Week 6: Must Work Work Work!

Week 6: Must! Work Work Work

Howdy Folks

This week on Game art has been much like the last, in that I’ve been working serious hours in order to stay on top of my target and catch up to the pack.

I began this week, finishing modelling and polishing the eagle warrior’s assets in both 3ds max and zbrush. This included cleaning up a number of assets such as the hood and the jewellery pieces. I must say it was fun to create these pieces. It was all coming together.

When I felt satisfied I sent off my progress to my mentor Del for feedback. He noticed that I had made a lot of progress from the last time I sent my work to him, but he urged me to spend more time to focus on the head, hands and feet, but especially the face.

Thus the rest of the day I spent time working into the hands feet and head to make sure I got the sizing and proportions correct.

I’m glad that this shows a great improvement in my abilities to sculpt real human proportions in zbrush.

Del instructed that it would be wise to make sure that I get the main forms of the face right first and the right face proportions before I began adjusting the features to get the right ethnicity. For this I looked at Character artist Ben Davis’ character sculpts for the Batman Arkham games. The characters are very impressive and I like the slight stylization of the characters, even though the game is realistic. Most importantly however, I like how Davis has captured the attitude of the character.

With this in mind I spent the whole of Tuesday paying attention to the face. To allow me to work through the broad strokes methods I kept working on different elements of the face until I was ready to begin adding detail.

I made sure I got the forms of the face right Like Del advised

With this complete, I began moving the features into the right place to get the ethnicity correct.

Here I made sure I had good reference images up, as advised by Del.

and voila:

With the features of the Aztec Eagle done, I then began adding the detail and skin pores to his face using brush alpha brushes. This was fun and a new experience, but I am glad that I was able to try something new and even make the character loo believable, whilst capturing his attitude.

I was able to continue my discussion with Mike Powell about my character art career. Like last week, Mike pointed out that on my journey I might not always be doing realism, furthermore only doing realism might limit me as an artist, so it might be great to experiment with this project.

I took Mike’s advice on board and in my spare time, I began working on a small mini-project. I had the intention of creating a low poly character for a mobile game. I’m thinking about creating a stylized ancient Greek hoplite using games like Dungeon defenders as inspiration.

I’m still working on it as we speak, but the process has definitely been providing a break to my work which has been somewhat therapeutic.

My tutor Emma, was also able to take a look at my work and recommended that I exaggerate the bird skull, in order to make my character to seem more intimidating. Furthermore, she mentioned that the ball on top of his head could be something other than would I had tried to emulate from my reference.

On Wednesday I got the thumbs up from Del about my character, he noticed the improvement on my character from when I showed him at the start of the week.

I’m very proud of my progress, especially with the face, it has always been an area that I felt weak at, and this has proved that I can create realistic characters with believable faces. Additionally, this character would show that I can create royal characters.

With my work approved by my mentor, I began re-topologizing the body using a base mesh I had already created previously. I needed to adjust the shape of the base mesh to match that of the high poly, but once complete I began baking my textures.

There were a number of baking issues and I definitely needed to sort them about before moving on.

I put my work aside for the day and helped my tutors with the potential students for the opening day. It was great to speak to these students, especially as only 3 years ago I was in their position. Afterwards I was able to even meet the Chancellor and Vice Chancellor. As nerve-racking as it was, the experience provided me a great opportunity to speak to them about my work and really show off how far I’ve come.

I spent the rest of my day retopologzing the skirt instead and creating a texture sheet plan for the character.

The week was coming to an end and I was concerned that I was behind on my project targets. Furthermore I was aware that I was rushing my work in order to meet the targets and which meant that the quality of my project was being affected.

I had another go at re-topolgozing the body using Zbrush and 3d coat, and after several iterations I was able to make a proper base mesh for my character.

With the help of my peer Eva, I was able to use 3ds Max to bake the textures on my character using the projection modifier. This was a great help and the baking proved to work. In order to complete this however, I will need to re-visit the unwraps as the seams could be placed better.

This week we had life drawing as well and it was good to spend time improving my character art skills by doing observational drawing. We hadn’t had a session in 2 weeks so it felt good to get back into it again.

It was open day on Saturday and I wouldn’t waste the opportunity to work on my project. I noticed that I had begun to feel exhausted from working at this rate. In truth this is not particularly healthy for me- more to the point I’ve noticed that I have been less focused because I am not spending the time to plan for the next day. Moreover, it has become demoralizing to not meet my target for the week despite my hard-work. Due to my feeling behind the pack I feel obliged to slave drive myself, which is not good and needs correcting.

My resolution for next week is to make sure that I work in a contained amount of hours working to achievable goals, with enough down time to allow me to recover and prepare for the next day. Moreover, I will need to continuously re-adjust my time plans to meet my goals.

Thanks for reading guys

See you next week.