Dan WIP 001

Hi Andrew,

Have decided to start modelling as i am sure that a few of the design issues will work their way out as I go.

For the metalwork sections I have decided to start with using some poly-grids. I thought this might be a good plan anyway.

At present, all of the sections that I have modelled are all still in separate bits. Not sure whether to keep them separate for texturing purposes, any suggestions?

Anyway, here are a few images of the model as it stands at the moment.

Cheers,

Dan

OH Mesh update, W.I.P. 1

Hey guys,
He's a slight revision on my early meshes.
Compering this image against the mesh (which I'm modeling from) clearly illustrates how long his hair is.. A little worrying! I hope to have him finished by this eve, to test some hair, fingers crossed!

AM - Hi Emma

Sounds like you have a great resume to accompany your impressive design background. Having any type of traditional training is a huge bonus in the digital industry. At the end of the day you can always learn new software, but a fundamental understanding of design principles, illustration techniques and model making are highly sort after skills.

The digital work you have already done has a great style to it and I'm very intrigued to see a concept painting!

I can't offer too much help at the moment but it sounds to me like some blendshapes will come in handy later. Also, one big mistake most students make is to build everything in one scene and hit render. Don't forget that you can always comp elements together post render. Not only will this give you more control over the lighting and mood of your scene, but you can also fake aspects of your shots and save on render time. Just a thought :)

Anyway it looks impressive, so keep it coming.

AM - Yo Ritchie

Awesome illustrations! Your attention to detail is very impressive.

Good old Medusa. There is nothing more appealing than a woman with fangs, brass hands and venomous snakes for hair! She never had much luck though did she...




Can't wait to see some concepts! Bring on Medusa.

AM - Gday Alex

Looks like the years of scribbling and doodling have paid off. You have a great style and your project has some great potential.

The tree is a perfect example of a good reason to use Zbrush or MudBox. As I've mentioned before it will be a good idea to model in as much of the shape as possible in XSI and then add the bark detail with Zbrush. You could really go crazy with this and get a seriously detailed displacement map.

I like what you're planning to do with the windmill, ladders and walkways. There is a huge amount of potential for this one and I'm keen to see your progress on it. I don't know what your plans are for texturing later on, or if you are going for a clean or dirty style, but personally I think some nicely integrated moss would be great.

One thing I always get my modelers to do is place a scale reference object in their working scenes eg: human, matchbox. It really helps you plan where details go and how sharp a bevel should be, or how tall a door should be.

Also, depending on what type of shots you want to render out it might be a good idea to model an extra high resolution section of the tree and a building or two. You can have a nice wide establishing shot, but then crop in on a section and show off a great point of view within the tangled limbs.

Once you have decided on the placement of your buildings, I'd dump them under a node and move them to World 0,0. Then you can line them up next to each other and start adding in the detail. This way you can keep some consistency with your models and also easily compare how they are looking against one another. When you are happy with them you can place them back inside the tree limb and start integrating them and making them feel like they have been there forever.

Keep it coming!

image addition from alex

yo peeps, here is a rough pic of maybe what the texture work and colours are going to look like. buildings are not final, their design is going to be tinkered with

Emma Howard Bio

Hi my name is Emma Howard, thank you for agreeing to set this blog up.

My Background
I have previously studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and Production Design at the National Film and Television School.

I have previously been commissioned and exhibited my fine art work and have worked (freelance) in the art department (set design) for Film/Television, with the role’s of runner, art department assistant and buyer.
I have not worked within the creative industry for a few years and have been doing other things such as travelling around the world. I hope studying at the NCCA this year will help me make the transfer from working with traditional methods to working digitally.

NCCA final project brief outline (April-September 2007)
I am planning to do one project over the 2 terms with its focus on modelling and texturing. I would like to create an environment that forms a kind of cityscape (does not necessarily have to be a city) that has another worldly quality to it (Sci fi/horror/fantasy inspired). I do not plan to put any characters within it. I am at the design stage at the moment and am aiming for a highly imaginative, fresh design. I have created this sketch model and have been playing around with the design and composition, i will develop this into a concpet painting.

In its presentation I would like it to have a slight music video feel. I would like to animate the architecture and plan to look at simple effective solutions to bring the place to life and possibly forming from nothing. This idea is inspired by the Rhapsody in Blue, New York cityscape forming sequence in Disney’s Fantasia and I have been looking at lots of time-lapse stuff.


