Character Design and Creation

CDC was a super fun and awesome month! It was a lot of hard work, but it really paid off to see just what I had to offer in the world of modeling organics. I had never even attempted modeling anything like an animal, let alone a human. But I was super proud of what I did in CDC.

First of all, here is my completed model:

I would say that the hardest part with organic modeling is making sure all of your separate pieces are going to be able to fit together by planning ahead and making sure you have the correct amount of edges at your seams. For example, you can't attach a hand which has 20 edge loops going down it to an arm which only has 16 edge loops.

So the planning aspect was definitely the hardest for me to comprehend. But in the end, I think it's just a matter of practice and experience.

As well as modeling the character, we also had to do some clothing development for our characters. My character was a "Steampunk Burlesque/Showgirl from the Future." And yes, that was generated randomly! We had the option of cycling through the character creation generator until we hit one that we liked. So this is what I had to work with. And here is what I came up with:

If I had more time, I think I could have definitely accomplished a much better design and illustration. But I really focused on the modeling, since modeling humans was something I was more inexperienced in.

Well, there you have it! My very first 3D character and her clothing design. If only I knew how to model clothes now. Final grade? 99% baby ;)

Design Class

This class had a LOT of art, so I'm not going to bother posting all of it up. Basically we just were given some critical thinking tasks in order to get a better handle on design principles. What makes a composition more interesting and engaging to look at? That kind of thing. 

Oh and the catch: the whole class was entirely traditional art... After I've finally discovered I am most definitely more comfortable with digital art... But I do enjoy a good challenge I suppose.

The final project consisted of an entire chunk of pre-production concept art. We had to choose from a character design project, environmental design project, or a storyboard project. I chose to do a character because I have a lot of fun with that sort of thing.

We were also given a fairy tale to work from, along with a choice of two characters. My fairy tale was "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" by the Grimm Brothers. I won't spoil the story for you, but the characters I did were the Old Soldier and the Youngest Princess. So here is some of the art I had to create to design these characters:

These silhouettes were done first to block out some different shapes and styles and get a feel for what best represents the character you are trying to create.

 

Next, I chose a few of each that I liked the most and did some rough drafts. This gave me a more clear idea of what they would all look like. Now for the final decision.

Here's where the heavy duty concept art comes into play. Above we've got full character turn arounds, expression sheets, and facial canon changes (to play with different face shapes and styles). Once the character is pretty solid, we get the final concept renders:

And voila! That's a very basic idea of how character design pre-pro works. If anyone out there is looking to design some characters, I have one bit of advice for you: learn how to use construction shapes! They are absolutely the most important tool for drawing characters consistently. I always hated the idea, but now I am obsessed with laying out my characters in construction shapes first, then working on top of that. Even when the characters are as simple as the ones I did above.

But anyways....I'm exhausted. Too much concept art crammed into one week. And now I am bombarded with too much concept art to be crammed into another week (with Mother's Day this weekend on top of that!!) So I am going to go fall into a dreamless oblivion before I get back to work, haha...

Oh right...Final grade for Methods of Design? 97.84!

Zzzzzz.......

Shading And Lighting

So I had a really hard time with this class. Basically, we learned how to create lights and how lighting works, whether you're lighting for a picture, for a film, or for a game. Lighting is crucial to design and can dramatically enhance the mood of whatever you're working on. I have always had a keen interest in lighting, so the lighting portion of this class was really fun and easy for me.

Shading on the other hand....

Let's just say, it isn't my strong suit. It took me a really, really long time to understand the concepts and to get a hang of the processes. But where there is a will, there is a way. And my hard work really pays off. It really does go to show though that you seriously have to be willing to put in the time in order to get any sort of pay off at all. I worked my butt of in this class and was only moderately satisfied with the outcomes on all of my projects in comparison to projects in prior classes.

I do commend a lot of my classmates who did excellent work in this class!

But let's cut to the chase. :)

So I'm not going to post a lot of the beginning projects just because I don't want to break any Full Sail rules by uploading their render references. But basically for the first few weeks they would provide a reference image of the render that we were supposed to recreate and some help on how to accomplish this. So for week one, we were learning basic rendering and lighting. Week two was all about texturing....

This bad boy is the Hypershade (and the Attribute Editor on the right). Look confusing and scary? THAT'S BECAUSE IT IS. And that is what you have to work with to create textures. Even the name Hypershade scares me.

But anyways. So after going through a couple of weeks of Hell trying to figure out how to do this stuff, we were thrown into an even deeper circle of Hell for the final week. Our last project (worth 45% of out entire grade for the class) was to completely texture and light a whole scene ourselves to look as close to the reference image as possible. There were about 4 different options to choose from. I chose a scary staircase.

