Week 17

Visual design

This week of the character project, as part of our anatomy crash course we were treated to a session on understanding drapery. As our characters will be clothed we should be able to render this with some realism otherwise it may appear that our character is nothing more but a Lego block. This lesson took me through a range of folds such as diamond, thrust and half lock. Admittedly I felt that my understanding of this session was quite lacking so as a result I decided to explore drapery in more detail via a Pinterest board as well as producing a double page spread on the subject in my sketchbook.

This I feel will come in handy in the future as I have a personal reference to refer to when trying to depict the different types of folds in the clothing of my eventual character. Moreover this should push my understanding of how drapery works over forms.  From my investigation I had learnt that what essentially creates a fold is a point of tension. This point is where all the creases and spirals originate from and develop the draped form.

Game production

In game production we further pushed the theme of drapery and got a chance to model drapery on a pre-modelled and pre rigged arm. During this session I experimented with different ways on modelling drapery such as chamfering edge loops and extruding them among other different methods. Eventually I decided that the most efficient way would be a produce a swift loop, extrude the edges and adjust the folds to make it appear as if gravity is affecting it. This way this should produce a somewhat effective yet low poly fold. In addition to this I learnt another method of creating efficient draper which doesn’t eat up the tri count. This would be to only model the folds with affect the silhouette and texture in the other smaller folds, communicating the look of drapery effectively whilst saving on Tris which I could use to model more details in the face.

My drapery attempt

Critical studies

This week in critical studies we were given the brief for our character project. We are tasked to produce a character which will fit within the village style guide constraints and also share a likeness to ourselves. This brief is something that excites me as characters has always been a passion of mine and I cannot wait get stuck in the concepting stage.

Lastly after the brief was set we took front and side orthographic shots of ourselves to use as reference of our characters.

Other work

Practicing composition using a dutch angle shot- I'm quite happy with the image
as it shows improvement in use of values however one part of the image im not so happy
about is how the kaiju sits in the image it seems out of proportion and the perspective seems off 

The image about was part of a personal project I wanted to explore. Taking old ideas
and compositions I had previously worked on and executing them with skill
that I have now acquired. The image on the left was a graphics project based around Flash Gordon.
The image was put together via paint overs and photobashes everything in the original was traced or photo edited
The image on the right is my attempt to draw and digitally paint this composition

The final result

This image was produced in the first few weeks of the course the image below is an iteration of the image above
which I produced this week. Thus continuing the idea of taking an old idea and using the skills I have acquired now to execute it stronger

The final result - note this is the first time I have made a painting straight from colour