MOD tries to teach students to use more of a organized structure before jumping into a project. They also expect all the 2d projects to be colored. Unlike the other art classes, MOD wants all the practice work or "pre-pro" to be turned in. They also wanted very specific things for all the pre-pro.
I will include some pictures to help explain. There were only four projects in this class. Each project however had writing assignments to go along with them.

Project 1 was called re-design
The idea was to find something boring around the class room, and draw it from a more interesting perspective.  After tons of prepro we would color a final piece and then make a foam sculpture of our object. The foam was very fragile and difficult to work with.

Here is some of the pre-pro




The final

Sculpture pre-pro


The foam sculpture final.

Project 2 was called the aesthetics project
For this one we were to find an art style that we did not like. I chose dada art. We were to then pick out a famous piece that we did not like, and recreate it in a way that we did like. This project was fun, and very time consuming. Doing colored pencil well takes a long time, and this was a large piece of bristol.

Here is the piece I chose "GOD 1917"


Its a pretty big jump, but here is the recreation in 3 stages.




All I really kept is the composition of the shape of the pipe.
We had to then write a bunch of essays talking about what we did.

Project 3 was a cardboard sculpture
I did not like this project because cutting cardboard with an exacto blade just sucks.  The idea was to create an interesting object with good negative space.  Nuff said, here is the pics

Pre pro,


Final


Project 4 gave us 3 options to choose from
We were to read 2 stories from the grim fairy tales, "The Goose Girl," and "The Juniper Tree"
We could choose to either re-design 2 of the characters and do character sheets, create an environment from one of the stories on 3 separate planes, or do storyboards. 80% of the students went with characters so I went with an environment from the goose girl.

The environment had to show atmospheric perspective, meaning that the further back things are the less detail and contrast they will have, as it is in real life. This is why the back looks like it was gave so little time being colored. I also over-achieved and did mine in 4 planes instead of 3.

4 of the 20 or so prepro drawings required.

Final pieces


 

After being cut, and layered.

Was really happy with the top layer on this one.


So that was it for school projects. I just got my grades back today and actually ended up with the highest grade in the class "99.4%" and took the advanced achievement award. The school kept my aesthetics, and environment project for the gallery! So yeah... im pretty badass
 Actually there were again several highly talented artists in the class, but they did not have all their stuff done.

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On the Side Stuff


So I did a few side projects but not nearly as many as I intended, and I also started playing with some fluid simulation software called Realflow.

The first project I did was just intended to get me used to a digital pen, I have heard that a few projects in future classes will require their use, so I wanted to familiarize myself with them a bit. This was a digital painting a did from some random chic picture I found on Google.

 Was for sure very fun, and could turn into a future hobby.


I also got back into texturing as I really enjoyed it.

This was the chair I modeled in MCR a few months back after being textured, lit, then brought into Photoshop for some composting.

I have a super high res picture that looks pretty cool but it wont let me upload it =(

This one had depth of field played with.

This is another project I did just for fun. I modeled a pear, cutting board, and the room walls, then textured and lit everything. All the textures I made myself from photographs using Photoshop.

Texture used

After Everything

There are lots of places where I could have made it look better, but its a learning process.

SO THATS IT for traditional art classes...sorta.... besides 2d animation in a few months.

Next month is character design and creation (CDC), and measurement and geometry..... not sure why I did not get out of that one.

Month 5: Shading and Lighting/ Art 2

This month was another busy one, but not like last month. My original schedule had me in shading and lighting lab 5am-9am with the lecture portion of the class from 1pm-5pm. I did that for 1 day and then was extremely lucky in that I overheard a guy behind me in lecture that needed to switch to the early lab because of his job. So after that I was 9-5 every day. Art 2 was also 9-5, so no stressful hours this month. 

Art 2 was great! I guess I was skeptical that I could really improve much with a month of art class, but this class really helped. Unlike Art 1, for Art 2 we only worked on 1 piece for each project (more or less). The projects were perspective/figures in action/figure drawing/zoo/character sheet/maquette figure. Also unlike last month instead of of a chunk of our grade being "effort", our entire grade was based on our final portfolio.

With our first project we started of where we left of in Art 1, perspective.

For this project we were to create a fictional city using 2 point perspective. So you pick 2 points on your paper that are on the same horizontal line and draw some guidelines expanding out in every direction from each point. My left point was off the paper and my right point was on the far right of the paper.

Perspective Piece



I had the teacher approve the castle idea, and he really liked how this turned out. This was the only 100% I received on any of my art projects, they kept this one for the gallery.

