Be PREPARED

... for the second round of Rapid Prototype Production!

This time around, the theme of the game is "storytelling". This time around, I'm grouped up with Gordon, Jonathan, Samantha, and Larry. Cue the pressure of having three artists on one team. I won't say much about the game so far since everything is still in development. I will say that I'm very confident in my group and our idea!  Our designs and in-progress assets are looking good so far. ♥

an accurate depiction of the week to come.

This week in Drawing Fundamentals: SILHOUETTES. Whiiiich is pretty self-explanatory. Admittedly, it's something I need to get myself in the habit of doing before I devote time to a full character design. It certainly helps me see -- very early on -- if the shapes are really going to work or not.  Our homework assignment for this week was to make silhouette designs for assets that might/could be used in our second RPP game -- which was pretty cool! I approached it trying to think of characters/props/environments/mounts/etc. we could have used if we had the time to make more levels. I'm still not entirely sure how to do environmental silhouettes for non-man-made environments, and Google didn't seem to know all that much about it either.

some character silhouettes!

aaaaand some props & mounts. 

my environments are hideous so i left them out.

Oh! And for last week: our homework was to do two drawings of different compositions. One had to be iconic and the other could be any composition we would like (I chose the L composition).

i should really get back to drawing more men.

For 2D/3D, our task was to model, UV, sculpt, and texture a fish then import it to the unreal engine. Naturally, I went for the cute kissy face fish. This model was a lot easier than the canon. I didn't have as much of a problem with creating the actual maps (though, I ran into a bug on Maya where I couldn't go to the "tangent space normals" option to apply the maps). A chunk of my time was spent attempting to resolve the seam down the middle of the fish where the maps were joined. It's definitely less pronounced on the low res mesh, but still noticeable. The frustrating part is that it's completely absent on the smooth preview and the meshes with way more geometry so it leaves me uncertain on how to fix this problem. That aside, my paint-splatter fish ended up looking really good! I think I'm slowly getting the hang of this process.

glubglubglub.

As for Common Core art, we're working on digital sculpting. Fortunately, I've already had some practice with this with the 2D/3D assignments. One of the reasons I did the fish assignment was to use it as an exercise before I did this one.

carl has seen some stuff.

I also worked on doing some painting in Zbrush. It's safe to say that I prefer Mudbox exponentially for creating textures -- there's just way more tools on it to get a more detailed paint. Carl came out pretty well, though! [ tooting of own horn in the distance ]

Aaaaand lastly, for animation we have been working on adding overlap & following through to our walk cycle. As fun as this is, the thing I'm having trouble with is making the tail to the hat more lively. Originally, I wanted to make it bounce with each step but it ended up moving waaaaay to unnaturally fast (this is just a 29 frame walk cycle, after all). I wasn't too fond of it, so I had it sway back and forth like a ponytail would. I might be making changes to this in the future until I'm completely happy with it. The walk looks better, though!

And that's it for now. :D