Dwarf and Elf Drawing in Photoshop

For a short while in Steve's lesson, we were learning about what sizes and ways of proportion that we should use when it comes to creating our characters. It always important to get proportion right as it means that we can add a certain realism to the picture.

The key thing that we all took in from that lesson was that we should start measuring characters by their head size. For a dwarf for example, The height of this character is going to be 4 fat heads high. This is because Dwarfs themselves are small and fat, its as simple as that. When it comes to elves however, They are elegant and slim, That why we measure them using 9 slim heads. 

I drew a diagram below to help explain this a little better.

The Mansion on Maya

The aim of the task we had for Robin was to follow a picture that we had been sent over the computer. This was to create a temple in Maya. I think what the aim of this task is to use all the skills that we had been taught and put it into action. As I am really enjoying Maya so far, I thought that this would be a lot of fun to do and was looking forward to it.

The temple that we had to create.

The image above shows the temple that we had to do. Besides some little parts, I was fairly confident when it came to making the building. On the other hand, I wasn't looking forward to the texturing. This is something that has been bugging me for a long time, but I hope at least, that I can move on from the stage that I keep getting stuck on, make some progression.

My finished Temple.

A view from the front.

It took a fair amount of time, but I eventually got there. I had created and made it look exactly like the temple picture that we were given. As mentioned above, I knew I would get to this stage and be happy, even adding the smallest intricate detail to make it match perfectly.

On the view from the front, I had covered the temple in a dark red blinn. This was so that you could see the amount of detail that went into, including in the nooks and crannies.  

The next part I was dreading, I had to start to texture it, this meant that I would (try) put on bricks and roof tiles by using a blinn and U.V map it.

Adding a small amount of color.

I first started off by coloring everything that wouldn't be textured, these included the windows, the grates and doors. I was pretty happy so far, you could see that this temple was starting to come together.

Attempting to texture.

I had attempted to put on the tiles and bricks and to be fair to myself, I had gone out and got to a further stage than when I had tried this with the gas pump, but when you actually look at it you can see that its a complete mess.

The final.

I decided that I would completely start the mansion again from scratch, I figured that the texturing had been at fault because of how many faces that I had in each shape on my individual palace, it was only right that I put a full amount of effort into it, so that I could finish this. This time, I had a teacher at hand and by missing most of the little detail, I managed to get the palace completely textured and looking good.

I think I'm starting to realize how you texture, which is something that has struggled me for a long time. 

Animating my Fish on Maya

We were set some work to complete over the two weeks by Robin which was to use the skills that we had learnt when animating the Star Wars Death Star turret. We were going to use the Lynda tutorials again, which I was quite happy about as I feel, so far, that Lynda has taught me a lot.

Once I had opened up the tutorial, I was in a state of disbelief, we would be going back to the fishes that we did in the fist homework assignment and animating them. This made me worried, I added a touch of originality to my fish, making the end result different to everyone else. I thought though, that I may as well give it a go and try my hardest in getting this thing to work, That's how I learn best.

I started to practice using "joints" on a cylinder.

At the beginning of tutorial, the guy who was taking it taught us some key items in Maya on how to animate. We were going to be using a tool called "joints". This gives the object that we are animating a sense of feel, if we move the joints, the object will move along with it. You have to be quite specific on where you put the joints, so that they can move to place that you want them to.

The picture below shows me twisting a cylinder without any jagged ends. I already think that this is a much better and easier way to move a certain amount of an object. The only thing that you have to do is select one of the joints and move it in the direction that you want.

Movement on a cylinder.

I had to do this on the fish next. I got the joint and put it straight onto the fishes eye, all the while making sure that it was dead on in the middle. After selecting and placing it, I then have the option of placing another joint. As you can see from the picture below, I have ended up placing them in all the important positions, these include the fish's mouth, fins and tail.

Once this was completed I had to go to the smooth bind options and set it up so that all of the joints ran smoothly with a hitch. 

All the "joints" are in place.

The last thing that we had to do was to use the skin "Paint Skin Weights Tool". This is a simple but really effect way of making sure that the area that you animate is as small, or as wide as you want. For this project though, we are going to have small areas so that you can see the detail in the film.

This works exactly the same as a paint brush, you just paint what you want, if you would like to erase where an animation is gong to be, you change the value to 0 and paint away.

The "paint skin weights tool".

Provided below is the small animation that I did of the fish, I found this task quite simple and it only took me a small while to do, again the results could be better, but I am happy to work on this as I did enjoy using all the different tools at my disposal.

