Saturday 25 December 2010

Merry Christmas!

Hey guys, just thought since it is now that time of year to wish all of you a very happy Christmas and a happy new year. Hope all of you are spending it with your families and are more than happy on this wonderful time of giving, I know that sounds cheesy and everything but I really do mean that and that's what Christmas is really about. Any worries or stresses you have forget about them and just enjoy being with the people you love, your friends, your families and everything Also I thought I'd play for all of you a few of my favourite Christmas songs, this however is the last blog report I'm posting up for for the year but don't despair for I will be continuing in the new year. Anyway have a wonderful day and god bless us, everyone!






FS Santa Claus is coming to town
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Thursday 16 December 2010

Digital Environments-Day 10

Hey guys, this is day 10, and I have something quite cool to show you tody. I didn't think I could do it at first but I finally have, I have made a lioness move. At first I didn't think I could do but after having some help from my mates in the group I was able to make a piece of animation and I have to say I'm quite proud of it but I do believe that I can do better on something else someday. The character model you saw in the last blog report was modelled by Perri and was rigged by James and I feel very honoured to of made their model come to life and I think it's very great achievement especially when I thought I couldn't do it. Anyway here it is, hope you like it and talk to you again soon.

Wednesday 15 December 2010

Digital Environments-Day 9

Hey guys, this is day number nine, but I'm sure you already know that from the title above. Forgive there but today I have to take on a whole new task and am a little bit dreading it. I was going and still am going to do environmental animation I think, but still nothing has been done and we need to get this project done for good and from the sound of our leader Gary.... fast! So that means I can't wait to do my environmental animation and I have to do something now. I have to do some proper animation and that's something I am dreading and have not been prepared for, but Gary needs me to do it and I really have to do to get it done and that means I now have to put my skills to the test and really create a worthy good piece of animation. So wish me luck, what I will have in this report is the model I have to animate of a lioness and also a few videos of actual lionesses to get the feel. Soon I'll get back to you when I have done the final product. See ya later.



Tuesday 14 December 2010

Digital Environments-Day 8

Hey guys, this is day number eight and no I haven't begun doing the environment animation yet for the project but should be soon because this week it's out last week before we all break up for christmas this year. But anyway in the meantime I've taken the opportunity to build some scenery pieces for the Digital Environments piece. I've made three rock formations that will be placed into our Serengeti landscape. What was done was Gary our leader, downloaded a rock from our A-drive folders where we keep a lot of the stuff we've done on this projects. Anyway so we downloaded a rock that I then took and modelled into three different rock formations that will soon be placed into our Serengeti world. So here they are, hope you like them and I shall get back to you soon, take care.

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Thursday 9 December 2010

Industry Exercises-Day 8

Hey guys, here's more progress;

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After making the hand, we then had to sort out the fingers. By doing this we selected three new polygons and extruded them three times to make the fingers.

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And this is close to what hopefully will be the final product.

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No watch the magic unfold as we created the other side of the body. What we did was that we highlighted one half of the body and deleted it. Then as we were left with the good half, the one that had the arm and the leg we then duplicated that half and....

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Viola!

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We now have a full nine-year-old's body.

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Now we decided to make the face, we made one poly split to the middle of the face and made two poly splits to the side of the head from which we extruded the ears. And made one ear.

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After modelling it a little bit I can tell you all now that this is the final ear.

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Now for the nose, we extruded the spilt polygon once again and pulled it out and modelled it a bit.

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Rotated it up and push it in, moved it up a bit more...

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Made it slightly bigger, pulled it out a tad bit more.

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And this is the final nose.

Wednesday 8 December 2010

Industry Exercises-Day 7

Hey guys, here's more on on the evolution of Billy the Goth in Maya;

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To add fingers to the hand, we split the face of the hand and extruded three new faces to create the fingers. The final result is what you see down below.

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To create the neck which you see here, it was just two extrusions at the top of the body.

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To make the head, it was extruded three times and the vertices were pulled to fill out the rest of the head.

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And now the body, the front vertices in the centre of the body, what we did was just pull the two vertices on the centre of the body outwards to give him more definition.

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And for the back we pretty much did the same thing.

