Week 17 Summary

This week we did not have a presentation on Monday so my first 'in uni' session, as such, was on Wednesday as a life drawing session, focusing on lighting and the usage of charcoal. The session was pretty good as I haven't really done any drawings with charcoal apart from the odd drawing here and there during one of these sessions. Some of the drawings were pretty enjoyable to make, especially with the limitations set to us such as only drawing with vertical lines.

On Thursday we had another Maya session, but this session was simply just more of a drop in with a couple of reminders about some things shown off before, but was more of a drop-in session. I never spoke to the tutor so I probably could of done this work as home, especially given the fact that a lot of the things shown to us I already knew, so I didn't really take anything from this session beyond just a couple of reminders.

We also had a lecture on Thursday where our course leader showed us some of his work, similar to the last couple of Thursday lectures, as well as learning about women in the gaming industry and was also given a recap on what we need to be doing for our presentations since no one really understood what we were supposed to be doing, but after this lecture everyone seems to have a solid idea (at least me and my group do) of what we should be doing, or rather what we can do. The lecture was definitely worth going to as we got more information and ideas about the gaming industry as well as actually getting a proper understanding of what we need to do.

In my free time, I've worked on my models at a couple of points, but have mostly focused on my presentation for next week with my group, to the point where we actually finished it on Saturday. I also wanted to spend a lot of time this weekend just doing some digital drawing since I haven't done any in a long time, even though I really do need to crack on with some of this 3D modelling.

Life Drawing 5

This life drawing session focused a lot on lighting, and the use of charcoal to make strong contrasts between light and shadows. 

The first drawing we did was just to start us off. It was simply on plain paper and we had to use the charcoal and erasers to create shadows. We was told to not create outlines and make an almost messy-like drawings. This one was done in 12 minutes and was pretty fun to create, this one was easily my favourite one of the drawings created today. 

This next drawing was done in 13 minutes, and this time we could only draw with vertical lines, which was surprisingly challenging but was also very enjoyable. 

The third drawing was done slightly differently. We had to cover the entire page in charcoal, and then use an eraser to bring out the highlights. Unfortunately, even though I tried to set this drawing with a spray so that the charcoal would not transfer or rub off, this drawing was messed up a little bit with some charcoal transfer. For this image we just had to create it from just horizontal lines. This task was fun, but not as enjoyable as the previous 2 drawings in my opinion.

This drawing was done just like the last drawing but without being limited to horizontal lines. 

These drawings were pretty interesting to create but I have to say I won't be using charcoal over pencil for drawings. I think the first drawing I did was actually pretty good as it quite easily portrays the figure of the model but has the somewhat scruffy appearance to it.

Presentation plans

What is the subject of our presentation?
Character design artist/concept artists within games 

Artists/companies?
Kitty - Bioware - Matt Rhodes, ThatGameCompany
Luke - Ronimo Games - Istvan Pely?, Adam Adamowicz
Connor - Lab Zero - Alex Ahad & Mariel Cartwright

Relevant pics?
Concept art and final outcome of concept art

Contextual Studies: Research into Lab Zero

To start my research off I want to look at the company Lab Zero, creators of the fighting game Skullgirls and the upcoming RPG Indivisible. My interests in the industry are character design/concept design and animation, so naturally I wanted to focus on these areas. A lot of my information has come from a Q&A session the team held on Reddit, taking place 4th November 2015, so both recently and right in the middle of the Indivisible Indiegogo campaign, so a lot of questions focused around the development and business parts of the industry with some artist question scattered around.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rk1x9/were_lab_zero_games_makers_of_skullgirls_ama

Lab Zero is a small indie company which was formed after Skullgirls publisher Autumn Games received a series of lawsuits and ultimately had the entire Skullgirls team laid off by Reverge Labs in June 2012 because these two companies allowed their contract to expire, prompting the team to reform under Lab Zero Games in order to continue working on Skullgirls. Despite Autumn Games owning the Skullgirls IP, they claimed they were "fully behind the new studio". Because all funding from Autumn Games had ceased due to the litigations, Lab Zero decided to set up an Indiegogo campaign to get their first DLC character Squigly completed, who's development stopped after they were laid off. This was funded within the first 24 hours, and by the end of the campaign, had received enough funding to create 4 other DLC characters and several other extras.