Tank Concept

The idea behind this project was very much involved with the lesson that we had on the same day. As this was to do with perspective, I had to use what we learnt, to create a tank design, that would not only have incorporated what we had learnt at drawing something from a different angle, but go back to the shaded cube that we did and use the ideas that we had learnt there, which would be on the final design.

I was quite excited but at the same time I was actually quite worried. My reasons for this was that I feel that my Photoshop skills aren’t at a high enough standard at the moment, which is actually really frustrating me. The thing that gets me is that I’m improving in the drawing aspect but it’s when it comes to converting it onto the computer that I really do struggle at. I suppose by doing this task and just generally practising on Photoshop would help, its just getting there first.

The "Big Willie" tank.

A big inspiration in designing a tank for me was the big willie. It was first built by the British in 1915 to combat German soldiers in World War 1. It was the first working prototype of a tank that was fully completed and had a devastating effect on all of those who faced it. Only a couple of dozen were ever made and today it still stands as one of the major engineering feats of the 20th century.

What I like about these tanks is they set the standard of what a tank is, what it means. It even hit off a slang term because of its full body and guns. When you call someone a tank, you associate them being strong and able to hold their own weight, much like that of a Big Willie. Now if you were to use this, by today standards, you will be destroyed in a matter of seconds, but at the time, it was a monster, that's why I appreciate what beauty it is.

My tank mood board.

I first started off this project by creating a mood board of all my favourite tanks, as you can see, I have such a wide variety of them, I could only fit a few on a page to emphasis the size of these beasts. Their also quite a few tanks that have inspired me from video games. these include the wraith tanks that appear on the Halo series and the tank that appears on the Mass Effect series.

Mind Map of countries.

Here I decided to research tanks by country origins. By basing it on a country, this means that If I did decide country/army (Soviet/Red army), I can look at the key features that they had, their signatures on each of the tanks and try to incorporate it into my own. I mainly looked at the main countries who forced their own image on the tank world.

For the British, I have included a challenger, one of my favourite tanks. At the start of World War 2 the British had terrible tanks that were no match for the superior German tanks, but at the end of the war, by taking ideas off of the Germans, they had some of the best tanks in the world. The appearance that usually comes along with a British tank is that it has lots of flat surfaces on it, something that helps it when it is shot.

I also looked at the United States way in tanks. The picture that I have shown features a Sherman tank. This is a first of its kind as it was a first of its kind, all though having an average battle record; it was the first to be mass produced. The tank was made on the major production lines in America, such as Ford. In the war the Americans had 50,000 of these tanks made, where as the Germans only had roughly 1,300 Tiger tanks.

Type of thanks mind map.

The next thing that I started to do was look at all the different types of tanks that either existed or have been stuck in the thoughts of many different people. Over the years from the first prototype tanks powered on coal, to the flame-thrower tank, many ideas have been conceived of what this hulking mass could do, This is why I tried to find out many different types of tanks as possible, so I could get to grips with what already exists and try to find a whole in the market, something that was original.

Over the several tanks that I looked up, their were several that really did interest me. One was the Bren Carrier. The reason being this was that my Grandfather used to drive tanks in the army, but his favourite was the Bren Carrier. He used to tell me how quick he zoomed around the African deserts in these armoured vehicles. He said to me that they were essentially like go carts with a great big gun stuck on the front. These tanks were mainly built as infantry tanks and would do no damage against a real tank. 

Another one that I was actually quite interested in was the Artillery section of tanks. Its always been something that I have been interested in when it comes to tanks. Early version of artillery can be , traced back all the way to ancient China and has been used throughout history. So what happens when you put one of these monsters onto an armoured vehicles? More recent versions of these tanks are the British AS-90. The most distinguishing feature of these tanks  are the long barrels that they have. This is so they can sit back at the edge of a battle and hit any target that they want to. If I were to continue on from this variation, I would stick with the long barrel, to give the tank a realism factor.

Rough Designs 1.

I moved on the assignment by sketching my own rough designs of what the tank I'm going to finish with is going to look like. I also wanted to use the two point perspective plan that we had been learning in the lesson. This was a lot harder than it sounds, but I still tried to make sure that they were 3-D for the viewer.

I started off with with a futuristic looking tank using one point perspective. This was something that I wasn't happy with myself, as it looked too fake and the angle was wrong, I had instantly realised that this design had no potential what so ever, so I was happy to instantly denounce the image. I tried adding some shading to try to repair the design, but this only made things worst. The image that I wanted to create with this picture was as if you were looking down the barrel of the tank, ready to be destroyed. 