NCCA Work: Group project last term, I work on a game mod using the Half Life 2 engine and my role was environment lead. I designed this environment and built most of it, everything is low poly and the pictures are in-game shots.





Work prior to starting at the NCCA: Some examples of my fine art and set design work.

AM - Hey Phil

Looks like you've been doing some great work already. The key now is to focus on the problems you had in your last project and improve on them this time. The character design has a lot of potential and it looks like you've been doing some effective research that will really help.

As you did for your rock creature, spend the time creating orthographic drawings of your character to use in XSI for getting your proportions correct. If you don't spend enough time on this it will cause all sorts of problems later. Only when you're completely happy with your XSI model and it's looking clean then you can go crazy in Zbrush or Mudbox to add finer detail.

Depending on what you're trying to achieve, Normal Mapping isn't necessarily the best approach and especially for a project of this scale. Your render times are never really going to be dramatically increased by having 10,000 extra polygons to play with on one character. I would suggest modelling is as much detail as possible in XSI. This doesn't mean just slapping a poly smooth to the whole object a couple of times, but to gradually build up localised detail in the mesh where necessary eg: head, leg thorns etc. It would be best to only rely on Zbrush for adding the finer detail and skin detail.

Bring on the fusion critta!

AM - Yo Ollie

It sounds like you have a great understanding of what you want to achieve and what you want from your characters. The arctic fox will prove to be a very difficult character because of it's long hair but never the less, a great challenge!

When we create existing animals at MPC we spend an enormous amount of time gathering photographic and video reference. We then match our models precisely to these and get client approval this way. You will really need to try and do the same for this fury little guy. Finding good reference might be difficult, but it is essential to model with photo reference in your scene to help with proportions. If you try and model from memory or images sitting on your desk you will never really get a good match.

Below are some images that might help. It would be great to use something like the side image or skeleton image to help your model. Your current model is a great start but it's this point where you can use the images to lock down proportions and muscles.

Can't wait to see more!

AM - Hey Dan

Your 3rd and 4th term project sounds like a cool plan. It's a great idea to be doing a hard surfaced and an organic organic character.

The design of the robot dog looks great and has a lot of potential. It's great to see that you've got a background in Industrial Design, it's helpful to have it up your sleeve in this industry.

All I can suggest at this point is really think about what you want the dog to do and what range of motion you see him performing in the future. If you have the time it might also be worth drawing some quick sketches of what he'll look like sitting down next to his companion, or even running and stretching. These simple things might highlight some design modifications which will be easier to sort out now. If you don't have time, just keep it in mind when you start building him and keep rotating joints and checking poses as you go.

Other than that, keep collecting heaps of photographic reference. I can't stress this enough. It will be the small attention to detail that will really make this character kick arse!

Ritchie Moore

Hello!

My name is Ritchie Moore.
Prior to studying MA 3D Animation I worked as a drawing and painting tutor for the Workers Education Associations (WEA). I also completed a BA Hons degree in Scientific and Natural History Illustration.
Last term I worked on a group project where I designed, modelled and textured a cave troll. There is a render of the troll in the folder provided and you can see the project on the link below. For my major project I’m going to do the concept art, modelling and texturing for the mythological character, Medusa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MzDyGRtNNI

Past Work:

Alex Mourant

Hi there andrew,

Firstly id like to say thanks for taking up your time to help us guys out, it is very very much appreciated by all. My point of origin is sunny cornwall but I recently graduated from an illustration course up at lincoln uni where i scribbled and doodled for three years. I dont have a website up but here are a few images of the sort of thing that i did...

I think phil has put a link to the video "detritus" in his section, which i also worked on with him and ollie last term. I mainly worked on charcter set up and animation, but had the chance to do a bit of modelling and texturing which i loved doing - hence why i want to dabble in those areas more this term. Below are a few of the bits of modelling that i did on that last project...

Below are a few sketches (i know they are pretty rough at the minute) of the sort of thing that im looking to model. Its basically going to be a town built into a tree, so i want there to be quite a contrast between the organic curves of the branches and the architechure of the buildings.

I started blocking out some of the trees, just so i could get a better feel of how they are going to interact with each other and the buildings but its in early stages at the minute.

Going to get some more images up soon which will give you a better idea of the overall visual style that i am going for and more specific details regarding the arcitechure.

Anyway, thanks again for helping us all out,

Alex

Andrew McDonald - Intro

Hey everyone!

