Week Summary

On Monday, in the morning I had someone come to mine from DSA for my final session with them to go over my equipment that helps with my dyslexia. Later on that day I started to draw out some rough helmet designs for my character. I drew the designs in Sketchbook Pro as it has a useful symmetry tool. After I laid down some initial designs I opened see Zbrush Core and started to sculpt out my character. I did use the built in human anatomy model as I was told by a tutor this should be fine to do as long as I edit on top of it. As I have already attempted a sculpt of a human body in ZBrush Core using zspheres I wanted to show that I had still attempted my own. At first the helmet sculpt took at least 2 to 3 hours to get right in what methods I wanted to use and best way to sculpt the model. I went by my rough initial design of the character I liked best with changes added, I knew that as soon as I started to sculpt my model it would change quite a lot as I could add more detail in this process. With my first attempt at sculpting the helmet I use the extract tool by masking the area. This method worked well but the result wasn’t really what I wanted. I inserted a sphere and edited that to create my helmet design. I extracted areas by masking certain areas, used the Move tool a lot and adjusted areas to shape the helmet. I also use the dam standard brush to create the refined details and the clay build up brush to bulk out some parts of the model. I managed to get a near finalised state to the helmet. I will still need to work on the helmet in areas.  

 On Tuesday, I had my anatomy session, making the big scale model. In this session, we added the wire head and arms, we did not place wax on these areas in the session. The focus of the session was adding the feet and muscles to the pelvis area. The muscle’s added to the pelvis was using a coloured wax that was a light salmon colour that represents the ‘Psoas Major’, ‘Iliacus’ and ‘rectus femoris’ muscles in the pelvis. 

Also on Tuesday I added the shoulder armour to my model, to do this I used the same method as the helmet with masking an area and extracting. Before doing the shoulder armour I masked areas of the body where I wanted the spandex like Suit to be placed I use the same method and extracted the area making sure the thickness was right for clothing which was roughly 0.01 thick. This created a bodysuit for my character that I can model on top of.

  

On Wednesday, I went into the media lab’s and used ZBrush. While using Zbrush I noticed that every time I extracted a piece from my model it would double even though the settings were not set to double the mesh. I spoke to a tutor and he managed to sort out the problem using the grouping section of ZBrush. At times, I still struggle with some of the technical side of Zbrush. I believe the more I use the software the more knowledge I will gain and hopefully be able to tackle these kinds of problems. I decided to change the style of the shoulder pads. As my old shoulder pads were doubled this benefited me in some way as I could use them to generate other pads for the arms. I also attempted to add a neck piece to the model that is still yet to be edited. 

On Thursday, I had my photoshop session for concept art. In the session, we were told to create an environment piece that was based from a brief given. Here is an image below of what the brief consisted of.

We were told to use the software ‘Alchemy’ to create a few thumbnails of environments. I’m not the strongest creating environments but I have noticed since doing these tasks I have seen slight improvement especially from when I did an environment piece in year one. Also with these tasks the hand in is getting shorter each week. This task had to be handed in the same day (Night). I did manage to complete the environment piece in time which I was pleased about.

In my environment piece above we could use any method with liked, I used the photo bashing method to gain the realism of the environment setting. I then added an army, at first, I only added a small amount of characters in the piece, but this did not feel full enough as it stated it needed to have an army of characters or animals whatever our choosing. I decided to duplicate a few of the characters to give it a fuller atmosphere. I then painted over parts of the piece especially the characters. I then added an effect on some of the areas to give the painting differences in style, this worked well for the army. Overall, I am quite happy with this piece and in the time limit that I had to do it in. I now feel more confident in doing tasks like this. 

On Friday, I was meant to go into the university in the morning to see tutors for a group meeting, I could not attend as I have been unwell recently. I did manage to watch the DVD ‘Stalker’ that was recommended for my dissertation. The film was quite long, it was two odd hours and only in English subtitled, but I did get a lot of notes written down which should help me with my dissertation and I’m glad I watched this DVD as it does match my dissertation theme with the environment style and it will be a big part of the comparison between the film and games.