The next image that I tried to draw was quite interesting. The concept was there, but still my skill in perspective seemed to let me down, yet again. The idea that I had was this almost sniper tank that would climb walls or buildings. When an enemy enters a town of city, they can use they several hundred wheels and grips to sit at the top of sky scrapers and fire at will. I think that if I were to do the picture again, I would add a smaller barrel, so has more range and penetration.

Rough Designs 2.

I had one more design left, this, to me, was an original tank design that hadn't really had much focus on at all. I decided to design a sports tank, This was going to be for all the rich generals who decided that being in a filthy, dirty tank, was too good for them. I tried to make the design as slick and as elegant as possible, as if they wanted to ride in only the best. One thing that happened with this drawing is that the perspective lines came out pretty well and gave a fairly good 3-D design to the tank. I instantly had a winner in what tank I would take into Photoshop and spruce up.

My final design.

I was extremely happy with my end result that I got. I had never really been good at shading, but I am thinking now that everything that I have done is starting to sink in. Sure, I think that the perspective could use a lot of work towards it, but its practising things like this that will help improve it.

I used red as not only is it the colour of blood, its also the colour of passion, something that the drivers of the tanks would have for their field. I have gone so far as to create 3 others, just to model what they would look like in different colours.

A 50's Dodge advert. A huge inspiration.

The thing that I tried to do was base the design and layout to that of a 50's car advert, claiming great things that these tanks could do and how all the competition are rubbish. I also wanted to copy the bright colours that would be used on one of these adverts. If you click on the mini advert that I had created for it, you can see the key areas that I have been incorporated into my drawings.

The Challenger. My favourite tank.

I really have enjoyed this task, as learning off of my granddad, who had a tank drivers licence, had really got it stuck in my head. It was nostalgic in a way, to visit back on all these old memories. One tank that we both had a passion for were the challenger tanks.

I felt that my drawings though could have gone a lot better and that's something that I need to pick up on, perhaps over the holidays, so that I am at a good enough level for this course. Besides the negative, I had fun and I hope something like this comes up soon.

Coding an Automatic Door on Unity

Now that we had the light switch working, our next objective was to get a door coded to open automatically when we are are near. This is one thing that I was worried about, at this stage I feel that I should have some sense on how Unity and Coding works, but still it seems lost to me, though by doing the work that has been sent to us, along with the help of the tutors, I'm sure soon, that it will all make sense.

This lesson was all about following what was done by our teacher in order to make sure that the code we had created was working perfectly. We started off by following his every step, every dash, every bracket and every full stop.

Getting the door to open.

We first had to get the door to Open, so by selecting the doors that was already made for us, we added a new component which was a new script. Here we named it MyDoor1 and MyDoor2. It was important that we differentiated them from each other, this is because we don't want the doors to move in one direction, they both have to move opposite each other so that it looks like they are sliding.

As I mentioned before we followed our teacher Ewan carefully and made sure that we stuck to the script just as he had put it. After we had created the script which is depicted above, we had to go back into unity and drag both the doors on the different drop down menu's now featured in the script. By linking this with a collider, like we had done in the light switch, it means that when we get within a certain area of the doors they will open automatically.

Getting the door to close afterwards.

There was a problem with the doors though, it meant that every time that we went to walk through it, it didn't close, it stayed open as the code had commenced. What we needed to do was to go back into our code that we had down earlier and make the door close after you had left the collider (trigger).

This was actually more simple than I thought it would be. It involved us just trying to copy the code that we had already done on the doors opening and pasting it again as its own code. The next thing, using the collider was to say that as soon as the player had left it, we would close the door. Just by changing the numbers to reverse and changing the factors from true to false and false to true, we were set.

The end result.

We then had the finished result,which was actually quite fun to create. This something that came out quite stunning as you cant believe that computer game designers put this much effort into doing something so small such as opening a door.

As mentioned above, I'm finding coding a bit of a struggle, though today has really taught me new and exciting things which I would love to put into my own level.

Shading in Photoshop

Today was quite an important lesson for me. We were going to learn how shading works on different areas of an object. As I have mentioned before, I really do struggle when it comes to this side of digital drawing. I find this quite strange as I have never really done that bad when it comes to regular drawing on a sketch book, its just transferring those skills over to the computer which seems to be my biggest problem.

We started off by watching a half an hour tutorial by a famous concept artist. It was interesting to see what he was saying, as he obviously came from the industry and knew what he was talking about.

After the video had finished, we took what he said and transferred it onto an activity that had been set to us by Steve. The aim was to get these two cubes and do them as two different types of shading that had been shown to us in the video.

My finished result.

