A Sneak Preview

Hears a sneak peak at something im working on at the mo. Nuff said.

Dark Elf Project (Update 3)

So I have been doing a little more work on the model since last time. Im starting to get close to the final base mesh before I start adding the fine detail in Zbrush. To be honest this is a lot more involved than I ever expected and i'm now struggling to keep focused and excited about the project because of the amount of time I have spent modelling, but should hopefully begin UV layout and texturing in the next week.

Dark Elf Project (Update 02)

So its been a while since I have done anything on this, basically because im lazy and enjoying my hols but here is where i am at so far.

Dark Elf Project (Update 01)

So what have I been up to for that past week? Well nothing really just enjoying the break from Uni. I did manage to have a look at this years graduating student exhibition and must say that the standard of work was phenomenal, hopefully I can create something as special for my final major project.

What little work I have done is posted below, basically the chest armor, belts and spikey bits on the dress. Not be long now until the model is built and textured.

Typographic Deconstruction

Deconstruction Theory was first proposed by French philosopher, Jaques Derrida in 1967, in a paper named ‘Of Grammatology’. Here he argues that language is not a string of words but a group of thoughts or images in the mind. He states that when a speaker talks they are actually thinking aloud, and the listener interprets their words. At any point, if the meaning is not clear, the speaker is able to clarify their ideas with the listener. However, a author is usually absent at the time of reading and therefore is unable to clarify any ambiguity of meaning. Another problem with writing is that the alphabet is also supplemented with conventions that bare no relation to speech at all, for example; spacing, punctuation and page layout. These non speech related conventions have infected language and have in turn influenced the way we think and talk.

Deconstruction Theory, in the context of design, was given the name of ‘Deconstructivism’ due to an exhibition at the MoMA called ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ in 1988. This helped secure its place as a design movement and propel it into the mainstream. The curators Philip Johnston and Mark Wrigley used the term Deconstructivism to contrast a range of contemporary architectural practices to Russian Constructivism. In Wrigley’s view, ‘deconstruction in architecture asks questions about modernism.As with most architectural movements, deconstructivism found its way to graphic design where its mission statement is to favour complexity over simplicity and legibility. Simply put; the viewer should have to decode and translate the piece to arrive at a their own conclusion.

This post looks at Derrida’s argument to explore the possibilities of his ideas on Deconstruction Theory. Using a range of experiments, I will ultimately derive a new typeface based on the same principals, but at the same time reflect a more contemporary feel.

As deconstruction theory states, the of meaning of the typeface must constantly be in flux between the creator and the viewer. So with this experiment the idea attempted was to give a holographic quality using two fonts split along the vertical periodically, then composited together to derive a new unique letterform.

For this experiment the sound of the letter A when spoken out loud was recorded and broken down into four main frequency groups of High, High–Mid, Low–Mid and Low. The waveform of each frequency type was then traced in Adobe Illustrator. The traced waveform was coloured in grey–scale based on its pitch, and ‘blended’ to create a visual representation of the letter’s sound.

Taking the idea of sound depicting writing further, the waveforms were arranged to depict the letters they were derived from.

An experiment was then conducted to determine if different accents would give different results. The letters A, K, O, and Y were chosen as they gave a greater diversity of the audible characteristics in each sound.

These last images were a chance to have fun with the typography.

Flash Torture

This interactive piece was designed to be incorporated into the B.B.C.’s history site. It is aimed at teenagers, and was designed as an educational tool to give an insight into medieval practices of torture. It is intended to be fun, engaging and informative. The piece has five interactive elements to it, each one detailing a different torture device used during this period. Because this is designed to be used by children, any scenes of torture or execution are dealt with in a stylised cartoon and humorous manner as not to upset or offend.

Re-Envisioned

28 years on and still it looks amazing. Blade Runner for me is one of the best examples of technical and creative work in a movie. It is described as being the last film to use in-camera special effects, and I personally believe that they could stand up to any C.G equivalent today. It could be argued that the reason the techniques are regarded obsolete is the cost involved and the time it takes to create them.

I was given the task of creating a title sequence for any movie, and for me the choice was obvious. Although Blade Runner is visually stunning the same could not be said for the title sequence. I wanted to try and stay faithful to the ambience of the move and emulate the dark and dystopian environment that Ridley Scott achieved in the move. Even though this was an assignment based around learning Adobe After Effects I also wanted to try and recreate some of the in-Camera effects that were used in the film.