I thought I'd quickly add a short bio so you know I'm not some crazy bloke Saf found in a dark alley on his way home one night.

I have a background in Industrial Design, Animatronics and Prop Making. I have now been in the Digital Effects industry for 7 years. I started in 3D as a generalist, working on all sorts of kids television shows, music videos, commercials and idents. After a while I soon found my calling, it wasn't hard, it was basically a process of elimination. I was a very ordinary animator, got bored with particles and hated waiting for renders while I tweaked the hue of a bounce light. With my background, modeling to me was the most appealing and I really enjoyed it.

I have worked with Saf in Australia for a number of years at Animal Logic and have recently ventured to your windy shores to check out the London industry. I'm currently the Head of Modeling at The Moving Picture Company in Soho and am fortunate enough to be working on some great films.

Films that I have worked on to date include Matrix Revolutions, Happy Feet, Where the Wild Things Are, Harry Potter 5, and 300. Currently I'm working on 10,000BC, Fred Clause, Prince Caspian - Chronicles of Narnia, and Sweeney Todd.

I've pushed and pulled countless polygons and verts in my time and I'm still learning new tricks and pipeline procedures so hopefully I'll be able to pass these onto you. I will endeavour to give you as much feedback as possible on the work that you post. Most of the time you should be able to just post a few images, but feel free to upload a turntable or animation to youtube. Also, please feel free to email me an "obj" export of any models if you'd like me to take a closer look.

Remember that this forum is for everyone to contribute. Feel free to make comments about other peoples work and offer suggestions and constructive criticism.

But most of all, let's get some kick ass models for your demo reel!

cheers
Andrew

Philip Pendlebury - Intoduction

Hi Andrew, My name is Philip Pendlebury, but you can call me Phil, its faster to type!


Just like to say thanks for giving the time to take a look at some of my past, present and future creations. Its much appreciated and i look forward to talking with you over the next weeks.
So to start the ball rolling i have a website

http://www.philippendlebury.com/

There is a selection of images from my illustration degree i took from 2003/06 down at University college Falmouth. The artwork in the 'conceptual' section are far more recent and fuelled me in the direction i have now taken.
I throughally enjoyed my time at falmouth learning much about traditional art techniques in life drawing, painting, colour,composition and as my art style moved into Film/animation based representational illustration.

I have a love for concept art, for both film and Video games. Equally i enjoy exploring the process from 2d concepts into 3d which is what im currently pushing all my efforts into. After two terms of hardcore XSI learning we embarked on the Group Project.

GROUP PROJECT:



http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=2286223673844321726&q=detritus+ncca

The concept was one of my own, which i presented and ended up with a group of 7 to work on it with me. I modelled the main character, created a Matte painting for scene1, and took hold of a portion of storyboarding. Art direction and general management where a daily activity and finally i produced the Music.

Matte Painting:



Initial character designs:

Final Character DesignZbrush Detailling

Final Render in XSI.





My main modelling priorities were:

- to create a character which was not symetrical , but one which had very odd leg and arm setups.
- to create character profiles
- to learn Low poly modelling in xsi
- to get to grips with high poly detailling using zbrush Intergration between xsi + zbrush
- Texturing
- Normal mapping
- Displacement + cavity mappingrendering these elements in XSI with successful quality (especially the displacements!)


In hindsight i feel that i have learnt all of these skills to a degree, and now feel confident to take them further in my final major project.Which brings me onto what i have chosen to do over the next two terms.


FINAL MAJOR PROJECT:
-To Conceptualise, model, texture and animate a character based on a fusion between Leaf insect, preying mantis, Plants, Human and Biotechnology. Many elements to fuse, so I have included a number of concept sketches and reference images to hopefully clarify the direction im going in.













My main goals are:
-To create a character which looks Organic, growing, without metal or man made elements except the human inside.

-To trick the viewer into thinking we are watching plants, leaves, organic structures grow, when in fact it is far more mobile.

-High detailled model using highpoly count detailling in Zbrush/mudboxCorrect use of low poly and high poly for normal mapping to speed up rendering times.

-Subsurface scattering for the leaf effects. (hoping to team up with MSC programming student who is coding a fast SSS shader)


What are the current and future trends regarding HighPoly, very detailled modelling techniques that would best suite my workflow? At what point do i stop displacement and move into Texture art?

Cheers..

Phil