2D Week 05 - John Berkey Perspective

For this week's assignment we were to take a piece of John Burkey's art and create a piece based off of it to demonstrate perspective. Picking a piece was somewhat difficult, since many of his pieces revolves around curved spaceships, so I decided to use a terrestrial piece with a handful of clean edges to work with. 

I then modeled it out in Maya, taking some liberties to "undo" the perspective inherent in the painting to apply on my own later with my render. Rendered out in 2 point perspective:

And with perspective lines:

I then painted over the model to create my own version of the scene. 

3D Week 05 - Cannon Modeling

This week, our task was to model a cannon for use in the upcoming weeks' assignments. Being the Warhammer 40,000 nerd I am, I decided to model a lascannon.

Using the above references, I sculpted out the lascannon. I started with the barrel, then the outer frame and connected the two, then the lower frame and tripod, connecting those two with each other and then the top, and finally the scope, battery, and power cable. I then scaled up the model to be about the height of a man on his knees, using the Cadian Heavy Weapons Team model as reference. The end result comes out to about 3600 tris, with areas for adding geo for the high poly in the barrel, tripod legs, and main frame. 

2D Week 04 - Composition

For this week's assignment, we were to look at some of the art of famed movie poster artist Drew Struzan. We were to take one of his pieces and trying to recreate it while paying attention to the layout of the art. I chose the poster for John Carpenter's The Thing, a staple in my October horror movie nights.

I think that the human shape and radiating light turned out well, but I struggled with the colors near the monster's feet. 

There is no doubt that the poster has a strong radial component emanating from its head. I also thought that the pose had the iconic diamond in it, though I also considered that it may be a distorted cross shape to add to the imposing and unearthly visage of the Thing.

3D Week 04 - LEGOS

Above: A picture of me trying to fix people's Perforce and Unreal issues for the past 3 days.

This week has been a whirlwind, let me tell you. I think vehicle team has made a combined 35-40 custom bricks easily. Between LODs, constructing blueprints, and navigating the loss of Perforce for the weekend, I think it is safe to say none of us want to see a LEGO for the next 8-12 months. But in the end, the vehicles all came out amazingly. First, the catapult from Christian and Sam, with Griselle's boulder ready to fire:

Next, Joe and I's ballista:

Rebecca's battering ram, with orc textures courtesy of Zach M:

And finally, Alexis's ladder:

And a few shots of all of them in the scene:

It has been a looooong week, but I am happy with how my team has performed and stepped up to the challenge presented to them. 

2D Week 03 - Frank Frazetta Value

This week we were to explore value on a 3-dimensional form. To ensure that we had a smooth surface, we used the au naturel art of Frank Frazetta. I specifically chose a piece of his depicting Flash Gordon and who I can only assume is the spoils of victory for him in that story. As the picture was on older, yellowed paper, I had to touch the image up some so that the colors on the image would not interfere with the rest of the art. 

I decided to use green, since human eyes are more sensitive to the difference in tomes of green (fun fact, this is why night vision goggles are green). I started by blocking out the shapes, with separate layers for the skin, clothing, metal, and hair. After I had blocked out the surfaces, I added the shadows, using up to 3 bands to get a feel that I felt matched the character's comic book roots. Afterwards, I added highlights, focusing on the metals and the skin - the metals obviously being reflective by nature, and I imagined that the skin would be heavily oiled and shiny as well. I think this piece turned out better than the previous two, and I am happy with what I came up with.

3D Week 03 - Lego Brick

For this week and next week's assignment, we are, as a class, recreating the siege of Helm's Deep from Two Towers. We were split into four teams: nature, man-made, character, and vehicle. I am heading up the vehicle team, and alongside Joe Bonura I am creating an Uruk-Hai ballista. My unique brick to help accomplish this we called the "engine block", though in the model it is the base for the ballista's firing mechanism. To start, I created the base of the model. The base is the same scale as a 2x4 plate, with 3 stud-sized holes in the middle. The flairs are each the length and width of a 1x4 plate, but half the height. They also cave in, and their studs are hollow.

To make these hollow studs, I simply took a cylinder, extruded a portion of the top downwards to make the hollowing, and slanted the bottom so that it neither poked through the top nor bottom of the base.

For the regular studs, I used Nick's video tutorials and manipulated a beveled cylinder to get the curve in at the top and curve out at the bottom which ends in normals pointed upwards like the base to create the illusion of a single piece.

All of these put together give me a rather good looking replication of the "engine block" brick.

And put inside Unreal:

I am excited to see where the project ends up, but I am not hyped for the several other unique blocks I would need to create to follow the instructions 1:1. 

2D Week 02 - Brian Froud Silhouettes

For this week's assignment, we were to look at the art of Brian Froud, choose one of his pieces, and make a silhouette of it. Then, we were to make 8 iterations of that silhouette with various changes. I chose this piece depicting some sort of fae.

My sketches:

1) The original, based on Froud's art.
2) I made the wings to be more like a butterfly's wings.
3) I tried to simultaneously iterate the look and the pose, creating a chubby, lounging fae.
4) Another different pose, with more of a shirt and no hat.
5) I tried to make the faerie as buff as I could.
6) For this one I sketched an unseelie - a dark, more monster-like faerie.
7) Digging more into the stories of my ancestors, I sketched a brownie, a house spirit that would help with chores like sweeping.
8) Next, I drew a leprechaun (though with wings, as I liked the look of it more than without).
9) Finally, I drew what I imagined fae looking like when I was a kid - a horrifying monstrous spirit that was out to get little kids like me.

Welcome to the Garage

Vehicle/Mount team - Me, Joe, Rebecca, Sam, Christian, Alexis

3D Week 02 - Minecraft-ish

For our second assignment, we were to build a minecraft-ish level using blocks in UE. I decided to slightly increase my 90x90x90 cube to 100x100x100 to make building the level easier. 

I decided to create four textures: wood, stone, glass, and ground. I figured that with these four, I could build a nice pastoral village, and hoped that the transparency on the glass texture would transfer to Unreal (spoiler alert, it didn't). 

Thinking of how I wanted to build my village, I thought about different older cultures, and through a complex train of thought I can't quite remember, I started to think about the Percy Jackson book series, a favorite from my childhood. So, I decided to build the center of Camp Half-Blood, which is made of 12 cabins dedicated to the Olympian gods. For some artistic license, I decided to make the cabins more temple-y to fit the Greek theme more. I wanted to do more with the environment (like the hard drop at the edge and the lighting), but Unreal had already crashed twice trying to handle the nearly 25,000 blocks of my scene so I decided to leave it be.