Neon feature heavily in the film, you could say that Ridley Scott was very close in his vision of the future, especially if you look at cities like Tokyo or Las Vegas. For this reason I wanted to use the theme of neon for the names of the people involved but not only as just text but as a logo for the character's personality. The city itself is a very dark and wet place, ravaged by the effects of global warming and acid rain, The way I accomplished a similar look was to set up the camera on a rainy day and film the lights of cars and buses as they reflected in the puddles. Then a smoke machine was set up in front of my car's headlights with a black piece of card behind so as to almost create a smoke alpha pass. All of these elements were composited in After Effects and tweaked to make them all flow together. I decided against changing the audio for the opening credits because the mood that Vangelis creates with this haunting music is 'perfect' to use absolutely the right word.

Here is an early draft of the piece as to better illustrate my idea and pitch the concept to the lecturer, it was also used so the class could have input on my project and give feedback to help create a stronger piece. This draft has two different concepts to it, the first of them shows a room with light flowing through the blinds which I ended up rejecting, this was because it used after effects heavily instead of the in-camera effects I wanted to pursue and also I liked the idea of an outside scene better,

Here is the finished video. I hope you all enjoy and comments and criticisms are welcome.

Dark Elf Project

So as of last week I have finally left university for the summer holidays and I'm already bored, so I have decided to give myself a little project to keep me ticking over until I start my final year in September. After seeing the amazing trailer for Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning and watching the making of on the Gnomon School website it has just inspired me to make a model based on concept art from the Warhammer site. Im gonna take my time with this one as I have a while before I get back to uni, and make sure everything is perfect on it. The aim is to have hair and cloth sims as well as a full facial and body rig with deformations sculpted using an excellent plugin for Maya by Michael Comet called pose space deformer and I also want to learn how to paint detailed textures from scratch. So all in all it gonna be a blast.

For the head I sculpted the detail on a very basic base mesh and then re-topologised it using zspheres, then exported it to maya so now i have a detailed head with animation friendly mesh.

I have also started work on the dress, just basic geometry with textures applied

check back to see my progress

Resurrection

Don't worry I'm not gonna start talking about religion, unless you pray to the gods of C.G. Seriously though, this project was a chance for me to gain a deeper knowledge of modeling and animation within Maya, But, it evolved into so much more. I suppose I better start at the beginning as thats as good as any.

The brief was to take one of the following words:

Resurrection

Simple Simon

Inquisitive Lola

Panther

The Professor

Then design and model a character then animate them in a run cycle using Maya. Sounds easy right? Well, I will let you make your own mind up as you read on.

Design

The eagle eyed people amongst us may have already guessed that I chose resurrection as my theme. As with any project I usually brainstorm some ideas using a spider chart. It helps me get all my thoughts down on paper quickly and not worry whether the initial idea is good or bad.

Let me just say that reference images are THE most important thing you need when starting a design, for this project alone I must have looked at over a hundred images of human anatomy, bird anatomy, art, etc... Basically anything that had the slightest bit to do with the theme of the project. from this research I found that when you base the physical appearance on known physiology it will make for a more realistic and believable model. I know that I want some kind of humanoid body with claws for the hands and feet with some kind of birds head and large wings. After many drafts and sketches I finalized my design.

Modeling

Using the image as a guide in Maya I blocked out a base mesh that could be sculpted in zBrush and laid out the UV's.

The model was output as a .obj file and imported into zBrush where I sculpted the face to this point. Using some feather alphas I added detail to the face. The problem was that the head just didn't fit with the rest of the design, I really felt that instead of looking like a bird it was starting to look more like a rat.

You see I didn't listen to my own advice and base the head on known physiology. With this in mind I took the model back to Maya and created another head based on an eagle which gave a much better overall look to the character. Also at this point I sorted out the UV's as there was problems with them overlapping in places.

Using Zbrush I finalised the musculature of the body keeping in mind the human anatomy studies that I had done earlier. I know its not perfect by any means but as a first attempt to sculpt anatomy while learning to use zBrush it definitely shows potential. Also the head was sculpted to the point where I felt that it flows well with the general shape of the body.

From this sculpt I then exported the lowest sub division as an .obj file and also created displacement and normal maps which were used in maya to give the model the same shape as above at render time. For those of you who are unfamiliar with displacement maps, I'm not going to tell you how to use them, there is plenty of resources on the internet for that especially zBrushcentral.com. Let me just tell you that they are the biggest pain in the a** ever, but the results you get with them are simply quite amazing.