On 2nd June 2015, Lab Zero announced their new game Indivisible, and set up an Indiegogo campaign to fund the game. If the game got funded, then publisher 505 Games would contribute the remaining development budget. Despite the very slow start, to the point that it looked like the game would not get funded, it eventually reached the full funding and is now currently in development.

Company & Funding
It's interesting to note that Lab Zero have been noted for being incredibly open with their campaigns to fund their products. For example, with Indivisible, they released a playable demo, specifically stated with great detail what would be included in the game and what it will be about, and frequently released updates showing off new characters and concepts, as well as stating exactly is in each perk. However, despite being so open about their project, it took a long time to finally get funded, and this is likely because of influx of teams and companies twisting the wording they use or not delivering everything they promised, if anything at all. The screenshot below is from the Reddit Q&A, where one member of the team describes how some accuse them of "lying, inflating numbers, being shady, etc". This then obviously leads fans to not fund the game because of other projects being misleading or failing as stated previously.

They also stated at multiple points that if Indivisible did not get funded then they would be forced to go into freelance work and split from one another, essentially disbanding, as stated in the screenshots below. The entirety of Lab Zero was in the hands of this crowd raiser because if Indivisible was not a success, the game would most likely never be made nor will the team likely make anything together again due to publishers looking at the project flop and noting that there was not enough support from fans. At several points they stated that they actually managed to get a contract signed incredibly quickly for the industry even though it took 6 months, showing that the industry is constantly busy working on something, but it also shows how much 505 Games believe in Lab Zero games after their success with Skullgirls. This is further emphasised with one statement, where they said "it's worth nothing that publishers are absolutely terrified right now because games are getting so expensive to make and entertainment is such an unpredictable business" and only really want to make small games under $1m or huge games over $25m. Considering Lab Zero is also a small indie company with just one game to their name, it shows how much of an impression Lab Zero has had on companies with their success and how they go about creating their games, as well as showing people that indie companies can become successful.

Concept Designer
For Indivisible, Alex Ahad worked with almost his entire team to make the characters (for example, Mariel created Razmi), knocking around concepts between each other until they had ideas that they liked. They concepted them before gameplay ideas were about, and then adapting moves and play styles for them depending on their appearance or vice versa, as the team has also stated that characters constantly go through design changes right up until final moments, such as some of the characters for Indivisible being changed when their role is determined. Ahad also states that he likes his team being involved in the concepting because it throws around more ideas and allows them to do stuff they are more interested in, which could present ideas that Ahad hadn't previously thought of.

In the blog post below, Alex Ahad talks about what he feels are important in character design: silhouettes, structure and shape. A good character is one that can be deciphered from their silhouette alone, and a character that can only be told apart from another just by some hair difference in the silhouette has gone wrong somewhere down the development line. Small and internal details should not be a unique point for a character, as they aren't going to stand out on a silhouette. A few key points should highlight what kind of character they are. Twisting ideas, such as myths, so that they take a unique twist on something is another strong way to create a stand out design. He ends his blog post on this: "I'd sum it up like this: the overall theme, structure and silhouette trump all internal details. If you have to worry about internal details like belts and zippers to make a character unique, something has gone wrong". What he says in this article is very strong advice and is definitely evident in some of his designs, and is something that I and any other artists should follow.
https://skullgirls.com/2011/05/character-design-big-shapes-vs-small-details/

This interview with Alex Ahad reveals that a lot of the Skullgirls characters were concepted when he was still at highschool and college, so have been around for several years now and have grown as his artistic skills have grown. He made a lot of his characters for a hypothetical fighting game roster, although he created characters outside of this too. For example, Ms. Fortune was a request from a forum years ago, as someone was curious what a cat girl would look like in his style, so she was made from that idea, but Ahad gave her a unique spin by making her head removable.
Alex Ahad also mentions he is in charge of pre-production materials and the character model sheets. He also concepted character's attacks and created a lot of the promotional and initial artwork for characters. As well as this, he oversees the animators and clean-up artists to ensure they are following the intended style and direction. He also creates the stories and character scripts so that they are consistent, and occasionally created some key frames for animations.
http://www.game-art-hq.com/interview-with-alex-ahad-creative-director-and-creator-of-the-skullgirls-ip/


