Be Prepared

For a scarred up bipedal starfish!

Hey, looks like another assignment done. Or at least sculpting part is.

This guy here has no official name, though, like the one that was modeled, I shall call him Bruce.

Bruce here is a decent aged creature that works along side a fish-like creature on the battlefield
.
I think he's working a little too much around those canons, don't you think?

Look at those scares on his face. Those burns (or at least it'll look more like burns once it's colored). 

He looks pretty neat, right? 

But this isn't his final design. Though not too different from this one, it gives the guy a bit more of a kick. 

Now looking at it away from the program, it kinda seems like I should put something more towards his backside. It kinda looks a bit bland. But then, I shouldn't go overboard. He is a fleshy character after all. 

Either way, I think he looks pretty good. I think, maybe, his teeth are my favorite part. I don't know, came out different than the concept art, but looks so good. xDD


Anyone else get the feeling this starfish is a little young? It must be those tiny teeth, he's probably adolescent at this stage.

Under the Sea with 3D Models!

Darling it's better! Down where it's wetter!

I'm back and posting some new material! And no, it has nothing to do with the Little Mermaid. Instead, it's with one of her extremely deep sea friends. 

In 2D/3D art, we were assigned to model, sculpt, texture and set one style of fish into the Unreal Engine. This was to be done in about a weeks time, which is a lot of if you think about it. 

For my choice, I decided to go with a "bass" looking fish.

Low poly all around! I was actually pretty surprised I was able to do this relatively quickly. Only took me longer to get the Normal Maps to look clean. Which is cool, since I thought sculpting in ZBrush would have taken longer. 

Especially with how it came out. 

It has so much detail! I think I like the sculpting aspect a lot more than the modeling. Who would have thought? 

Though that's not all! Next was color mapping, and I think I had a bit too much fun with that one. 

I'm going for a fish that emits Bioluminescence in the deep ocean in order to attract either food or mates. Though usually they have blue, I enjoyed the idea of having one emit a pink-ish glow instead. That really came out when I placed it into the Unreal Engine. 

I think the fish is a little big for a deep sea critter, though it looks really neat! I just love that light glow it has, and how there is a tint of blue light in the engine. I'm really hoping I got that good feel of the deep. Which is the first time of attempting it in any engine. 

If anyone's curious, this is what I did for my fish to look alright in the engine. It looks great when I first put it in, it's even better now. xD

Maybe we'll turn it all around

'Cause it's not too late

It's never too late!

Well, looks like things in the digital world has not gone as smoothly as I would have hoped. One would think homework would be such a simple task. Sit down, do some artsy things, and then submit it once it's done.
Of course, it's never that easy.

It's been some time since I've updated. Since then, I have found that quite a few programs, specifically those created by Autodesk, do not like me.

I've had:

• crashes
• lag
• saving errors
• computer issues
• blue screen of death 

I'm not sure what is going on here, though all of this started happening after the day of power surges throughout the campus. I thought everything was fine, but both today and yesterday evening, my computer has failed to run heavier hitting programs without freezing or switching straight to blue screen.

Heck, even my desktop wallpaper doesn't always show and it's just one image.

I wish I could figure out this problem on my own and get back to work. But instead, I'm blogging about my pain and suffering. Not exactly at that point, but I am indeed frustrated to the point of wanting to bash some heads in Gears of War. Or maybe I'm just seeing red....lots of red.

Eh, well. As much as I would like to complain even further, I could say that at least I was able to finish some aspects of my homework. Though I really dislike that it isn't as much as I would like to have finished. 

For 2D/3D Art, I was able to finish Bake Mapping and setting my High Resolution ZBrush model Bake to my super low res game model while still looking good. Which I'm ecstatic about. Though, unfortunately I cannot get freaking Mudbox to work. I'm quite positive that if my programs aren't working properly and I'm constantly seeing that blue screen error, they are connected at one point. I probably have something wrong with the processing on this laptop or something. 

 Anyway, here is my model in Autodesk Maya 2016 with the normal map added. 

