Queens Project - Week 6

Another week goes by. Apparently we’ve altered the level design quite a bit now. It’s now got some scaffolding and a basement area for going up and of course down. I think it’s a good thing, because this way there’s a bit more freedom of movement, were as at first there wasn’t that much. We’re halfway through this project now and the deadline for assets is coming up shortly.

In terms of Art direction, we’re just going for the realistic look of everything looks like and then at the end we can edit stuff in a 20 day period from March the 1^st until the 20^th. I’ve done some more assets now, however I’m going back to edit a few and push the triangles up to smooth out some of them. Because of the new areas in the level there’ll be some extra assets, so it’s one of them things were you start making something, new things pop up, and change of plan/action is required.

I was heavily criticised for taking a step back and saying what I thought was wrong about the level and everyone was complaining that the first three weeks would be wasted if it changed. The problem is there was still 2 months at the time to change stuff and now halfway through we’re changing stuff. Honestly we got a lot more time then we think, because basically all you need to do is spend a short amount of time re-planning and then cracking on with your plan. The assets, you can literally have them all modelled in a day if you put your mind to it and then take a week probably for texturing, but with all the change going, more concepting has to be done taking up time.

I think in level production, once you get to the halfway point you have to certain on what you’re going for, you must be nearing the finishing point to allow time for testing as some things could take a while to fix. The assets, well there isn’t as many as I thought there was going to be, and you can edit them, scatter them around the level and change some for example a bin, one will be standing up, one could be laying on its side, the texture colours could be changed to break up repetition. All video game level are made up of asset repetition, so once they are done then you can use them do make alternating rooms etc.

I’m going to write another entry shortly on assets etc with my thoughts on them and level design.

Black Hawk Down - Revisited

Last time I talked about Black Hawk Down I remember talking about how Ridley Scott designed each scene in a very simple manner. He basically planned them all with line drawings and they matched the actual outcome in the film itself. For example the scenes with the helicopters landing the scenes are so accurate to the art work.

The colour palette (which is always something I like to talk about) is very dull, but not in a bad way. I think the dull greens, browns, oranges, greys and blues add to the feeling of war. I mean let’s face it, it would be very weird seeing beautifully colourful war scenes, so it’s as if because of the genre of the film and the story they almost forced to use a dull colour palette? I mean the Artists and directors can do whatever they want but with this type of film, colourful is not the first thing that comes to mind with war. You expect it to be strong, emotional experience with the fear of war because these are men in the army, in Somalia in the middle of a civil war. It’s dangerous and the colours of it suggest that, which is done very well.

I’ve noticed how in quite a lot of films, green, browns and yellows are used quite a lot especially green. It’s used everywhere; with this film being one long drawn out battle that lasts overnight you see a lot of green almost giving a perspective of the soldiers themselves as a sort of night vision look.

The environments are something else as well, set in Somalia the colours tend to be tones of orange, brown and the odd red thrown in the blend. It’s very dull. A lot of the buildings are broken and there’s rumble everywhere giving you a sense of what it would be to be there. It also says it’s very bare, abandoned, poor, lonely, unsafe (obviously) and just a horrible place and on top of all that there’s a civil war going on. The environment speaks for itself; you don’t need a story to tell you about it, you know everything there is to know just by looking at the settings.

The one scene where the soldier is hurt but to make him better they must cause him more temporary pain by going into one of his wounds. It can be quite distressing watching it but it shows the pain and brought about by war, they really captured the torcher of the war and portrayed it well throughout, it’s all done through the script and art direction throughout, cause for me the colours really add to the sadness and there isn’t really a lot of moments when they try to break up the seriousness of it, because they simply can’t joke around that much.

To sum up it’s a great film, very well thought out in terms of Art direction, story line, environment and costumes. The main character is 18 years old which just tells you something about how scary that can be, going into a war at such a young age. 

Queens Project - Week 5

Continuing with asset making this week. I’ve made a few small assets but one thing I think we’re still trying to come to terms with is our triangle budget. In the asset list we’ve all been assigned an equal amount of assets and a triangle budget prediction of how many each one with take. I find that some of my assets for example a clock and a first aid box take up way more than 60-70 triangles if you want them to have smooth edges. I know UDK can handle thousands of triangles but I’m trying to keep as low poly as possible. I found with a low triangle budget for the first aid box for example I can’t smooth off the edges as they are in my reference photos and also the handle for it is a 4 sided diamond/square shaped because of it being so limited, I couldn’t round off the edges and smooth them out. It’s becoming a slight problem the thing is to add more geometry and end up with something a bit more detailed and smoothed but at the expense of a few more triangles.