Animating
The Lead Animator at Lab Zero is Mariel Cartwright, who has also worked on projects such as the Shantae franchise, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game. In the interview linked below, Mariel states that her job is to "animate and oversee our animation contractors", as well as splitting the animation work evenly between herself and the Senior Animator Jonathan "Persona" Kim. They work on roughly animating most of a character's moves and then test them in-game. Once this is done, Mariel states that her job is to "assign out the roughs to our animating team and work with them to get finished animations back before passing it to cleanup". She also mentions how they only work on one character at a time otherwise it gets too chaotic.
http://shoryuken.com/2013/10/09/interview-with-mariel-cartwright-skullgirls-lead-animator/

They mention a couple of times that they use Photoshop for animating but then regard it as being a poor choice for animating, which is interesting for them to state and initially one would think to just use a different program. However, it makes sense when you remember they are an indie company with not a lot of money, so they cannot afford better programs for animating, as well as giving up the time to learn a new program; they are used to Photoshop and find it adequate enough to get the job done at a high quality (which it evidently does from the in-game animations. Mariel states at one point that she struggles with subtlety in her animations because has to limit her frames, suggesting that she constantly has to work within a time frame to get things finished, but also because she wants to just get the point across.

In the video below, Alex Ahad, Creator and Art Director of Skullgirls and Lead Concept Designer for Indivisible, talks about how his team goes about animating and creating the characters to their final state. It follows this process:
-Ahad starts of creating the character concepts.
-Ahad, the animation team and Mike Z, work on creating the moves and brainstorming ideas for each character, all being drawn on paper.
-Artists and animators are given model sheets as guides to keep consistency.
-Reference sheets include lines, shading, colour mapping, scaling to other characters. Shading layer shows the shading for characters. False colour map are not the characters colour scheme, but rather designated areas for colour, so colour changes can easily be made for palette swaps/alternate colour palettes in-game.
-Once concept is complete, keyframe animations are made based off the rough sketches to determine basic timing.
-Frames added in between these as seen necessary by the animators.
-Once fully animated, it's sent to the clean up team, who clean up the lines and the false colour map and shading layers added.

Alex Ahad also states that each character is entirely hand drawn and has between 1200 - 1500 frames, which is a huge feat since every frame has to be drawn individually.

In the link below, Mariel describes how they combined western and eastern styles of animation to create Skullgirls. A lot of the animators have backgrounds in TV and film, so there approaches and styles will be vastly different to those of specifically games animators. Despite a lot of them being raised with Japanese games and animations, they are actually more influenced by how Disney animators are taught, creating a different look to Japanese styles. Mariel then goes on to explain the character Peacock, a character they created who is heavily inspired by, and blatantly looks like, something from a classic 1920s or 1930s American cartoon. These are some interesting ideas, as despite a obvious Anime-like style, there are some very heavy western inspirations and techniques brought into the animations, which makes this game stand out from the crowd.

https://skullgirls.com/2011/04/on-animation-in-skullgirls/

This blog post describes some of the steps needed to create their animations. Life drawing is key and the animators are required to draw from any angle and any pose; they need a strong understanding of the human anatomy, despite the heavy stylisation to the game. They also say how important it is to understand some basic techniques like squash and stretch. They don't take any shortcuts, such as cloning or rotating as they feel it can look odd and lifeless, as well as disproportionate, although they do occasionally use it for very very small changes. Another thing is that they really want to capture a level of "oomph" to an attack by giving it a good amount of detail and motion, such as finding the best way to convey a strong attack is to "simply snap to the active, attacking pose, and then having the character's hair and clothes flow afterwards to really sell the motion". Something they do differently to other studios is that the animators do not animate the shading, with the clean up artists doing so instead. The clean up artists need to include shadows that understand the masses of the body and how the light plays off of it, but also keeps within the game's style. 

https://skullgirls.com/2011/05/animation-getting-the-details-right/

Part of Brian Jun's job as Clean-Up Assistant is to create the colour palettes within the game. Whilst most people will think of this as pretty low in the list of priorities, it is both important and non-important in the sense that whilst it doesn't add to anything in terms of gameplay, it can add to someone's experience with the game as colour palettes can add a lot to a player's enjoyment of the game, and can even be memorable if done correctly. Some people settle with specific colour palettes which then allows them to get more attached to that character, and some competitive players can even become known for specific colour schemes. The original colour palette "can speak volumes about a character's personality, such as Cerebella's bright and vibrant orange to Parasoul's moody blacks. The alternate colour palettes can be used to push a character's personality to an extreme, or even show a different side to the character. In addition to this, the Lab Zero team want homages that people could recognise, so some characters will have colour schemes to make them resemble others, such as Painwheel getting one to resemble Jason Voorhees, Robo-Fortune receiving a colour palette to look like Samus, and Eliza getting one to represent Raven (Teen Titans). 

