Falling into the Swing

With my second week of FIEA reaching its end, I'm slowly beginning to get used to things! The change of scenery and being this immersed in the medium is still a little strange to me. My undergraduate university wasn't that serious about its Digital Arts program, so this is definitely a magnificent change of pace. I already feel like I'm learning a great deal from the faculty and we have barely scratched the surface. 

The beginning of the second week he beginning of the second week also marked the start of RPP, or "Rapid Prototype Production", where we spend two weeks making a small Flash game. I'll be talking more about that in the future. At the moment, I've been working through my homework for my other classes so I could focus my attention mainly on my team's RPP game.

For my Animation class (which I adore), our homework was to animate a bouncing ball. I've had an intermediate amount of experience animating with Maya in the past. Nothing wrong can come out of going over the basics of Animation! With each passing class, I'm growing more and more excited to learn about this medium. This'll likely be where I specialize!

Last week, I modeled a cannon for my 2D/3D class. This week, I had to go through the ... less-than-time-efficient process of mapping out UV's for the same model. My being currently inept with UV mapping might have had something to do with me taking forever on this. Maybe. This was my first time successfully mapping out a UV for an object that wasn't as simple as a square or a circle. Needless to say, I'm quite proud of that accomplishment!

if you look closely, you can see the stains from my blood and tears.

It's not quite perfect, but it's functional! So that's what matters right now. Our next step was importing that cannon into Zbrush to give the model some more detail. If you thought Maya was great, Zbrush is on another level. This was definitely the most fun part of the entire process. Digital sculpting is something I'm going to be practicing with a lot.

this would have taken me years on maya, holy cow.

The topic of the Common Core art class this week was concept design (exciting!). We went over concept art, design processes, and art examples of great designers. The gist of our assignment was to redesign a Nintendo character, create a model sheet, a colored drawing, and an environment. My partner (my sister, k'doy) and I opted for Princess Peach after a less-than-successful go-ahead with Kirby. orz. My duty was the character-related stuff, while she's working on the environments! After making a few silhouettes in my sketchbook, we opted for an arachnid-inspired Princess Peach.

it doesn't resemble her in the slightest until i add the colors, huh? LOL

Our working knowledge of Princess Peach is that she's Mario's love interest and a damsel-in-distress. We didn't want to go the path of just shoving Peach in a different environment and changing her outfit. Thaaat wouldn't have been too fun. We ended up picking that spider-lady silhouette and rolling with that because it's so ... utterly not Peach in the slightest. The only thing reminiscent of her is probably the dulled color palette and the crown & gloves.

 Is it a successful design? More than likely not. Was it fun to try out for her? Hell yeah! What first designs are successful, really? After seeing it drawn out and colored, we probably would have tried out a few more routes before deciding on something final. 

On top of all of this, my other coursework included some much-unwanted math for Technical Art. Yes, I certainly fulfill the expectation that artists aren't particularly skilled at advanced math or coding. I AM NOT ASHAMED.  

AND NOW. I can march on, full speed ahead, to working on our first RPP game of the program!