So from left to right, that's Before, After, and Reference. I think it's alright, but I felt so rushed. If I had longer than a week to spend on that, I think I could have done a much better job. But part of being in this industry is having to deal with time constraints so I am trying to get used to that.

The rules were no Photoshopping allowed! That was 100% rendered in Maya, baby! Luckily, we didn't have to model anything or else none of that would have happened haha.

Overall, I did pretty great in this class. But it was really, really tough. It wasn't my best, but my final grade was a 95.7%. Boom.

Reasons Why I'm Dreading

Yeah, I'm trying to dreadlock my hair. Why? Well, I have about a thousand reasons! Allow me to enlighten you~

1. I've always wanted to. So there's one check off my bucket list!
2. I think I'd look good with dreads!
3. I hate brushing my long ass hair 8 times per day or more.
4. I have babies. Babies pull hair.
5. I don't want to cut my hair off. But it's either short hair or dreads.
6. I think dreads are beautiful (depending on the wearer/caretaker).
7. My healthy, thick hair knots itself ridiculously on a regular basis making it virtually impossible to comb out but really easy to dread.
8. I feel like I look better with crazy hair.
9. I also feel like I have more creative freedom with hair expression if I have dreads. 
10. I don't have an employer who could care if I have dreads and I probably won't any time in the near future.
11. I think I will have a better and closer relationship with my hair if I have dreads to care for. (As it stands now, my hair just makes me mad every day. I know most people would hate me for that because I have nice hair. But it's the somber truth.)
12. I want to experience the "dreadlock journey" as so many dreadies call it.
13. Just because I'm me and the me I know and love would try wearing dreads at some point in life.
14. And also because I finally don't care what other people think of me or my hair! I'm me, with dreads or without them. 

So there is a pretty solid list of some pretty solid reasons. I am about 3 days in, slowly adding more dreads as life will allow. I got about half of my hair down and I'm using the twist and rip method. I like thin dreads and I feel as though backcombing makes dreads too fat. Also, you lose a lot of hair length. So far my hair is relatively the same length, maybe a few inches shorter. I'm going all natural (no, I am not using the "Neglect" method, that just seems gross to me) so I am not using dread wax or any of that B.S.

I did a LOT of research for this. So I will be keeping my dreads nice and clean and I know how to take care of my dreads in a natural, healthy way. Hopefully in a couple of months' time I will have pretty dreadlocks! :)

My Model Creation Experience

First thing I want to say about MCR: I loved this class!!!!

The first project was a garage scene which we had to fill up with props. So in the above image, all of the lighter grey objects were created by me. Here is a close up:

The second project was a cafe scene, and for this one, I modeled everything except for the building and anything in it/on it.

That is a lot of stuff!!! I made some extra little props for the table that weren't part of the minimum requirements. (I did not make the creme puff thing on the plate though.) Here is a close up:

The third project was a quick one. We were just learning how to map out UVs on models. Basically UVs are just little maps on the surface of your models which tell your textures where to lay on the model. For some reason this is the modeler's job and not the texturer's so we had to learn that this month. It's nothing too special to show, but it can be tricky. It takes some critical thinking sometimes. But once you get a feel for it, it's easy stuff.

Lastly, we had to recreate an entire scene based off of a photograph! This project was SUPER fun for me. I loved modeling everything like all the little trinkets. Here is the reference photo that we had to use. (There were several options for this project, I just liked the look of this office.)

I am so going to try modeling my scene version of this after I master texturing! :) I am currently taking my Shading and lighting class. So by the end of the month I may be able to even better recreate this photo! I hope anyways. My grade for MCR? 97%! Yeah, baby!

End of Art 2

So I know it's been a long time since I posted on my blog. But I do want to catch up. So! Art 2...months ago. Above is a picture of my character creation! We had to do a front, back and side view (with proportion lines, which I turned off for this picture) as well as a demographic change. That's what the little powerpuff-looking girl is there. A demographic change is basically a version of your character which is more geared to a different audience than your current character. I chose to do a demo change for a younger audience. Underneath is my original concept for the character.

We also had to do an environmental concept to match the character. The point of this is because we ended up doing a whole storyboard with our environment and character. Above is my environment concept, which was deeply inspired by the Secret of Kells. Really good movie, phenomenal animation.

My rough storyboard:

My final storyboard:

So there you have it! The final product of my Art 2 experience! And my final grade was 98.94% Yay me! Overall, I enjoyed the class, though the storyboard was very challenging with the time constraints.