While this one is from Mudbox 2016 just before it crashed. Literally just placed the model into mudbox, saved and it crashed. Go...me...

Hopefully I can get this squared away soon. Fingers crossed for me guys~

Core Art - Let's Model

Low Poly Style!

This little guy here is referred to as Bruce to me, Carl for others, and Kevin to the rest. Don't ask, I don't know.

In all truth, he has no name, so I guess I will continue to call him Bruce until his true name emerges. Anyway, this guy here is a companion "monster" to another monster, as funny as that sounds. Moving from quick concept art to now modeling, we get a taste and practice of more 3D modeling, which has been the most fun I have had in Maya lately.

With all of the technical errors, crashes, and Maya not doing exactly as it is supposed to, sitting back and just building a model last minute was somehow relaxing.

He's pretty smooth on Smooth Mode, which is awesome. 

To be honest, I'm quite surprised it came out this well. He should look even better in color. <3

Animation - Graph Editor and the Bouncing Ball

To bounce or not to bounce...
                                                                  That is not the question


Animation is totally kicking up with another assignment, this one I regrettably had to rush through the night before it was due. Part of the problem was caused that for some odd reason, none of the balls wanted to animate in a new scene. So, I had to go to a previously saved version for an earlier assignment and save that as a new scene and work from there. I'm still not entirely sure what is the deal with Maya, but I will be working with it all day today so I will figure it out eventually.

Anyway, this is my speed run through of animating a bouncing ball. This time there's three different weighted balls: standard rubber ball, bowling ball and a ping pong ball.

Looking at it after turning it in, I can see that I screwed up the animation when I planned out the weights. I know how each of these types of balls move, however it seems that I still haven't perfected how to properly animate them as of it.

It seems that I still need more practice.

Hopefully I do better with organic when the time comes.

RPP - Round 1

I Challenge You to a Battle of...
                                                                  KITES!

Hey guys! FIEA is moving forward and classes are rapidly becoming filled with loads of work, concepts and, of course, video games. First up this week is the first round of Rapid Prototype Production game made in Adobe Flash. 

Assigned into an amazing team, the five of us had to work hard to make a clean and playable flash game in just two weeks. Probably doesn't sound too difficult, but on top of other assignments as well as work and real life, this can become rather challenging. But of course, challenge accepted! 

In just two weeks, we made an amazing and fun game known as: KITE FITE.

As you can see, this particular game is made for two players. 

                       Object of the game: Defeat your opponent.  

It's a very simple objective, and made to be childish fun for all to enjoy. Though, you can also be as competitive as you would like. Personally, I like to just have some fun and mess with the controls as I fly my Ram Kite. 

As for the weapons, they are simple toys (yo-yo, fan, and top) that serve as three different types of combat styles. Each having an unique feel and style which can serve the player's strategy to defeat their opponent. 

The focal point of the game are the kites. Tied down by their "weapons" the player chooses one of eight kite designs. Each color coded to their respective Chinese Zodiac sign. 

 In this game, you are able to choose from these eight zodiacs: (from left to right) Dog, Dragon, Ox, Pig, Ram, Rat, Rooster, and Tiger.  

   

  

 

This amazing game's clean and stunning artwork was accomplished by both myself and Summan. We wanted to play off of ancient China and their love for kites. Not too many people know that they were the ones who created Kites, so we wanted to pay homage to such an amazing discovery.

The game would never have reached to such amazing playability without our two highly skilled programmers: Nihav Jain and Brian Bennett. They made all of the game play possible and they are awesome for their incredible skills and input into the game. 

Our final member provided so much input, kept us all working together and was essentially the Creative Lead for the entire project: Agnesa Belegu. She's amazing and any group would love to work with her. She has such great ideas, and so does the rest of the group. Will miss working with all of you guys as we move to our next RPP section.

CORE ART: Creating Concepts

THE WORLD OF PRINCESS PEACH
Revamped to fit a much darker theme.

The assignment for this week Common Core class was related to Concept Design. Here, we had to work in a group with either two or three individuals in it, and divvy up the work evenly. For this assignment I worked with my sister to rework a design for Princess Peach.

