Anatomy and Proportion

This week in our 2D work we were taught how we can distort basic rules of proportion to create humanoid creatures. Naturally for games design, this meant creating Elves and Dwarves.

My Elf didn't really work out as I wanted it. I got the height right (9 heads tall as opposed to the standard 7-8), but it doesn't have the usual slender profile that is indicative of Elves.

My Dwarf, however, I am very happy with. I got the short, stocky look I wanted, though he might have looked better with an axe than a sword.

This was merely the task for the lesson though, and the task for outside of class was to practice our anatomical drawing. I've never done much of this, which is probably poor form for a previous Fine Art student. I've had my fair share of drawing skulls though, so I tried to focus on the bone structures of the torso and the limbs.

And finally, a front, back, and side view of the whole skeleton. I've tried to capture the shading of some of the more difficult areas in the back view.

Animating the Fish

The fish that we made for a first Maya assignment has had an upgrade! And now it was time to learn animation.

The task starts with constructing the skeleton. Here is the main body of the rig.

Then comes the bones for the pectoral fins. This whole part of the task was relatively simple but good fun.

Here is the finished skeleton. This is the stage where we learnt about the "Paint Skin Weight" tool - using a brush to adjust which areas are effected by a joints movement.

Here is the tool in action. 

Once that task was complete, it was time to start animating. I set the animations of the body to occur at the beginning, middle, and end of the scene, to get a smooth speed and look. The pectoral fin animations occur once every 10 frames.

Tanks

Tank assignment this week - a welcome change from character design!

After a few weeks of playing Destiny and Battlefield 4, I figured I'd like to go with a sci-fi style tank. I also wanted to follow in the footsteps of Aaron Beck again, as I love his industrial military concepts.

Here's my jumping off point:

I also did a few doodles in Photoshop, as I wanted to push myself and do as much of this assignment in the programme as possible.

I still have issues sketching out initial designs though, so I resorted to hand drawing line art and scanning/photographing it to then paint over in Photoshop.

So here is the first tank - a spider tank drone with a rail gun attached to the turret.

Line art.

Final product.

I really enjoyed doing this and I taught myself a lot about layering and shading. However, when I copied and pasted the front leg to the rear I forgot to adjust the shading! A daft mistake, and one I won't make again!

And here's my second design.

Line art.

Final product.

This one is a little less futuristic, even if it is a hover tank. It's based on a Soviet Anti-Aircraft tank from the 60s - I really like the aesthetic of Soviet tanks and I'm not quite sure why.

Petrol Pump

Or Gas Pump, if you're of an American persuasion.

I started with a single cube, and beveled, smoothed and indented accordingly.

Here it is with a UV map. Unfortunately it wasn't perfect but I adjusted it later on, after yelling at it a lot.

And here is the final product - it's not quite as I hoped, as I had a lot of problems with making the texture in Photoshop, and then the Normal Maps would cover up the colour completely. I'm going to retry this, and post the results accordingly.

Insectoids

Another week, another assignment - I give you the planning stages of my insectoids!

Oh look, a mood board..

And a page of initial studies - just getting a feel for drawing the limbs and heads; some colour patterns too.

Here's an initial play around - inspired by Portal 2, I give you Greg the Mantis Man:

This isn't really what I was going for at first, but the idea popped into my head and was too good to resist drawing. He's actually changed my idea as to my final design, which may very well be Greg riding something spidery into battle.

Now we get to the spiders:

I wanted to give the impression that these have evolved to be the top predator and dominate their environment. I image them to be giant and covered in carapace armour and camouflaged.

I also had an idea for a flying variation, because screw you.

In the end I went for a more centaur like creature, mixing the Mantis and Spider together.

Texturing the Turret

Took a while to get a hang of what I was doing, but yesterday I learned how to do normal mapping, occlusion mapping, and texturing!

Here is the turret with it's high-poly model layered on top:

Then using xNormal, we learned to map our objects. Here are my Normal:

And Occlusion maps:

I opened the Occlusion map in Photoshop, and added a rusted metal plate texture, and low opacity rectangles to highlight some of the vents:

And here is the final product!

Despite the difficulty I found doing this exercise, I actually started enjoying myself once I got into the swing of things. I'm a lot less worried about having to do modelling in a game of my own making now!