Slow week.

I found it quite difficult to get some work done this week. First I had to upgrade to Windows 7, which wasn't too bad apart from backing everything up and then reinstalling all my programs again. Once I got my computer up and running though I got a few hundred viruses that I couldn't get rid of so I had to do it all over again. Windows 7 is quite nice though, so I suppose it was all worth it.

Unfortunately I had to downgrade to an earlier version of Maya so I wasn't able to continue with my Spaceman. In the meantime I've made him a raygun to use which I made as a warm up for the day. Obviously it is yet to be textured, but even then I'm not sure if I'll figure out how to attach it to his body so I might not use it for anything.

What took up most of my time this week (when I wasn't watching movies or playing games until 4:30 in the morning...) was a little scene of an old timey house I started while I was upgrading. I'm thinking it might be a Wizard's house or something. I've always liked these old English houses, especially when they're somewhat stylised. I'll still add some trees/bushes/grass/vines, a sign or two and whatever else I can think of to make it look interesting. It's definitely far from finished.

I'm not sure if, when I come to texture it, I should go for a colourful vector look or a more realistic one. Maybe I'll try for somewhere in between.

A few different angles:

I'm not really aiming for low poly but I'm not going to add loads of detail just for the heck of it. It might be worth keeping low poly as I might try to bring it into the Unreal Engine at some point just to see how all that works.

Next week might have some textures, or it might have some animations. We'll just have to see what I feel like doing.

Round One.

We've finally arrived at the first official update of this magnificent blog! I'm sure both of you readers are ecstatic. I have quite a few pictures today, so I'll jump right on in.

Last time I said I was working on something from DFACbyScottCVol.1, and that is indeed the truth. To be more specific, I decided I would model, texture, rig and perhaps animate a character because I haven't had much experience in modelling and rigging characters and would like to get much better at it. For starters, I thought a dude like Captain or Thompson would suffice as I can put a helmet on them and skip a lot of hard work modelling and rigging a face. That's not to say I won't be modelling or rigging a character's face at some point in the future, I just didn't want to bite off more than I could chew. Anyway, this is the character:

So I drew up a front, side and top profile of him to model from and got to work. I finished a few days ago, and here he is:

You will notice there are two versions. The white one is just the simple version, and the green one is where I tried to put in some slight watercolour texture to match Scott C's primary medium. You can kind of see on the book that he uses watercolours. I'm still not sure which one I like more. Here are some different views of him:

Another reason I wanted to try and add a bit of texture in there was to try out this new Photoshop feature I discovered that eliminates the seams on textures. It lets me bring a 3D model into Photoshop and paint and draw directly on the model. This is amazingly cool. I've spent many hours in the past lining up textures manually so this marks the start of heightened efficiency. It's not perfect though, but it certainly helps:

Notice the line (I think it's a zip) where it bends underneath - there are a couple of tiny little white bits digging in. Probably not too noticeable from a distance, but it still pains me to see it. RRRAhAGARAAHRAHRHARGGH

Anyways, what's taken the most time this week is the rig itself. The rig is a skeleton that, when moved, animates the 3D model of the character. Just like in real life.

Yep, just like real life. Look at all those joints and controllers on the left there. You don't need to know what they all do, but I want you to know that it's much more complicated than it looks. But all that time was spent for a good cause. I can now make him run while giving the thumbs up!

You'll notice that the model isn't moving along with the rig. That's because I haven't binded the two together yet. That's for next week. But since it won't be too interesting unless I get some animation done, I might have to do a smaller day project to keep you interested. Look forward to that!

Hamish

Ready Set Go!

Hello there. I'm Hamish and this is my new blog.

I decided to make one of these because I don't do enough work. So, every week (I'm thinking probably Sunday) I'm going to upload a picture or two of what I've been up to art-wise. It's not so much for people to look at as it is for me to make sure I do at least one thing per week that's worthy of submission to the high-quality-art-database that is the internet.

I even put up a sign above my computer to remind me to keep updating this place:

I almost definitely won't forget now. In fact, I've already started something which I'll show next Sunday. That'll be an easy update. It has something to do with this:

I can't wait.