 

The colour palettes are not created in a traditional sense, as character's are given false colour maps so that the colour schemes can be edited quickly within the depth map engine. This allows him to change the colours to almost anything he wants, and can also allow him to alter the lighting on the characters to create the look of a matte, metallic or glossy surface. The false colour maps, created by Alex Ahad, can also allow for small details like leggings and glasses to a character to bring out a bit more personality should the team want to include them. Combinations of shadows and highlights can also be edited within the engine, but Brian always tries to keep a strong contrast between the colours and the character in general so the character is easily readable, something that is important in a fighting game so you do not lose sight of your character. 

Brian states that "once all the colours are settled in, Alex and I go over the colours once more for some final tweaking and testing, pass it around the office for a quick approval, and then the palettes are imported into the game". This process for creating this palettes is both incredibly interesting and unique, as 3D games would have an entirely different way of going about this, and most 2D games would likely just fill areas a certain colour and leave it at that. 

https://skullgirls.com/2011/09/a-rather-refined-palette/

Richard Suh, Lead Clean-Up Artist at Lab Zero, describes what the role of Clean-Up is in the blog post linked below. A clean-up artist is someone who cleans the frames drawn by the animators. In fact, all of the animators are capable of clean-up, but the reason clean-up is a more specialist role is so that the animators have more time to work on other animations given the time constraints. Clean-up artists can tidy frames both efficiently and quickly. The clean-up artists are also required to add the shading and fill in the colours. This looks to be a very effective role both for the development of the game and for the animators, as it allows the animators to work on other animations without having to stop to do these roles. 

https://skullgirls.com/2011/06/diamonds-in-the-rough-animation-clean-up/

2D Vs. 3D

The art style in Skullgirls is beautifully executed and the animation is very fluid and smooth. However, 2D is often dismissed in favour of 3D when it comes to video games because it is quicker to make and easier to animate, requiring less time to work on in most cases and therefore requires less money going towards employees. In the screenshots below, Lab Zero explain why they prefer 2D and why their games are made in 2D as opposed to 3D. Most of their artist's specialise in 2D or work entirely in 2D with no experience in 3D, and they cannot afford to hire a team of 3D specialists, as well as their tools catering to 2D. Although 2D is expensive, Lab Zero prefer the look of 2D, feel that the outcome is definitely worth it and are not able to hire 3D specialists due to their small budgets. They also state multiple times that 2D often ages better then 3D does, which stands correct when looking at a lot of games from the 1990s that use 3D haven't aged too well (such as Final Fantasy 7), where as something like Super Mario World still holds up to this day, yet is older then FF7. They also state how 2D allows you to control all aspects, so bad angles aren't a thing and model clipping does not exist. They say 2D holds more personality then 3D which is something I agree with, it allows everything to be stylised a lot more and things can be exaggerated or expressed easier and in more unique ways.

One major struggle that 2D art has over 3D is that you cannot really give characters completely different costume designs, as then you would have to be almost forced into redrawing most of the frames, where as in 3D it's simpler to add or change.

In addition to having limited amounts of skins or costume designs, 2D art also forces the artists and animators to completely reuse animations and redraw parts of them if you create a clone character, or have to start from scratch if the character is similar but not quite the same. In 3D, this is easily solved by just reusing the animations or skeletons. More specifically aimed at fighting games like Skullgirls. This also applies to throwing reactions as stated in the screenshot below.

Going back to their use of Photoshop, an FAQ on their website clarifies that 3 members of the team (Mariel, Jon and Alex) primarily use Photoshop because Skullgirls frames are exported as raster images, and that other programs are used by other members of the team such as SAI and OpenCanvas.
http://labzerogames.com/faq/#what-programs

Tips from Lab Zero
At a couple of points Lab Zero was asked about any tips for upcoming artists, and they strongly suggested life drawing and figure drawing because of how important it is. They also said to keep a folder of inspirational images to go back to at any point which is a pretty good but sensible idea that I will have to go to doing at some point. They also point out that you should study animation frames and art, as well as various artistic geniuses, as no matter what they have something interesting to teach you. This is pretty sound advice and it's evident that the team have done this, both with the designs, animations and Alex Ahad's own personal inspirations.