Now, neither one of us had much of a working knowledge of this character. What we know about her is that she is from the Mario franchise, is that damsel in distress whenever Browser kidnaps her, and she is Mario's love interest. So, we decided to change that up a bit and turn her into something a bit more interesting than the usual kidnapped princess.

What we came up with didn't resemble her at the slightest at first glance. But that is what's awesome about it.

While my partner worked on the character concepts, I worked on her environment.

After developing the initial design of her "palace", I went forward to figure out exactly how this world would look with such a design. 

Coloring and texturing was fun, however I made this one way to saturated. Doesn't seem to match with such a bleak hued character, so I have to fix this into something that reminisces the character much more.  

That's better. This looks rather bleak and dull, right? Though I still feel that my favorite part is the floating orbs. Matches quite well with our Spider-Peach concept.  

UV Mapping & ZBrush

A NEW JOURNEY~!
One step towards texturing, on giant leap toward professionalism.

FIEA has been a bustling journey filled with a variety of techniques and projects that it has been a feat itself to keep up. After almost a week, I have finished another assignment. This one, mind you, showed me something that I have never done before: UV Mapping. 

UV Mapping is rather difficult. I never imagined it would take such a long time just to cut UVs into proper segments and insuring that it properly covered the entire model.

 

Of course, with days of working on it, I finally got it clean and organized. Hopefully, this is exactly how it should be done. It looks about even, so it should be fine. Though, let's test this.

 

Added a Blinn Texture to check the entire model. It looks clean in all angels, and I even have some nice detail around the entire thing. Pretty happy with how it came out. However, this look is rather boring. I want something that is damaged, something that looks like that canon has seen some stuff and been in use for a long time.

This is a job for.....ZBRUSH!

 

Another program I never used before. Though I can see why people enjoy using this program so much, it's very easy to alter a model into something with so much more detail. It was amazing how easy it was! A few types of brushes here and there, and now my canon looks like a beat up metallic canon fit for limited use.

Though in hindsight, I probably should have added some singed texture to it. I should find some time and figure out how to do that one. It should be fun.

Tech Art

Math...why did it have to be math?
And I thought I was finished with Math for good.

Okay, I knew that Math was not going to disappear off of the face of the earth once I graduated High School. Heck, I had math in various of classed during my Undergrad. But I was hoping that I didn't have to worry about it once I got into a Master Program.

Video Games = Math? Preposterous! That isn't a thing, is it?

Yup. There is quite a bit of math, especially to make a well made game. Though most of it is tied into Programming and being a Technical Artist. Neither of the fact I am a part of, however learning some of each is probably a good thing for the future.

Hopefully, this optimism proves to be worthwhile later one.

First off for today's Math lesson is Trigonometry. 

 

I probably shouldn't be complaining, though. It's not like it's that difficult of math, but it's been so long! I don't even remember if I still have my calculator for this kind of math. Or maybe I can use my computer to calculate, who knows. All I know, it is math and I feel as though I'm quite rusty in that part of my brain. There's probably cobwebs forming over on that side.

I guess I should just go to my happy place.

Nope. That didn't help. I guess I should woman up and do some math. >_<

The work to become a Game Designer is never easy, though I do know that I probably do not want to be a Technical Artist in the near future. Programming and math every day? That may not be my cup of tea.

Common Core: Art

Play With Photoshop!

Sounds fun, doesn't it? 

Objective: To play around with the program. Do whatever you want and try out all of the brushes provided. 

Photoshop is one of my favorite programs to create art in. Actually, I frequently draw in Photoshop for both commissions and personal works on my DeviantArt account (as well as for work related materials). So this assignment was a great way to just mess around with colors and brushes and see what happens.

The image above is what happens when you just want to mess around and not think for once. It's essentially what you do when you have Art Block guys and gals~! This here image I only thought about the colors I would use, the rest just happened while messing with the different brushes and settings in Photoshop CC 2015. I don't think I missed any of them to be honest. 

FYI: Love purple, hence the color choices. <3