3D ART: Assignment 9 - Cannon Proxy Model

 This week we moved on from our crates and into cannon-ville! To start I compiled references of the kind of cannon I wanted to make. 

I want to try my hand at modeling and texturing something more realistic and ornate so I'll be using the top cannon reference as my base and using the more ornate cannons as a guide when I begin sculpting. 

Proxy sculpt:

Smoothed.

I want this cannon to sit in an overgrown, lush environment because I'd love to experiment with creating moss materials. To start I created some wood planks, grass, and ferns to populate the scene.

From here, I took my proxy into UE4.

Lotsa cannon bois.

2D ART: Assignment 7 - Final Painting

 The end of boot camp is here! I'm so happy to have survived and specialized but I must admit I'm a little melancholy about seeing common art go. I will miss sharing these awesome critique days with my classmates - it felt like a mini Christmas every time getting to see the cool art my peers have made week after week. Alas!

This week I was feeling kind of spooky, so I decided to make something dark and intense. It took me a while to think of something but once this image was finally in my head, it struck so hard and so clearly. I immediately put together an inspiration board to help keep that vision focused. 

This board features art by Maxim Verehim on Twitter, and Simon Stalenhag. The bottom two images are from the Alien film set. 

With these pictures in mind, I roughed my piece out in Maya through modeling and lighting. 

                                            This is the shot I took into Photoshop to paint over. 

                                                                                Final piece!

                                                                            Close-up.

3D ART: Week 7 - Texturing in Substance Painter

 So this week I tried my best to wrangle the UVs into cooperating with me with extremely questionable success, but I did it. With them done, I finally was able to bake my high poly sculpt onto my low poly model in Substance Painter. 

From there I began to paint on my model. I wanted to make an old, paint worn crate inspired off of distressed crates I found on Google. 

Here's what I ended up with. I've been calling it Elsa.

Color and normal maps.

From there I finally let this girl go into UE4 and she looks great!

                          Finally I took her back into Maya for a good ol' fashioned beauty shot!

2D ART: Assignment 6 - Perspective

 This week we focused on one, two, and three point perspective. To practice, we had to create our own city model kit composed of 4 buildings but I took it into another direction (with permission!) and went small. With all our pieces made, we had to set up a scene and take shots from all three perspectives.

                                                                One point perspective.

                                                                
                                                                  Two point perspective.

Three point perspective.

I decided to go with the three point perspective and took it along with several other render passes into Photoshop to push it as an illustration. Here's the final result.

3D ART: Assignment 6 - Sculpting in zBrush

 This week I got my ass kicked by UVs and it all started because I wanted my crate to look busted up. Here's the crate I took into zBrush.

Here's my crate in zBrush.

Aaand here's my crate after I went to town on it in zBrush. I'm pretty happy with this as a first real sculpting attempt because it didn't come out super blobby. I learned a lot and I'm excited to keep learning the tools in this program!

With the sculpt done and exported out in high and low res, I returned to Maya to create a low poly version of the model to bake my sculpt onto. Unfortunately I started running into issues and couldn't figure out the best way to UV unwrap my low poly model so I couldn't take it into Substance this week. To be continued...!

2D ART: Assignment 5 - Use of Composition

 This week we focused on learning various types of compositions and were given a Maya file full of assets to build a scene with. From there, we're basically supposed to implement the techniques we used in assignment 3 to create a totally new illustration. 

After messing around with my scene for a bit, I finally settled on a dramatic city invasion scene with a messenger that made it just a bit too late. I messed around lighting and materials to get a better sense of value and also with different camera angles to see what looked best compositionally. 

Originally I was going to run with this but I stumbled upon a clearer and more appealing shot during a really helpful conversation with my classmate Nitin. Thanks, Nitin!

After I got my shot lined up, I took some render passes (toon material for lines, object render, beauty render, and lighting render) into Photoshop to fiddle with and paint over. I tried to keep the rule of thirds in mind while doing this but I think I ended up with a hodgepodge of rules. Next time..!