What I did was create a scale of all the different types of grey ranging from pure white to pitch black. As you can see I measured them from percentage. This tells you the amount of black that was put into each white to create the grey.

You use the lightest grey on the opposite side of the shadow, then on the darkest side you separate it by 50%. The shadow is ten percent lighter than the darkest side, withe the top being 20% darker than the lightest side.

This has been good for me. Its helping understand how to shade much better, though, I do have to do a lot more practice, if I am ever to get good at this. It will be a long task, but it will be worth it for the end result. 

Rigging and Animating a Star Wars Death Star Turret

The lesson that we were going to be doing today was vital for me to learn, we were going to be animating the Death Star turret that we created on Maya and getting it to look like it was shooting rebel scum.

This idea was quite interesting to me as I do like what we are doing in Maya already but this can only further my skills and push me that little bit further into becoming a computer game designer. Also if there was any reason in the end that I chose not to go into video game design, I can easily use the skills I've learnt here to go into other directions such as animation.

The animation itself was actually quite simple, all we had to do is get all the different sections of the turret that we wanted to move and create sub groups to stick that in. We then would right click in the corner and lock each of their axis except for the one that we wanted to move.

Then all we had to do is press ctrl + S, to start recording using key frames, so when we wanted the base to move, we would rotate that, or if we wanted to slide the barrels, we would just just move them up and down, all the while pressing ctrl + S.

This is the animation that I created:

Life Drawing - Lesson 7

We started off by having our usual quick three sketches, the last two I wasn't happy with.

We were then going to fill the body with different shades.

We were then asked to use just one tone to completely fill the picture in. This one I was fairly happy about.

I continued the trend, this one I'm not so happy with.

This picture is me trying to incorporate all of the skills together.

I finished off with a quick 5 minute sketch.

Insect Concept

We had several lessons and homework's in character design. It was now time for us to put it into practise. Steve told us that we would be evolving this assignment around the idea of an insectoid. To truly understand what it was that Steve wanted us to do I went to do some research on what is an insectoid and what of our favourite T.V creatures are actually closer to insectoids than we think.

I first started off by researching what an insect is, the definition that I got when I went onto the internet was:

Any of a class of arthropods with well-defined head, thorax, and abdomen, only three pairs of legs, and typically one or two pairs of wings.

This was a very good description of what an insect was, it helped make me decided what body features I should put onto my insectoid. The "oid" that's at the end of the creature is mainly associated with human features such as arms, the hight of a character and its legs. I know that I have to create an insect creature that has human features on it, as mentioned above, in order to get the target that we are looking for.

My mind map of insectoids.

I then proceeded to create my usual mood board. This was so I could get to grips with what an insectoid was and famous examples of insectoids. When I started to research them, I discovered some pretty interesting concepts, that I didn't even realise that fell under this category. For one you can tell that they all pretty much have the same sort of features. they have two legs and two arms, much like that of a human. You can also see that they have lots of elevated positions on them, such as their head and parts of their arms.

Famous Insectoids part 1

The next thing that I did for this project was to find out out my favourite movie and video game insectoids that were actually really famous. I first kicked off this section by mentioning the soldiers for the Arachnids in Starship Troopers. These were insectoids mainly because they had the mind of a soldier, that's what they were created for. The four legs on these creatures, along with its tank-like shell, doubled the size of an average human and that one factor I need to consider, what would be the size of my version and how would it mount up when it came face to face with a human.

Another one that I would like to mention were the engineer type bugs that feature on the Mass Effect video game series. This bugs are so peaceful, that they wont even interact with other species, just so they don't cause any conflict. This is something that I could include within my final drawing, something that is so innocent, it wouldn't touch I fly. One thing that I defiantly do want to achieve, is to give my character a purpose, just like that of the engineer. It has one job and one job only.

Famous Insectoids part 2

As you can see from the images above, I have researched some pretty famous characters in my time of doing this project, The first two are some of my favourites and they are the creatures that feature throughout the Alien film series. The first one is of the actual alien that features in the film, it is the main protagonist and very much looks like that of an ant. It has lots of squares on its body and is very formidable, like some insects, it has a defence mechanism of acid blood.

The other creature that features is a face hugger. This has the body of stick insect which is very noticeable, I think I really appreciate this creature as it has an insects instinct. It lays eggs into the mouth of the of the humans so they can eat their way through and gain the hosts nutrients.

Rough designs part 1.

Here I began to sketch my ideas of what my final design looked like and I have to say, I was pretty impressed with the results. To start I had this idea in my head of a demon like bug creature. I thought that by combining the top of a distorted boatfly head with a scary demon like bottom half of the head. The results of this were actually better than I expected and was pretty proud with what I had created. This time I had really emphasised on the shading and by doing this, I was surprised with the end results. If I were to do this one again, I would add saliva to his mouth, adding more realism to the picture.

