Over the summer I've been practising my drawing skills. I know that character drawing is one of my weaker areas so I have been creating splotches and random shapes and attempting to fit character faces into those shapes. I feel this has helped to create slightly more expressive characters.
Some modelling and rendering practise using Maya and Pixar's Renderman over summer. I know this needs a lot more work to appear realistic so I will continue to play around with the textures and shaders.
A selection of drawings and a painting from my last two lessons.
We used the technique of boxes and sketching out through using the edge of a piece of charcoal again which I found really helpful to get back into drawing. I think I might keep using this technique when posing characters.
Some longer poses which I preferred as I had the time to add detail. I also enjoyed working on coloured paper to work with contrasting tones.
One of our life drawing lessons gave us the change to practise painting in acrylics. I haven't painted in a really long time and found it quite difficult to get the grips of it, however I'm quite pleased with the result. I think it needs some work to improve my painting skills and my painting speed by blocking out the different shades really quickly.
After testing how long it would take to render out a shot without fog we realised it would take too long to render if we were to use it throughout the whole animation. As well as not having enough time the fog seems to be creating more noise and although there is a way to reduce this it would increase the render time even more.
Using the technique of drawing in boxes was quite helpful as it made sure we could keep the full figure within the area. We then had to make the figure touch two sides of the box which I think helped to prevent from drawing too small.
We then applied this drawing technique to a full page drawing as well as a new technique of using the edge of a piece of charcoal to capture the overall position of the figure. We then went in and added detail once we had rough markings outlining the figure. I found this really helpful as it allowed me to lightly sketch up the form and position before I began drawing.
We then applied both these techniques to portraits of each other later on. I don't think it worked as well as it did when drawing the figure, but I also think I need to work portraits more.
After noticing a problem with the floor, I attempted to create a curved plane to hide the wall. This still showed a clear line on the horizon which wouldn't disappear when batch rendering.
I then created a loft using the CV curve tool which created a gradient backdrop so the wall or floor is not at all visible.
There is still a lot of noise in these renders which is hopefully the last problem I need to solve before I can begin animating.
After testing glass, metal and diffuse on spheres under a spotlight we realized we needed fog to show the cone of light (volumetric lighting). I tested some spotlights using fog but the render seemed to be taking a while. I had another attempt at creating fog with the robot character imported into the scene to see how long one frame would take. Using maya fluids to create a 3D container I filled it with a gradient and decreased it in density to show a subtle cone.
I tried a second test using a cube and Rendermans Pixar volume and decreased density float to again show a subtle outline of light. This took about the same length of time however when a camera move intersected the Pixar volume, the fog was no longer visible which is shown in the second clip below.
Camera move rendered with renderman moving through the fog using maya fluids.
Camera move rendered with renderman moving through the fog using Pixar volume.
This would prevent us from creating close up shots of the character.
As well as this we noticed that the edge of the floor was visible in batch renders but not single frame renders. There was also a noise problem when rendering out a batch render which I need to try and fix before we reach the rendering stage of production for this project.
We began with some quick 30 second rough gesture sketches to quickly get down the shape of the model using lines of action. I found this really helpful to put the full figure in an interesting pose onto the page really quickly.
We then had a go at drawing the model as though it was drawing frames of an animated character.
We also tried blind contour drawing which I thought was amusing when I looked back at my paper. I don't think I've quite grasped this one yet but I'm sure more practise looking away from my page will help me to draw better. We also did a collaboration drawing where we drew on each others drawings around the room which I found fun as I could see where I would make changes on other drawings as well as understand how I could improve my own drawing.
After drawing the model in full for 15 minutes we had a go at drawing a caricature. I found the change of drawing realistically to stylised quite difficult but hopefully with more practise I can improve my stylised drawings.
Our final drawing used black paper and focussed on the light in the room and how to create the character using tonal value rather than drawing an outline of the figure. I quite liked this exercise as it helped me to see the contrast in the lighting around the room. I think if I were to have another attempt at this exercise I would use more white as I did in the previous session and work into it with charcoal.
We had another go at drawing the model in two halves this week, I think I still struggle with drawing this was as I can't get the proportions right.
After drawing the model in separate halves, coming back to drawing the full figure on one sheet I was able to draw the model in better proportions. I used a new technique on black paper where I filled in using white chalk and went back into the drawing with charcoal to show the shadows and darker contours. I really like the effect it creates.
The robot model for our eco project is to be rigged and textured by someone else in our group which is why I have made sure that my outliner is kept neat and everything is named. I find it helpful for myself to keep everything in order.
I've been messing about with the robot trying to create some eyelids and eyes that would suit our robot - TX392. I'm finding it quite difficult to find eyes that match and aren't too realistic but I guess the light that's meant to be in the eyes can be added later on which will make them look like robot eyes.
For our Eco brief we decided to have a robot character who explains the changes that occur in the future. I was given the turnaround for the character which I have attempted to model in Maya.
(Turnaround and design by Amy Lucas)
I think my model has turned out quite well as I have put what I've learnt about modelling from last year, the third years and online tutorials into practice for this model. The one thing this model is missing is the turbine on the chest which is shown in the character turnaround.
For the crew project the third years gave me the opportunity to have a go at character modelling. I found this challenging but fun and I think I enjoy box modelling. From this task I learnt how to create human eyes, an overall character shape, how helpful edge loops are at defining areas of a character, how to join limbs onto the main body and much more. Before modelling this character I used a tutorial on pluralsight by Justin Marshall to learn the basics of creating a character in maya which was a little space man. I found this tutorial really helpful as I could understand how a character was built up from just cubes.
I followed this turnaround that another member of Dino Diner designed. I think my model came pretty close to the design however I need to finish sculpting this character in mudbox which is something I am currently working on.
I think I have improved from my modelling in semester one when I had only just begun modelling props. I made a couple of mistakes with edges and edge loops when I began as I deleted a lot of them which meant it wouldn't be possible to add textures later on. I had a second attempt at modelling the same chopping boards which were much better meshes.
We also had a tutorial held by the third years to learn about how to model and the best ways to go about modelling. In this tutorial we modeled a torch which I'm quite happy with as it helped me to understand modelling a bit better.