So that's it so far I shall let you know when we've made more progress, me and my trusty companion Perri in the next blog report for the Industry Exercise project and till then, take care.



Tuesday 7 December 2010

Digital Environments-Day 7

Hey guys, on this day number 7 of writing about the Digital Environments project, I present to you a test shot that James has done for the sun set over our own version of the African Serengeti, and in my opinion it looks spectacular here it is, and I'll see you all soon. Here's James giving you a little introduction;

I have done a basic test of a sun setting, using envSky.  It is only very quick but let me know if you think this works well or not.

Industry Exercises-Day 6

Hey guys, this is day six and I have finally begun building my character Billy the Goth in Maya. But first before I explain any further I just want to get something off my chest... I HATE MAYA! I generally hate Maya, it is so complicated and everything, that I don't think I'll ever get the hang of it, even though I've been trying for the last five years now, but what is good about it is that I have help now from my friends and two of my friends have been great help in helping me set this up and they are two members of my Digital Environments project, James Waters and Perri Wheeler, guys if you're reading this I just wanna say thank you so much for helping me out with this. Anyway so what we've done so far is what you'll see in the images down below;

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First of all we placed the design of Billy the Goth, into Maya. By doing this, James helped me import a polygon plane and rotated 90 degrees on the X axis and translated back on the Y axis. We then together created a lambert shade in hyper shade which we then assigned to the front image of Billy. We then applied that texture to the polygon plane.

We then duplicated the polygon plane which I rotated on y axis at 90 degrees and translated back on the x axis. For those of you who don't know much about Maya, the y axis is one of the tools you work with in Maya to help animate the character as well as the x axis.

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To make the body, Perri and I started with one cube and it was a polygon cube. The next step was to extrude the cube to become two cubes. Then we extruded out until we filled the body space. After this we extruded an arm and a leg.

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To make the foot, we had to split the polygon to get a smaller polygon. We then extruded the foot but not too widely and we ended up making a really nice looking shoe.

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Now the hand, we created a slightly smaller polygon face to make the wrist. We then extruded out from it and widened the face as we went along to give the impression of a wider hand.

So that's it so far, most of the stuff I just wrote, I had James and Perri to help me out with that, but at list it will come in handy for when I need to Maya again in the future and I have all this written information up on here and I can look at it to give me a hand when I need to do it on my own. Take care and I shall get back to all of you when I have done more.

Sunday 28 November 2010

Industry Exercises-Day 5

Hey guys, well here it is the final design for Billy the Goth, and the final drawing that I shall make into a model in Maya, which is why I have a model sheet. This is the final drawing mainly because in my mind this is what he should look like. He should be a blonde haired goth because I just thought that idea would be a bit different and the fact that it shows that he hates people but loves insects more shows on his shirt and his face as well with that spider tattoo on his right cheek. It's based on two early designs, one is the favourite one of mine which was the one where he's blonde and has weird eyes and the one where he wore a sleeveless shirt saying 'I hate people' which was a favourite of everyones, and mine as well. But this is the final drawing I shall get back to you when I finally start building the model. Till then see ya later.

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Friday 26 November 2010

Inspirations Pt 9

Hey guys, more music for you now and this is the music from the "Narnia" movies including the latest single from the latest one; "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader". Please enjoy.

















Thursday 25 November 2010

The Animan Kingdom: Concept Art

THE
ANIMAN
KINGDOM
BY GABRIEL BOYLE
CONCEPT ART 




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Wednesday 24 November 2010

Industry Exercises-Day 4

Hey guys, what have for you now finally are the designs for my character Billy, which I'll be very happy to explain to you what went through my mind as I was designing him. Please enjoy the gallery although you won't get to see the designs for Billy right away, you'll see some drawings I've done of regular goths. It's me just testing out and trying to capture the goth look and make sure I get that right for my character.

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These drawings are the first pieces of test drawings I did of goths, just to try and capture the look of them and everything and some of these characters are kids, and since my character Billy is what you'd like to call a kid goth, I have to see what kind of clothes they wear and what they personality is because as you know goth kids act very differently compared to regular kids.

