Sculpts n History n Stuff

 Age of Empires

I'm quite interested in history and the origins of stuff.  Its great to help understand why we do "stuff" and puts everything into scale.  Some of the earliest pre-historic stuff is of course "fundamental", but sowed the seeds of what we find pleasing/awful, cool or boring.  It's also worth thinking about the scale of humanity - there are few sculptures/statues/figures which date back to 33,000 BC (around the ice age where everything got a bit fucky).  Some of the earliest carvings are ivory, and of course the materials became more refined as people progressed (there are no new materials since that time, only methods of combining and farming them).  So - even back then art reflected life/society which evolved after humanity got a foothold and didn't have to hunt or hide all the time... which is nice.

Women are from Venus

Venus of Willendorf (limestone/Austria) 20,000 -26,000 BC

Venus De Milo / Aphrodite/Amphitrite (100-200BC Roman, possible replica of Greek 2,000 BC'ish)

The human form is an old favourite - Many pre-historic finds appear to be female effigies that probably represent fertility, life and birth (which is an epidemic now).  Anyways I'm not going to quote a load of books and websites - I want to incorporate the "primitive art" style into my final project - I'm considering making a Colossus, but want it to look prime-evil, almost like the earth made it intentionally, like an ancient guardian or deity.

Empires rise and fall, just like the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, even the English empire has diminished and evolved across the great ocean to create western civilization.  Anyways I was researching a bit while I made this torso - Which is a lost classical example of the evolution in art - from figurative to realistic.  Before a few thousand years ago we only depicted the form in an abstract way, the ancient Greeks are famous for bringing the human form to life - even though the anatomy here looks a bit Anime it was revolutionary - the shifted weight, stepping forward and twisting the torso slightly.  These things we all take for granted now.

Quick sculpt of the "Miletus Torso" currently held at the Louvre (4096px DNS, 4K tris)

I'm a bit busy with course work and you know... life.  But enjoyed discovering a little more about art history.  I made it in a couple of hours - Not really a portfolio piece but good practice at texturing and retopo'ing in Zbrush into UDK.  The material is a variant of an auto-colouring one I made in UDK, notice the different tones?  that's because it changes according to world location.  The texturing is bullshit, and not a real serious stab at replication.  Nowadays if the Louvre wanted a digital record (which they should) it would be done with cameras/scanned.


Here's some speed paints I did in the week

"Tremor"

"Nomad"

Oh yeah - Here's a turn table of my Vehicle so far - Idea stolen from the game "Metal Slug" but is a digger (using a Caterpillar digger for reference so might call it a "Metal Cat?" nah.)

Final Major Project - Colossus research

One of my final major project (FMP) ideas was to create a "colossus".  A colossus is basically a giant being create from inanimate matter.  The game "Shadow of the Colossus" (SotC)created by TeamIco is obviously a great inspiration here.  In SotC each colossus is not only a boss, but also a puzzle - you have to find a way to bring down each one in a different way, which normally involves finding a gap in their attacks and ways to climb towards their weak points so you can maliciously stab them.

I have been doing a little early concepting to get feedback.. One cool thing about SoTC is that they have 16 of 'em - so they have to try and get as much variety as possible, so have a variety of designs and characters, from the standard humanoid biped, through bull-like creations and giant flying thingies.  Watching the above video it's also worth noting they mix up the environments too, giving each battle a "theatre".

Out of these the middle left was most popular - but is very "typical"

I'm not going too far into the design for now, although I have lots of ideas n stuff...   Whats more important is determining what is possible and how to achieve this.

Two ways to approach, many pitfalls

There are two ways to approach this project 

1) as a huge animated character/skeletal mesh in UDK

This will be a highly detailed model made in 3DS Max, but will not take advantage of the UDK engine - being able to construct and combine meshes at a low resource cost.