Mariel suggested heavily that freelance work and doing your own projects is something that you should do, as well as putting artwork online because that's how you get noticed and that is how she got to do freelance work for the various games that she has worked on.

http://superbestfriendsplay.com/podcast/sbfc-115-drop-everything-and-play-crash-bandicoot-ds-feat-mike-z/
https://skullgirls.com/2011/04/skullgirls-artistic-origins/
http://www.nerd-age.com/skullgirls-interview-mike-z-alex-ahad/
https://skullgirls.com/2011/07/fetching-coffee-making-copies-writing-blogs/

Week 16 Summary

This week our Monday lecture focused on baking and introduced us to things such as cages, raycasting and X-normals, and then recapped on Normal maps and various other maps. It was a pretty useful and informative lecture, but it was another one of those lectures where we was not shown a lot since it's something that's better to explain when actually doing it.

The Wednesday session was a Photoshop tutorial which I was excited for (and enjoyed in the end) which focused on masking and how it can be useful in certain situations. The session was pretty calm and there wasn't really a lot for us to do in it so we could go at a slow pace which I liked. I ended up creating the image below, and I am surprisingly happy with how it turned out to be honest.

Our Maya session on Thursday was incredibly fast paced and somewhat aggravating as I could not keep up with the tutor whilst also taking notes, but even when taking notes I would end up missing a part which then meant I could not keep up with him. The session took what we was told about baking on Monday and progressed through us doing it practically. We baked a cube, created a normal map and then messed around in Unreal Engine 4 for a little while, which is pretty interesting, but overall the session just ended up annoying me more then it should of because of how fast the tutor was going through everything, and I feel like if I didn't keep falling behind then I would of really enjoyed the session.

The afternoon lecture was presented by Scott Grandison, where he discussed programming and what he has worked on within the industry. The lecture started of fairly plain, as he just showed us some basic programming, but then once he started showing off some of the more technical and advanced bits, especially the use of the Xbox Kinect camera, then it became a lot more exciting. Afterwards he showed off some of the games and other bits he has worked on, which was also pretty interesting. Overall the lecture was actually pretty good and I did quite enjoy it to be honest, it was both very informative and fun!

In my time outside of uni I have continued working on some of my models a bit, but honestly I haven't done a lot, which I should really reconsider as I feel like I am getting behind now, and should do more models in general really.

Vintage Telephone

Our third task after the lamps and barrel texturing was to create a vintage phone. The one provided is shown below and initially I thought it was quite daunting, but once I began looking at it as if it's just a bunch of shapes, it seems a lot easier. 

I started off by making the base. I started this by making a 4 sided pyramind, removing the top segment of it, and then using fill hole to create a new, flat face. I then extruded that face upwards and then slightly outwards to create the part where the phone holder will sit. At the bottom of the phone I started by extruding down and then outwards slightly in order to create the part that sticks out slightly. When it comes to the unfinished dial, I simply created a cylinder and extruded it multiple times. 

The phone holder part was a bit trickier. I started with a small cylinder and extruded it multiple times, then added in a couple more cylinders and then a couple of slightly squashed spheres. I then placed a larger sphere on top, rotated it 90˚ and then extruded along both centre points of the sphere so I could then connect them to other spheres. The curved point was simply the centre point of a sphere bridged to another centre point of a sphere.

To finish of the phone holder I simply just place in more spheres and extruded on two centre points of a sphere to create the prongs. I then duplicated this and mirrored it to the other side.

The handle of the phone itself started off as cylinder that I repeatedly extruded along both sides until I reached the point that it reached through to longer, thinner cylinders, where I extruded them separately. I extruded the initial part together so that it was symmetrical, but once it reached the sphere I continued working on them separately.

Both the ear and mouth piece of the phone were just created by extruding the sphere. I started on the top part of the spheres since it would be the easiest bits to do. The earpiece was fairly straightforward to make, as it mostly revolved around pulling down edges that I had extruded. The mouth piece started like this too, but once it reached the big curve part, then things began to get tricky. Originally, I planned to just bridge between the point I had left off at and a cylinder I had created as seen below, but when I did this it caused huge problems such as faces clipping through each other and other faces disappearing entirely, so I left the phone for a little while to think about how to go about this.