Honestly we’re in the process of just making assets this month, once done the texturing will commence, I’m struggling a little with understanding some of the assets at the moment, but if I manage the time they’ll hopefully should be done with enough time to texture them.

We’re at a point where e can populate the rooms and areas of the level with our assets to see what they look like as a prototype; it’s all a matter of time for now.

Year 2 - Week 15 - February 6th - 11th

Continuing with our masters project this week, in which I’ve decided that upon having to scan in our hands and being asked to colour pick from them I decided why not draw my hand as my masters study?

I was going for the style of Dali (my favourite master). Upon more research he used long bold brush strokes to make objects and such to have a soft and light surface. I particularly used this technique in my work and I’m very happy with the outcome. It didn’t take that long to make and it work very well I thought. I’ve always been interested in his work and now I’ve really gotten to soft of try out his technique/style. Also he’d use harder shorter brush strokes on things that would appear to have a harder surface.

 Attempt at emulating Dali.

I found that the traditional version was a more difficult just for the simple fact that it’s traditional! Meaning that the colour palette is limited where as using a tablet and Photoshop you’ve got an almost unlimited supply of colours thus making it easier to seek out the one you want I very much enjoyed this project, as much as I did last year. Last year I also painted the back of my hand as personal work, I thought it turned out well but this time it turned out better. I used a basically 2 brushes using oil on canvas. I think oil on canvas works so much better than trying to use water colours or acrylics, simply put I think it’s easier to layer over because the paints are so soft or in other words they don’t dry out easily an then making it harder to layer over or remove colours if you don’t want them. Like in Photoshop you have CTRL + Z to undo anything you don’t want where as traditional it’s a little harder.

Traditional version. Tried to make it look soft. *Note* this is a photo, a scanned version will follow soon once the paint dries.

Anyway in both practises I used big brush strokes and smaller ones where needed. In Photoshop I used the soft edged brush to create a gradient effect seen in most of Dali’s work. Dali would have hard edges around objects and usually soft shadows. Using darker tones of skin I was able to add shadows and highlights seen on my hand. It’s not an entirely accurate perfect mage of my hand but it’s the style that we’re going for. I found that even in my self portrait work that brown is basically the colour of the shadows created by light on the skin. Thus it is a mixture of red, peaches/pinks, yellow ochre, brown and blue and maybe a bit of orange pretty much what makes up flesh tones.

Dali's soft and hard approach.

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~djbromle/modern04/nayefa/index.htm

In life drawing this week, some of us were experiment with paints however I feel that it’s a bit too much. Though I know that whenever you paint digitally of traditionally you should always put a base layer down which is what I’ve always done and build up layers of colours on top of each other, It’s no doubt that it’s the best way to do it. When I say that life drawing is a bit much, I mean that the pace we’re expected to work at is too much, 40 minutes on a painting isn’t long enough for me, I like to be accurate and ‘perfect’ about my work and I can only work at my own pace which is why most of my life drawing work looks very odd, inaccurate or unfinished, if given about 40 minutes for sketching I can get the body down how I want it and maybe find enough time for rendering but I like to take my time, I’m trying to become faster however with still life etc which may take me about 10-20 minutes...

1. Sketch, 2. Base Layer, 3. Adding shadows and highlights, 4. Adding tones, 5. Applying more colours, 6. Finished outcome.

Session 9

First thing I can say about Session 9 is the environment and its colours! Greens, yellows, blues and browns everywhere. I thought the yellows and browns worked together really well, they are like darker tones of yellow making these brown tinted colours that blend quite nicely, almost like a bleached colour palette again. Remind me of the colours in L.A. Confidential. So it’s about these guys working on a huge house but strange things start to happen (like in any horror movie), the whole building however has this green glow to it, it reminds of the queens building we are working on now, it doesn’t look like it’s got a green glow to it but taking reference photographs the lighting gives off a luminous green glow, as if it’s been coated in acid or some sort of chemical making it appear more strange and scary? It’s ironic how we’re turning that place into a survival horror…

Anyway I distinctly remember that in the first few scenes of the movie the guys were sitting outside for a while, I noticed how the saturation was very high, coming back to the film Paris Texas though in the outside areas of that film like in the desert for example it is shot just how it is, very bright colour palette all of the time. And this movie being set in America you’d expect the same thing. I think that the house is basically used to break up the high saturation scenes because it’s suppose to be a horror movie, so basically you don’t want to be outside in the colourful daylight all the time else it would take away the genre?

There were a mixture of different scenes I can remember and the colour palette changed quite often. When they were inside the building the colours seemed to be green/yellow and different light and darker tones. The scenes in the basement were basically just black, but one thing that I thought was a bit of a cliché was that the youngest worker has a phobia of the dark… I mean the way they just put it out there like that was very bold and I thought: ‘okay it’s a horror movie and they’ve given the youngest worker (character) a fear of the dark’ I don’t know, personally I feel that was a bit ridicule especially when they made him go down to the basement on his own in pitch black darkness!