Next we did figures in action. Our class broke up into groups and went outside and made about twenty 10 second movies doing movements based on the ideas of Action/Tragedy/Drama and Mystery. We then picked 2 of our favorites and drew them out using line of action and construction shapes. There really was not a whole lot to do in this project because we were supposed to leave all the construction line work intact, so this project did not get a whole lotta love.


The lion tamer action animation is me.

Figures in Action

Next we had 2 entire days of nude figure drawing, we were provided a large drawing pad of butchers paper that we completely filled up within the 2 days.  Day 1 was a male model, day 2 was the female. Both days were fast paced and a little stressful. The longest we had on any 1 pose was 10 minutes. Most of the poses were 15 seconds-1 minute, so we were burning through the sketch pad. This project I did the worst on (88) but actually made the most improvement. Drawing people, or figures was something I did not really want, or know how to do. However, I now have a solid approach to it, and enjoy it. The turn in was just our entire pad.

Here is a panoramic of the classroom set up for the models, as well of some of my drawings.






After that was out of the way we all met up at the zoo for class one day mid month. It was HOT.... and HUMID and we had to fill up a 40 page sketch book with animal drawings. Besides the gross weather it was nice to get out of the classroom. Besides the 40 page sketchbook, we also had to work on a project involving the zoo. The one that most the class chose, including myself was to create a mythological creature combining at least 3 animals together. The idea was to keep it believable pulling 90% of the attributes from one animal and 10% from the others.
This is supposed to be a black handed spider monkey with striped texture, piranha teeth, and horns. This got really high marks, and was also kept by the school.

Zoo Project
 

Next we did character sheets. For this we first were provided a theme (pirates vs Atlantians) and a small random pictures of characters to base our characters around. Mine was some weird goat wearing a robe. My character ended up being a female Atlantian villain. Character drawing really is not my niche, so this project was a pain. For the final sheet we needed 5 expressions, 5 canon shots, 3 silhouettes, and a 3 point turnaround.

Character Sheet


Home made ghetto tracing table that I made so I wouldn't have to go into open lab after hours.



For our final project we had to pick out a silhouette from our character sheet and build a sculpey clay maquette to match the silhouette.. This project was great, the only bad thing is we had very little time for it. It came in the last week, which was a very busy one in both classes. I took several pictures to show the process of how it was made. For my first clay project, I was very happy with how it turned out. It could have been a lot better if I had more time, and the proportions were a bit more accurate, but I thought it was one of the cooler ones in the class.
Here are some pictures of the progression.









this was right before she got baked

There were many really great artists in this class. The guy that sat next to me wants to be a concept artist, and actually has the skills to do it, ...probably now if he wanted. His stuff was pretty unbelievable, I had thought that his laptops background was a photo of a young girl tell I started talking to him, and found out that he had made it. 

So that was Art 2, next month is Method of Design and then that is all for the art classes. It kinda sux, but its also kind of a relief.

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My next class was shading and lighting. Shading and lighting is pretty much what it sound like. This class starts out teaching us how to properly light scenes. We learn about all the different kinds of lights, and how to adjust their shadows. The second half of the class focuses on creating photo realistic textures either using techniques within the software, or by using patterns taken from photographs and manipulated within photoshop.

Here were a few of the lighting projects. We were provided a reference image and told to match the lights, light color, shadows, and shadow softness. These scenes have 3-5 lights in them.

This was our first texturing project, we had to first match lights, we then had to create all the textures for the scene. This became complicated when you take into account all the small things like reflectivity, glossiness, and the grooves and depth that are in different textures. Here is a picture of the reference image I was provided with, followed my my project render.


REFERENCE PROVIDED

MY RENDER

still have not got back grades for any of the following projects.

The next project we worked on focused on matching to a photograph, so it was much more difficult, if not impossible to match a lot of the textures. Here we started to dabble with glass, leather, and brushed metal.

Here is what we started with


After texturing and rendering


Our last project was a cafe scene, in this we had some artistic freedom and did not have to match reference. We were just handed a list of what we need to do for each object in the scene. We also used photoshop a bit, and touched on 3d projections a bit.

Cafe Scene


Then there was a final written test, and an in class practical today that was pretty stressful. I was happy with the outcome and think I did well with it.
Overall I really liked the class. I plan on expanding on the content that we learned, as it can really make the work look stunning when done well.

So that was my month. Next month I have method of design by itself because transfer credits got me out of taking college mathematics.