I eventually realised that I am going to have to extrude along the edges and slowly rotate and expand them each time in order to get the mouth piece quite right, so I decided to just crack on with it, although it was incredibly tedious and took a very long time, but I did create mouth piece which I think does look pretty accurate to the photo. I went back to the neck of the phone holder and created the two odd panel like pieces that stick out. I did this by creating a cylinder, removing half of it, using the fill hole tool to create a large face down the side, extruded that along, duplicated it so there was one for the other side, and then bridging them to a thin cylinder in the neck already.

At this point the phone was pretty much finished, although I still had a few things left to finish, such as the dial, the wire and the small holes for the mouth and ear pieces. Since we was recently shown how to make the wire I decided to try working on that whilst it was fresh on my mind, but the only problem I had was whenever I tried to create the wire and edit it, my laptop would crash, but I have started getting it to work now after reducing some of the shapes on the phone (since some overlapped) and removing unnecessary objects.

So the wire is virtually done and I've realised that it will probably be easier to include the holes for the ear and mouth piece via texturing, just purely because of how I've made it.

I created the wires using the technique shown to us previously, and then I combined the wires and bridged the ends of the two together so they became one wire.

I bridged the top of the wire to the phone itself, but before that I did have to extrude the two sets of faces a few times in order for them to align and actually allow me to bridge them together. I also bridged the wire at the bottom into the base of the phone. I then moved the dial up and rotated it so it could be placed onto the phone's base. At this point the phone was completed in terms of modelling it.

Week 15 Summary

Our lecture on Monday focused on materials, showing us the Lambert, Blinn and Phong materials in Maya, as well as materials in Unreal Engine 4, material instancing and then a recap on things like physically based rendering, albedo, normal, roughness, metallic and emissive maps, combining textures, ambient occlusion and realistic and hand painted materials. Whilst it was nice to get a recap on a lot of previous topics, we had also been shown these before as the Unreal Engine 4 stuff was the only brand new stuff really shown to us (since the Maya materials were briefly discussed with us during our Maya tutorials last week).

My Wednesday session was another critique session and this time everyone had a lot more work done so it was easier to get feedback from people. The feedback I got was very helpful and I shall be taking all of it into account. It was suggested that I re-consider how I go about making my 3D models because I have a tendency to overlap objects so polygons are being wasted, which makes sense so I will be going through my models and finding all the points where polygons overlap, as well as extruding shapes to create some parts of my model instead of creating a new shape and just hashing it to pieces. It was also suggested that I do more UV mapping since I haven't done any for any of my models I have made so far, which I do agree that I have to do some UV mapping, but I was then accused of wanting the UV mapping session re-taught to me because I stated that I would like to discuss with another tutor a couple of things about UV mapping, such as a reminder on how to align the checker grid with the faces of my objects. Finally, it was also suggested that with one of my barrel textures that I apply a lighter gradient to parts of it in order to make it look a bit more wood-like, which I agree with entirely.

On Thursday I had another Maya tutorial, although this time we was just shown how to make the cable for the vintage phone and then was left to do whatever we desired. Having the cable shown to us was a huge help and will definitely be an aid in the future because it was the final thing we really needed to be taught in order to create the phone.
The lecture in the afternoon consisted of a lecture from games developer Steven Huckle, who had worked on Sims 3, Tomb Raider, Transformers Universe and various other games. He spoke to us about his experience in the industry, his work and his website sharkinfestedcustard.net, which helps people set up development studios for making games. His lecture was both entertaining and very informative which both kept me listening whilst also informing us all about various facts and intriguing information. This will also be a great aid in my group's presentation which is due within a couple of weeks (although we still don't know what we are supposed to be doing really beyond the research task assigned to everyone).

In my free time I have managed to continue working on the vintage phone, to the point where it is almost complete now, as well as starting to create a weapon for a character of mine. I plan to have the models for the phone and the weapon completed by the end of next week, as well as hopefully tweaking the lamps and the character, so that I can begin working on unwrapping them all and possibly even texturing them in the future.

