2D Week 01 - Syd Mead Basic Shapes

For this week's assignment, we were to look at the art of Syd Mead, and pick an aspect of one of his pieces to break down into simple volumes and sketch. After looking through his pieces, I found one of a man (some kind of guard or butler it looks like) attending to a car. I liked the pose of the character, so I decided to try and replicate this man.

I feel like I did well with how the light would fall on the shapes, but my overall drawing skill needs some work.

My sketch:

 The reference:

3D Week 01 - UE Box

For our first assignment, we were supposed to build something using blocks, to get a feel for UE4. To start, I brought in the default player model from UE4 and created a cube scaled up to its size (~180cm). I decided that I wanted my scale to be half the height of the player model, so I made my cube be 90x90x90. 

Afterwards, I deleted the human and large cubes and beveled the edges of the cube I would be exporting, so that it would appear less jagged in-engine.

At first I thought I was going to build some sort of toxic/nuclear spill, so I created a metallic texture for the base of the scene, and a glowing green texture for the spill. 

I began to build the scene, but wasn't happy with what I was coming up with. Looking around my apartment for more inspiration, I noticed the Ole Miss blanket folded up on my bed and decided to create something related to that. I created red, blue, and white textures and began to create a pixelized Colonel Reb. When I went to see the final render, I was happy with how the shape turned out, but the shadows were more clumped and smooth than I had envisioned. Perhaps there was a setting I had not turned on or off that I will need to pay attention to in the future.

With the original human model for scale.

UPDATE: I have since gone in and edited the lighting to both make it appear closer to sunset (when a game would start) and increase the resolution of the shadows on the white. I also added a fog effect, just to get some experience with it. 

Test post

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