Legacy Work: Uni Outcomes

This post features some of my legacy pieces of work from my university days. I felt that these videos were particularly important to my progress throughout CG art and animation.
The topmost two videos display my Minor and Major project outcomes, whereby I had to devise game assets and an environment using Autodesk Maya and the Adobe Suite (2015).
It was my task to develop a concept from scratch, develop the concept in 2D before creating the assets in 3D. I stumbled across the idea for the Aqua Marines because I was particularly concerned with the contemporary environmental issue of trash vortexs inside the Pacific Ocean. I therefore decided to make a game designed to educate young children of the environmental disaster. The game concept featured a series of animals from the Pacific Ocean who used the various personal attributes to overcome missions to save the environment. (Think ThunderBirds but with live creatures instead of an assortment of machines).

The final video was a small project I undertook to produce some assets based on historic evidence. I chose to design assets from the battle of Arnhem WW2. This was an excellent project which introduced me to the notion of LODs and correct UV texturing processes for games. It was also really nice to learn about the sacrifices of the soldiers and to build something important and meaningful to our history.

I hope you enjoy these legacy videos, it's a pleasure to share some of my professional past with you all.

Bourbon Rigging: Part 02

I've managed to get some time in lately to explore developing my rig for Bourbon in some extra detail; I've finally started to add some controls and explore the wire parameters settings. 

The rig is a mixture of IK/FK controls, with three duplicated copies of bones which I've colourised to help visualise in viewport. 

Green= Skinned Bones

Blue= IK bones

White = FK bones

As a result I've built an IK/FK switch into the global control to allow for extra manoeuvrability in animation. See pics below... 

Fig.1 An IK solver in action on the legs

Fig,2 An IKspline inside the neck

Fig.3 The spine twisting to show IK/FK falloff of the character rig

Fig.4 The Rig so Far

2D Sketch Practise: The Past

Very early on, before I started to push my artwork into the digital sphere, I practised drawing the human form. The human form provided me with the challenge of considering complex shapes, how they fit together and interact with one another, their surfaces and dynamism. This post displays some of my old sketch work I would like to share with you because I believe 2D art work paves the way for the latter 3D work. 

Bourbon: Rigging Part 01

Back to Bourbon, my quirky military rabbit character, I've started to build an animated rig for the character. This took some careful consideration of joint placement, as to how he would move. I couldn't just Rig him as I would a homanoid character since this would restrict the movement of the pelvis.

Step one was simply adding all of the bones into the right orient and position and making sure they were 'linked' or parented into each other accordingly. (See the schematic view to the right hand side of fig.1). 

Fig.1 Adding bones/joints to our rig.

The second stop I started to look into the different kinds of IK chain solvers I could deploy for my rabbits rig. See here I've also introduced a knee and foot control to counter animate twists and bends in the IK. 

Fig.2 Adding IKsolvers to the legs

Bourbon: Texture Modification

Before I jumped into rigging I wanted to make some basic texture changes to my character, Bourbon. For starters the blue and yellow/cream fur diffuse was too punchy and bold. I opted to a paler shade of yellow and a still strong copper brown colour as I still wanted my character to reflect a stylised approach rather than realism. I also made some adjustments to the Nut texture on the helmet and pads. I'm fairly happy with his overall look now, although I think I will come in and tweak textures between the rigging process (the carrots for example could do with an SSS2 MTL and I would also like to add a logo to the chest plate). 

Fig.1 Bourbons fresh new colour range. 

Fig.2 The Raw output of the Complete Map 

Fig.2 displays a simple 'length map' for the VRay fur, which utilises monotones to determine a the length of a hair on the basis of 0-100% (black to white value). To produce such a map I used the 'render to texture' tool and rendered a complete map, placing a VRay Dirt MTL into the diffuse channel of a  100% self illuminated white standard 3DS Max shader. I then had to analyse the complete map and paint over a few sections (such as the nose) where I knew no hair would exist. The VRay dirt basically allowed me to bake an ambient occlusion channel across Bourbons UV texture space, meaning objects such as the bag straps and the military vest which previously were penetrated by the hair were now being shortened to a degree in which they were no longer. 

Bourbon_Modelling Complete

It's been a while since I last posted, understandably the Christmas period is extremely busy with work. However bit by bit I've finally, finally managed to get Bourbon modelled!
I'm very happy with the progress, this is my first attempt at modelling a character inside Max and I managed it all without the aid of a single tutorial.
I'll be making a bunny gun for the little soldier too, (which shoots carrots, of course) but the next step is going to be looking into UV'ing and rigging him which as far as I can see looks completely different from what I'm used to in Maya. Game on!

Fig.1 Bourbon Mesh Front

Fig.2 Bourbon Mesh Rear

Bourbon_Modelling

Just a quick update of my WIP so far. Bourbon is well under way, I'll just have to model all the extra little details now! On a side note I'm really liking the EdgeTex wireframe shader map in VRay.

Fig.1

Fig.2

Fig.3

Fig.4

Fig.5

Bourbon: Character Orthographic Sketches

From one project and onto the next. I've finished my tank and started to get to work on a very different project of producing a cool CG character, Bourbon the Bunny. I had this idea for quite a while but sadly I never got to develop it through out my time at university. Nevertheless I've come back to it now and I will be working on him during my down time. The aim of this project is to take something from nothing all the way until completion. Moving through the rigging/ texturing/ uving/ modelling processes one after each other (whereas my most recent projects in Max have been aimed at developing certain sections of my skill set). I'm very excited to start modelling Bourbon and start to translate the rest of my knowledge in Maya to 3DS Max. Without further a do here are the orthographic sketches I decided to draw by hand. 

Fig.1 Front Orthographic.

Fig.2 Side Orthographic