Tuesday 13 December 2011

Playing around with cloth - Cinema4D

Practicing some new render techniques and playing around with the clothide tags in Cinema4D in anticipation for semester two where I may need to produce realistic creasing in fabrics.

Zombie Head UVW Unwrap

This is my updated one



This is the older version

Live Game Design Work

I was tasked with creating a way of propelling the polar bear forward from a complete stand-still, the player would control the speed and direction of the bear by pulling him backwards towards the camera. The game is for iPad and iPhone and therefore is as low poly as possible, these are rendered concepts!



Character Development - Final Character Turn-Around

The character turn around I have ended up with is an amalgamation of a lot of my ideas together. As you can see from the blog progress I skipped ahead initially and jumped right in with the 3D design element (not realizing we will be doing that all next term!). I had it in my head I wanted to create a female character as its something I've not particularly focused on before and it'd be great to push myself. 


This has carried through in to the final design of this project which I have decided will also be a female. I have produced this initially by sketching, piecing together parts referenced from my own previous sketches and then redrawn in Adobe Photoshop. Finally I have exported this to Adobe Illustrator and produced a vector image of the sketch which improves the quality of the line work.

I have left out the weapons/ammunition on purpose as it is something I feel I would add after the character design, I know I will want a bow and a backpack to store the arrows in.



Character Development - Backstory

Hunter/Archer

Correna Elite is a warrior from the Old Realm, she has fought in battlefields across countless regions of the scar ridden ancient lands. She fights alone now, a formidable hunter and an assassin when needed by close friends and allies.


I have decided a list of things that could possibly be added to accessorize Correna, which are both practical and visually exciting.

Fur/Leather patterns and fabrics - This gives a sense of strength and stature to the character, and also explicitly shows she is a hunter and she is proud of it.


Blood Splatters? - Perhaps this would show she is never long from a fight or the action, fresh blood gives the feeling that she has just won a fight.


Hunting Knife - Practical weapon which should be close to hand and visible to enemies, possibly strapped to her thigh or hips and attached by some form of leather or string?


Utility Belt - This would be a perfect addition and add more interest to her mid-section. It makes sense to have a variety of things carried by her at any given time as she is a hunter and would need different tools in different situations (such as snaring).


Boomerang? - I like the idea of this, I saw a weapon in RAGE recently that looked awesome, it was a 3 sided boomerang and it was used as a reusable weapon and visually looked great.


Bare skin - Parading bare skin represents she has vulnerabilities but at the same time shows she is not afraid, that she doesn't need to rely on armour for protection. This could also work against me though as I have been researching a great deal in to female armour. Basically if I were to do a female in full metal medieval armour, there is not historical evidence to suggest it should need a clear indication on the main platebody of a cleavage. It turns out if the design did include a bevelled in piece for the cleavage, the sword if stabbed directly towards someone wearing it, would be channeled towards the centre of the chest (sternum) and pierce right through due to the weakness in the design. For this reason, bare skin might seem to be a bad idea.


Art Deco/Renaissance Art Style? - It'd be great to have some historical influence on the actual visual design of the clothing, but this may be something I research greater in the second term where I will be creating and texturing the 3D model.


Colours - Specifically Browns/Greens/Blues would be ideal as it would blend with surroundings and also reflects nature, which relates in turn to the whole concept of a hunter.


I apologise this isn't like a story and why the character is the way she is, I just prefer to list out what and why she would need specific items or inclusions in her design.

Character Development - Refinement

I began to refine my idea and I have decided to proceed my research with an archer style character in mind. This is more visual research and creation (I also continued slightly down the indian route as I though I would like to do something different to the norm, but decided after the image it would be far too much detail to do so soon on, not knowing 3DsMax like I do Cinema4D.):











Character Development - Initial Sketches


The above sketches were my initial thoughts, I wanted to trial a broad range of characters and decide what I liked most before going in to a more detailed character. I wanted to get the emotion and energy of the character through these sketches.

Friday 4 November 2011

Live Game Design Work

Screen renders from a character (Fully rigged and UV Textured) I have developed for an iPad and iPhone game.



Thursday 6 October 2011

Skip - 3DsMax Development

I was tasked with developing a skip from a primitive box today in 3DsMax using a variety of newly learned tools. The most used of these so far has been extrude, inlet, hinge, bevel, align X Y Z and slicing. I've been learning a lot of useful things myself along the way such as selective slicing and merging polygons in either point or edge mode.


Here is the finished render of my skip, I have also provided a reference photo that I took outside my accomodation on the way home. I think its important to note because of the way I set the UV map up, it reverses the texture on the opposite side as it is symmetrical, so I have chosen letters/numbers which will appear the same whether they are flipped or not. ( I will post shots of the actual polygon wireframe once I have access to 3DsMax again )





H I created a small environment to place the 3D skip so it didn't seem out of place or floating, I believe this helps bring believability to the object and can sometimes bring out flaws in the design. Here is the texture I created for the ground, and also the UV Map and texture for the skip. (I unwrapped it in Cinema 4D)




Anvil - 3DsMax Development

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Steggosaurus Development

I developed this model in Cinema 4D as I wasn't satisfied with the standard of my work from the initial lesson. I've tried to keep the polgon count as low as possible but also keep the model looking organic and to some extent realistic. I've also UV unwrapped the model and created a texture for it, I've repaired the original seam by using BodyPaint (a module of Cinema 4D) which is literally a 3D version of Photoshop. I was able to use a combination of clone stamps, brushes and erasers to the existing .psd layers I'd produced on Photoshop to get a seamless join.

Here is the initial model rendered with some of my own presets I created a while back (trying to give the impression of an ink drawing) I feel it represents the silhouette and shape quite well.
Here are two renders of the model with global illumination on and a cell render over the top to display the polygons. At this stage I decided it wasn't refined enough and I didn't like the shape of the head it didn't seem very well defined.


I then got some feedback from friends and decided to go further with the model. I created the UV Map after having some fun using the UV unwrapping tools in ZBrush which are brilliant for organic models. The face isn't very good but I was more focused on the whole model and because I was limited for time I decided it wasn't important at this stage.

Here is the UV Map

  
Here is the displacement map which would modify each vertex so be slightly raised or lowered, but also allow sub-poly displacement giving the effect of a more realistic skin.


Here is the normal map which will give depth to the texture, allowing the scales to catch light and shadow much more realistically.



And finally here is the actual texture of the skin, I've tried to produce a scale like material as the base.


Here is a couple of renders I did using the newly modified model and textures.