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More test drawings, one of them being the very iconic figure of a goth with wings also if you notice there's a drawing in there of a goth's tattoo which is something I'm very keen to give the character.

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Again more test drawings, I basically drew these to see if the look of any different goth would suit my own goth.

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This one is based on the digital goth painting of actor Steve Buscemi which I collected for research from the internet. I was also thinking about giving Billy the same lip service that goth Steve as I call him here has.

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This is a hand test, I had loads of ideas on how to make this work for my character, I had the idea that maybe his hands would have eyes in the palms like the pale man had in "Pan's Labyrinth". Also I had the idea that he would have a dark poem tattooed on his hand and what I did was I took the poem from one of the actresses' Megan Fox's tattoos because it's the only dark gothic story I know and it's not exactly a poem. The phrase is "There once was a little girl who never knew love until a boy broke her heart". Unfortunately I couldn't fit the whole poem down.


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Again just exploring some more ideas and again trying out with the tattoos.

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More ideas.

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Now this is the first design for Billy I did just exploring the hair and just trying to capture the solitary nine-year-old feel to him.

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This is him with a long leather jacket with loads of belt buckles. Even though it's appropriate to goths, few of my friends thought it was little too extreme for a nine-year-old but the idea is is that he is a very extreme character but I suppose it would be a bit too extreme.

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This is exploring the creepy aspect of him and that's his insect loving self if you notice the little spider that he's stroking. Plus I wanted to give him long streaks of hair and have him wear stocking on his arms like most goths.

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Again exploring his insect loving side and again just trying out some ideas for the hair.

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This is his way of saying leave me alone and just making him a little creepy looking. Looking at this drawing now, I basically see a combination of three characters, Gollum a little bit, Jamie Hewlett esc the way he draws his characters and Neil from "The Young Ones" all to make one goth.

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Again this is exploring his insect loving side only this time he's acting like a insect as he's down on all fours.

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As you can tell from what it says on his t-shirt, this shows that he loves insects more then humans. Also I've done some stuff with the eyes as well, remembering that phrase that the eyes are the windows to the soul. And in this case his eyes show that he's creepy and dead inside when he's around people.

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Gave him sunglasses here but in the end though I decided not to go with this one because he looked at bit like Neo from "The Matrix", but definitely kept the neck collar.


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This is him with a wide shirt with a spider's skull in the centre of it. I decided that I wanted him to wear a gothic shirt that had an insect pattern on it, so I did some research for spider skulls and found one and placed that skull onto what you see here on the centre of his shirt. Also I have cockroach tattoos on the palm of hands here, exploring the tattoo aspect.


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This is a little bit based off of Tobey Maguire when he goes all goth in 'Spider-Man 3". I saw a digital painting of that particular image from the film of him showing his darker side and incorporated that into my design here but changed the image on his shirt.

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This is a little poster idea I had of him showing his shadow of what he is inside and that's an insect-like monster.

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This is him with his ideal mother and father.

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This one I have to say is my favourite because he looks more like a trapped child and plus I've given him different coloured hair. I decided it was interesting if he was a blonde goth which you don't really see a lot of.

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Him jamming on a base guitar.

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This is him with a little bit of a camp rocker kind of look.

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This is the idea of given glasses and making him look a bit more like a creepy scientist. And this could be what he would look like when he's studying his babies.

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This is a creepy one of him as a school boy with spider legs that he's somehow stuck onto his back. This is also a little homage to "The Omen", one of the great classics in horror film history



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Him with a long coat just minding his own business.

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Upper shot of him towering over what could be ants, so this image is from an ant's perspective.

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Him holding a spider and looking at it in his own loving way.

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Shot of him hooded and looking up, giving him that mysterious figure kind of look.

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Finally these are just head shots and what tattoos would suit his face.

Now you've seen the gallery of early sketches, what I'll tell you now is that I decided to make one more design and that design will be the final one. None of these will have that title and there fore be modelled into Maya because to me they don't quite suit to what I now have in mind which I think is perfect, sorry to sound bias. Anyway what I'll be doing is mixing of few of the designs you've seen above and try and make them into one and that one will be what Billy will end up looking like. And that's what you're gonna see in the next blog report.