Besides that I thought it was a great movie, once last thing would be the scenes where the main character is listening to the session tapes. Basically at them points the viewer is trying to listen to what is being said so at the same time (because movies are meant to be watched) they trying to make use of the scenery and the characters facial expressions which sort of comes make to our character projects when we were experimenting with facial expressions, you sort of see how important it is especially in a horror movie.

Also the scenes outside you can see the grass, the trees and house it’s self again using bright (when in daylight) and darker tones in the overcast scenes. Then you’ve got either the yellows lighting from the sun or the sky which is blue. There’s also that bit of red that blends in with some of the browns in some shots (and when there’s gore). The colour palette reminds consistent throughout and makes use of them in every shot. The characters themselves remind mysterious like the house itself and the tapes and your finding out different things about them from start to end.

Queens Project - Week 4

Again nothing to really say about this week, just continuing making assets. A few things have been changed, like that ladder I had a problem with, but I don’t want to get into that, in fact I’d rather apologise for everything that’s gone on in the past week,  don’t want this blog to turn into a huge rant, though it does seem it quite a lot, it’s suppose to be critical studies.

I finished some of my assets:

Bridge.

T-Junction Bridge.

We set up a small network on drop box to share files, though it doesn’t take .max files I’ve heard? So everything has to be saved as .ASE to work in UDK. I still have barely touched UDK, it’s not as hard to understand as say 3DS Max for the first time however, because I never really used a piece of 3D software before Max it was difficult to figure stuff out but now I’m really comfortable with it.

I’m still understand scale in Max, I’ve been told that I need to make sure things are real life size, in terms or height, width, scale, proportion etc . Honestly there really isn’t anything to say, the deadline for making our top priority asset has passed so everything is starting to come together. This month will be the biggest month on our Project no doubt, a whole month to get assets finished in which we’re leaving 20 days from the beginning of March to edit, add extras and sort out bugs.

Priority 2 & 3 asset deadline: February 29^th!

Year 2 - Week 14 - January 30th - February 3rd

I want to start off this entry with a question that was asked about the way using an easel in life drawing. Basically I was told twice that turning the easel right, to support my right handed use is better, I already know that but honestly I don’t believe in that, I’ve always found it easier to turn it left to support me ‘cause I’m right handed, for a one or two reason. The first being that even from being a child I’ve always found it easier to even write by turning the paper to the left side because it makes way to rest the right arm on the desk and find more comfort in it. Secondly my reason is that when I want to use my pencil for measuring I’m always having my right arm stretched across from me (which hurts) and finding myself moving around which can alter my drawing from standing in a different position thus causing the shape to differ from where I’m looking at it.

Like this but imagine him using the other hand... yeah...

So anyway it was time for our Masters project again, now it’s slightly different from last year in which we must draw an image in the style of a Master, digitally and traditionally. I’ve been looking at the style of Dali as he is my favourite master. I’ve taken a liking to his work for a few years now, it all started when I first saw the Persistence of Memory (which is my favourite of his work). I think it’s great how he used his own fears and confusions etc in his work. The objects and scenery in his work would symbolise something about him, like the melting clocks for example, he didn’t like time passing and fading away. The surrealist movement allows you to be more creative in your work, Imagineering if you like, and creating things of symbol or scenes from your dreams. The connection between the dream world and surrealist movement was something I studied back in college. It’s a very unique movement, I want to try the style of Dali but also I may try a different style for this exercise.

The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali

Last year I looked at Picasso, simply because he was someone who I never studied before, I looked into his style and ended up with a self portrait of myself using bold brush stroke and mixtures of colours for it. This time I want do something different, but using a tablet pen is much different to using a brush and it’s interesting to see a comparison between the two.

I created his ‘Seated Woman With Wrist Watch’ as a part of last year’s project, it went well though it was slightly not as accurate. Not entirely sure upon the image I’m going for, I need to give it more thought as of now and the group project work is getting in the way of A LOT of visual design stuff!

My re-creation.

I believe there is a japanese inspiration to this to, notice the black outlines?

On the other hand I’ve been continuing with my still life etc. Also I just want clear up something about a personal project I had been working on in the last semester (the park) I’ve binned it basically, because I was Imagineering and at the last assessment I was told off for lack of detail, and the references I took won’t add up to some things I had designed and modelled…

My Picasso style self portrait, I admit I REALLY could of done better...

I’m a bit confused on where the course stands between Imagineering and modelling from real life reference? I look at some of the 3^rd years ideas and just wonder how they get away with somethings?...