Week Summary

This Monday, I focused on my Zbrush model. I aim to get the high poly model completed by this week. Including posing if possible. I did manage to complete the high poly model on Monday night, I added further details to the leg area adding two extra armour plates. I felt like the legs where a little bare and it needed more of a bulk to the legs to flow with the upper part of the body and give the model weight. To do this I used an extracted mesh part of my mesh that was hidden. It was hidden at first as I didn’t want to use it and it was going to deleted. Instead I moulded it into a shape that I wanted and added the information using the dam standard brush and added a drag in mesh part to complete the area. After the mesh was completed I mirrored and welded the mesh to bind it into one sub-tool. This was the outcome; the model was completed in all its detail, I also added in damage marks too, as the model is a old sculpture piece.

On Tuesday, I had my weekly anatomy workshop. In this session, we went back to the big scale model and focused on the legs by adding in the final upper muscles of the legs, and tendons. Only one side of the model needed this as the other will show other areas of the muscles possibly, we were told not to add to both sides. We used a brown wax for the muscles and red for the tendons. 

Also on the Tuesday I went to see my specialist tutor for my hour session. The focus of this session was going over the book I got from the library ‘An introduction to game studies by Frans Mayra’. As this is a source for my report I wanted to go over how to correctly pick areas of the book and put them into my report if necessary. I sometimes feel I go over the top by picking quotes and placing them into my essays and less focused on other methods of placing in research. I wanted to get a clearer understanding on the correct procedures. Also in this session, we went over how to write an introduction. I was given a sheet of paper that put in context what should be added into an introduction. This will be a great help when I start to write my report at the weekend, ready for it to be looked at in my next hour session next week. 

On Wednesday, I was home for a hospital appointment so I did not do any project work, but I did have a quick look over in the book ‘An introduction to game studies by Frans Mayra’. I did have a better look and added post it notes to relevant areas. 

On Thursday, we did not have a concept art session this week, so no task was given. Because of this I stayed home and focused on posing my character model. I had looked at many YouTube tutorials on how to do this correctly, which where helpful but I kept having problems. Because my model is very detailed it as a lot of polys, in total my model has roughly around 11/12 million polys. The method I intended to use to pose my model was using the ‘Transpose master tool’ in which lowers the model to the lowest its sub divisions then you can rig your model using zspheres, which lets you edit the rig using the transform tools such as rotate or move. I used this method as it seems less complicated and gave good results from what I had seen on the videos. When it came to posing my model, and editing the rig and moving and rotating it, it lagged so much. It was possible but the results where hard to judge, it took so long to see a simple arm movement. I knew it was because my model was high in polys even if it lowered it to its lowest poly count, it still was too high. I wasn’t confident in how to correctly lower the sub divisions and keep the high detail, so I emailed my tutor. I did still try some methods on how to do this but nothing seemed to of worked for me. By next week when I get the help I need to pose my model I think my model will be completed by the end of next week. 

Here are some very rough sketches of poses I wanted to put down. I didn't want the pose to be too drastic anyways, so I was planning on going with a pose like number 2,6 or 8.

On Friday, we had a guest lecturer come into the university. His name was ‘Jake Gumbleton’ He is a concept artist, he has many skills in character art to environments pieces even knowledge in 3D but his focus is 2D. He is currently a freelance artist but gets many clients. I always hear stories of freelance workers not getting enough work or money but Jake seems of done well for himself which is good to see. He has worked in many company’s before as well, he has worked in games. He also has written a graphic novel that is still in the works. He gave us some good advice and told us how he started out as a concept artist. He also gave us some good books to consider that helped him to improve and some online web sources that are also beneficial. I will look more in-depth at these and maybe even buy some of the books he has mentioned. 

 

Over the weekend I did manged to write down my introduction for my dissertation by using the information given to me by my feedback from tutors and my specialist tutor that I see in the week. When it comes to writing, because I have some difficulty I tend to write down too much on what I intend to say in the report and this sometimes can become over the top and increase the word count. I have made the introduction a little too long so this will need to be shorten down, I will go over this next week in my one hour session. From there I can then start to write down the main chapters of my report.