2) As a living environment, shaped as a sentient creature

This will be constructed in UDK from many meshes modeled in 3DS Max & Zbrush.  This will be extremely hard to animate properly (walk cycle & possibly a wake up), especially with real-time lighting.  This will however leave lots of room for adding detail and different parts (leaning towards this)

I want to have a very cool and impressive end product, and for that I want it to be two things 

1) next gen = Highly detailed and realistic

2) Animated in some way = Everyone uses the net & is best way to impress & increase coverage

Animating a whole level obviously has technical limitations - not just from a hardware point but also in my experience.  I want to do something ambitious and engaging but need to know the limitations.  There are of course ways around animating everything in realtime - even a short scene of massive eyes opening and birds flying away due to vibrations could have impact for example.

Initial Tests

The first issue is size - we want this to be massive!  So the first thing I do?  go into UDK and see how big I can actually make this thing... I literally hit the roof of the level

Here is the biggest possible landscape size and highest I can get the mesh (note the teapot head)

In the above picture the landscape is on apar with a continent and takes around 30 minutes to travel corner to corner.  It took around a minute to hit the floor after jumping from the head.  It's simply too big - UDK has draw errors and everything slows down loads.  I was hoping that I could create gropus of objects (called prefabs in UDK) and animate them basically through matinee as movers - That don't work though and each mesh needs to be animated individually, which is not really do-able.

Here's a very quick blocked out colossus to test scale

Here's a quick video (sorry-ish for quality) to show varying size of colossi - ranging from 20 feet to a mile... also working on landscaping for the first time

Doin' stuff

I've been keeping myself busy with study n stuff since the last post.

I've been designing/refining a vehicle.  What I want is vehicle suited to the next generation of Metal Slug games.  Metal Slug is quite an "old school" style arcade side-ways shooter.  There have been many iterations of the game from the original arcade, and is suited to low-spec systems (My most played version was on the Nintendo Gameboy advance & DS).  So far it has been pixel art, but it is standard now for 2D games to be animated around 3D models for efficiency and accuracy (bastion is a good example).

Early concepts to help nail the silhouette and it's character - very easy read on multiple backdrops

This is a work in progress - orthographic images

The tank is characteristically "cute" - being very compact and with large smooth shapes, which suit the cartoon/anime style of the game.  I am designing it as the original Metal Slug tank mixed together with a conventional UK digger.  It has a main cannon (with limited ammo), a chain gun, and of course a digger for close combat and moving objects.... and digging?

I've been learning more about rendering in 3DS Max (not too happy with this but  is a WIP)

I am very tempted to make a high poly tank/digger.  Not only to bake/project down, but also for my portfolio - I know quite a lot of hard surface modelling techniques & should showcase them (all the little technical bits look cool too).

Here's a quick sculpt I did in Zbrush

I'm going to try and post a video once a week, hopefully with more time invested (rendered in Zbrush)

I think it's important to have fun... and drawing/painting is fun!

Speed paint "Hybrid"

Speed paint "Downriver"

More to come...

Rooftop Project

Hi, here's my rooftop.

I wanted to do a moody ye-olde feeling cityscape.

I took inspiration from stage sets like Marry Poppins here - Something simplistic.

 The artist John Atkinson-Grimshaw was also a bit of inspiration - some great moody paintings

My original idea for a massive route along the rooftops of a town centre had to be scaled down.

Although I only used two thirds of the texture budget I think it went well - Utilising UDK to make the most of what I had.  I would of like to have added more geometry and make things more "organic" but had to call it quits for time management.

I made everything from scratch - the sky and effects and everything you can see.

Here's a flythough - I tried to make the route interesting and give the player vistas to look at


I think I tried to do to big of an environment.  In future I will try to concentrate more on detail and the local area more.  Still had great fun :D

Year 3 - Go!

Welcome to my third year and final major project blog.  Less talk, more post.

I did a load of learning over the summer holiday joining up to A summer art camp and a year’s subscription to Digital Tutors – I love learning and doing new stuff.

I haven’t decided on a tight focus such as character design or environment.  I like them both, and doing technical stuff – I want to be engaged and challenged - Then relax with a coffee.

I have been enjoying sculpting in Zbrush quite a lot

I learned a lot of Zbrush from an in-depth project on digital tutors

Here are a couple of pictures I drew for our own “Speedtacular” group, which has an hour time limit with a simple theme – This year I am using reference and drawing more conventional compositions.

"Bewitching"

"Binding"