Weapon design

Just like how I wanted to create a character of mine, I decided I wanted to create a weapon of another one of my characters. This character is Meloda, a small Imp who uses a sniper rifle in combat, with a bayonet attachment and the ammunition being the spheres around her belt.

I started this off by just mashing simple shapes together and creating the vague shape of the gun, with no idea how to really go about making it. I showed this off during a critique session and got a very mixed reception, although I began to realise how I could actually make this.

I kept all the previous parts from before, but I did not want to reuse these so used them merely for reference. The non-higlighted of the gun below was originally just a cube, which was extruded upwards. The faces on two sides of this cuboid were pulled slightly to make them rounder, and then the bottom part was moved outwards so that it would keep the rounder look as opposed to an extrude literally pulling them out without altering the faces around them. The flat sides of the gun's stock was then extrude and pulled inwards to match the slight dip visible in my gun's initial design. To make the gun's grip I simply extruded and pulled and tweaked the edges and faces, which became very tedious at times but I eventually did manage to nail it. To make the slight rounded connection between the two gun parts, I just extruded some more, deleted some faces and then extruded the edges to the point that there is a completely flat surface for the second part to sit in.

The second part (the selected part) is simply a cylinder with 3 sides flattened and the last side pulled up at various pointed across the faces. The edges at the top were then extruded upwards to create the alcove-like part seen below, which is where the barrels of the gun will sit.

The barrel of the gun is just an elongated cube that sits in the alcove I created in the main body of the gun.

Below is the final gun model. The differences between the image above and the one below are:
-The scope
-The trigger
-The button and screws
-Second barrel and knife

The scope I created with a cylinder, extruding one end of it and expanding it out slightly. I then needed to make a dip within the main body of the gun so that the scope could comfortably sit on top, which was done by simply flattening and lowering some selected faces. Some faces of the cylinder were then extruded down so they touched the gun.

The trigger was simply extruded out of the top of the handle, but I did create a small gap around the trigger just like it would on an actual gun, so that the trigger can easily flick inside the gun when pulled.

The button, located on the main body of the gun next to the small extruded rectangle, is just a small cylinder, and the screws, located on the rounded part at the start of the stock/above the grip, are spheres cut in half and extruded slightly on some of the faces on top.

The second barrel is a duplicate of the first one, albeit shorter. The ends of the barrels had the outside edges pulled outwards to give them angled ends. These were then extruded inwards to give them the exit holes for the bullets. The bottom barrel however has a knife held inside instead.

The knife is just an altered 3 sided pyramid with two faces stretched to give it a more knife-like appearance, and the extruded along the bottom face. A cylinder was then created for the handle, which was altered slightly to make it look like a handle, even though you won't see this part.

Overall, I am incredibly happy with how this turned out. I think it resembles my initial design almost perfectly and it looks great overall. It's pretty simplistic for a gun, but then again the design is simple already. I just need to smooth some bits, UV map it and then texture it and it should be complete.

Week 14 Summary

This is the first week back after the Christmas break and things seem to be get steadily back up to pace already. Monday consisted of a lecture about advance modelling, showing us some more advanced techniques such as subdivisions, topology, floaters and kit bashing. Wednesday consisted of a life modelling session that focused on hands and perspective, where we did a series of short hand sketches followed by short full figure drawing. On Thursday I had a Maya session in the morning that allowed us to practice most of the techniques shown to us in the lecture on Monday, followed by another lecture in the afternoon briefly explaining our contextual studies topics for this project.

In my free time I managed to finish off my character that I started making in Maya a long time ago, and also managed to continue working on this blog and did a little bit of 3D modelling. The character I am semi-happy with, although I feel it could of gone better, although this latest Maya session allowed me to finally finish it after being taught about bridging and combining. The new techniques shown to us are fairly easy to remember and I can already see them being incredibly useful for me. I also took notes on these so that I could remember them in the future should I forget them (which is very likely). I do feel like I am going to get behind because of how slowly I am doing things lately so I will crack on with doing a lot more work next week.

Life Drawing 4

This week's life drawing session focused on hands and perspective, which was something nice and a bit different from the usual things we do. 

Below are my hand sketches, drawn in pencil. We was given varying time intervals in which to draw them in, and as you can see very few of them are actually finished. 

These are the perspective sketches, and whilst we had a lot longer to do these in (varying from 12-15 minutes), I still did not complete a single one. Regardless of that though it was pretty useful.