Wing Design

If I never have to model another feather in my life it will be too soon, honestly I have never had so many sleepless nights. But it was all worth it for the end result which you will see a little further on. I employed many different techniques when trying to create a realistic feather and if it wasn't for a very smart lecturer named Martin I may still be trying to do it now. You see by this point of the modeling process I had fallen into the trap of thinking that zBrush was the answer to my prayers. My dilemma was how do I get all the detail of a feather on a C.G. feather? Well, zBrush lets you use millions of polygons per model so why not sculpt the detail. Now while in theory this sounds like a good idea trust me when I say that it is not. I set of sculpting around 50 feathers or so thinking that they looked the business only to find that on second opinion they looked nothing like a real feather. You see a real feather is thin and soft whereas the ones I was making looked thick, chunky and rough. The point I am trying to make is that you don't need to go mad with the modeling process to achieve great results. It is only one part of the process in making a model. This is where Martin came to my rescue and put me out of my misery with the greatest piece of advice anyone could ever give a 3d artist.... "Just model its silhouette and slap a texture on it"

Genius!

Anyway here are some of my wing design faux pas I made before finally settling on that elegantly simple one.

Texturing

It had already been suggested to me that there was a Mental Ray SSS (Sub-Surface Scattering) skin shader built into Maya which would be perfect for the fleshy parts of the model. A blin shader was also used to shade the head. I painted texture maps for each shader using image reference and used them for the diffuse and bump. Finally all the shaders and displacement maps were placed into a Mix20Layered shader which is available on pixero.com. the reason this layered shader was used was Maya's own layered shader for some reason doesn't like mental ray nodes.

The wing's have basic blin shaders attached to them with all the magic happening in the texture files. Inside the colour map there is also an alpha channel which is plugged into the transparency of the shader which makes the polygons of the feather transparent in places at render, meaning that you don't have to model every little detail just place transparency where you don't want the polygon to be seen. Cool huh. Well, I thought it was.

Here are some of the textures that were painted.

Rigging

Now rigging the model was not required for this project as a maya script called Rig-O-Matic was going to be used, But being the stubborn individual that I am, I wanted to know about the subject. At first I set up a simple IK rig to control the character, but that wasn't good enough for me. You see I had already been given a rigged model for another assignment and it had all the bells and whistles on it like IK/FK switches and set driven keys. So off I went again and built a better rig. This one has stretchy IK limbs and spine, IK/FK switches, and set driven keys. For the rig I relied heavily on utility nodes and the hypershade window, so much so that the graph for my rig is even more complex than my shading networks. The whole rigging process was a lot of extra work with a steep learning curve but well worth it.

IK Setup

Stretchy IK Equation Graph

Animation

The run cycle was created over 20 frames and uses the principals of a single bounce. I used IK for the legs and FK for the arms, wings and tail as I found this produced the best results. You can see the final animation at the end of this post.

Dynamics

Maya's built in fluid dynamics was used to create the flames for my creature but I was not happy with the results. Don't get me wrong, the flames looked awesome if I do say so myself, but they were getting in the way of the characters run cycle, masking certain movements, and after all the project was to design, build, texture and animate a character and not about how I could make cool flames come off the character. In the end I decided to pull them from the final animation as they took away more visually than they added.

Rendering

I used mental ray for rendering the scene and render layers to pull out different passes like the beauty, ambient occlusion and flames. Finally After Effects was used to create a scene for my character to run through helping to give an added feeling of motion instead of just running on the spot.

Conclusion

There was a massive learning curve for me on this project, not because it was required but because I wanted to learn more. One of the biggest things that I have found out from this is that if you lay good foundations in the beginning it will save you massive amounts of time in the end. For this project I must have done each phase of the process at least 3 or 4 times, if not more, just working out what processes will work best for the result I required. There were plenty of sleepless nights not because I was behind schedule but because of the vast amounts of information I was trying to compact and retain in my tiny brain. I don't know about you but I find it impossible to sleep when there is so many ideas and solutions to problems buzzing around in my head. But I have found a great solution to that, no not a lobotomy but a notepad next to your bed, trust me, once you are not worried that you will forget your thoughts by morning you will have a much better nights sleep.

So here is the final piece hope you all enjoy it.