The next picture that I drew was adding the arachnid aspect to the insectoid. What I tried to do was add as much elevated shells as possible, giving a human like appearance. This one I’m a bit disappointed with as  It started off really well, the face came out nicely, but I feel that the body and the arms were way too rushed. The face I would keep the same but when it comes to body and the arms, I would have added a lot more detail to it.

My final.

The last drawing that I did for the project was something new. As I hadn't yet really delved into a female character, I wanted to move in this direction, so that I had variation in my sketches. I first started off with the head. Now looking at insects, you cannot tell one apart from another,  only specific characteristics separate them from genders and that’s something that I wanted to include in this  drawing. I first created an insect looking face, complete with pincers and deep black eyes. The next thing to do was create a body to complete the character. As mentioned before, I wanted to create a female character, so I would add human characteristics, such as the female shape and long legs. For a final design, I’m actually pretty proud of what I achieved here as the shading came out quite well and you can tell instantly that this is a female character, that’s what I was trying to achieve.

A combination of all the designs.

I also had a little try on doing a character design, this is a completely different design from character all together as I was just experimenting with  different designs. I was not happy at all with what I got, especially after my rough and final, so I'm happy to completely cut ties with this drawing.

I did enjoy this drawing session, except for the last one and really did learn a lot of  techniques when I did the assignment and I hope that long may it continue. The only thing negative I must say is that when I go into a character design, I really need to pick up the pace and start to draw a lot better.

Life Drawing - Lesson 6

We started off by creating a sketch of the model only using squiggles. 

We then tried doing straight line drawings, using only straight lines.

Again we were using straight lines.

The last drawing that we had to do was use think black lines to do the outline.

Life Drawing - Lesson 5

The first drawing that we did, complete with a scarf.

The next drawing, leaning against a chair.

We started using water colors, I really didn't enjoy this aspect, as I couldn't add tone as well as with charcoal.

Using thick black lines, for this drawing, we had to emphasis on the curves.

These are three quick five minutes sketches.

Again, we continued with the water colors, still not finding it tasteful.

The last life drawing that we did, I was quite happy with this result and do believe that I'm improving in this department already.

Gas Pump in Maya

We were tasked with following another Lynda.com tutorial. This was quite interesting because this week, we would be texturing. This is something that I'm feeling alright about, The making section of the Gas Pump should be easy enough, it's just past that stage that I'm not feeling too confident about.

I started off with a square, from here I would select the vertex's on the bottom and arrange them into the position that I wanted. I would then extrude this shape and add couple of subdivisions to the top of the pump. By doing this, I could smooth the top over to make it look rounded.

The next thing that I did was select the edges in the middle again moving them and the vertex's into the position that I want. The next thing that I was going to do is extrude those select faces and and push them in a tiny bit, then I had the model of what my gas pump what look like.

We are going to plain map the Gas pump.

Now I have decided that I will smooth the edges, making this as realistic looking as possible, the next thing that I had to do was to plain map the gas pump. This was simple enough, all I had to do was select the faces that I wanted and select plain mapping.

The model was now ready for me to place the texture on top of. So when I tried to place this I got no result. Confused I reset my gas pump on Maya, hoping, I could get this working. After several attempts, I came across nothing, even when I searched the internet. I ended up with this as my final design, which extremely frustrated me.

Me attempting to texture the pump.

I was happy in the way of modeling, that game out really nicely and I'm sure that if I got the texture on it, it would look fantastic, but the simple part of the matter was that I didn't manage it.

I did enjoy it, but I will try and ask why tutor why this didn't work and what I can do to improve it, after all, that's how we learn.

Lining Out Perspective

After we had finished the Apple Tree drawing on Photoshop, we were told that, using the skills that we had learnt during the perspective assignment. This was a quick task at the end of the lesson to see if we had learnt anything. As I had found the assignment easy at finding the horizon point, I thought that this would be right up my street.

The horizon line located at the end of the corridor.

Here the horizon point is at the end of the corridor. The lines that are coming out of it, either match or are close to the actual lines in the picture. They started with this l out line and then did the picture on top. This is 1 point perspective, so the whole picture starts at one point.

This is very useful when it comes to creating an up close piece like the one above. It looks 3-D, like you actually looking at the soldiers coming towards you.

A two point perspective.

I have used a ruler tool to get to grips of where the point will be. As there are two points, I need to make sure that the ruler is at a part where every single line is covered. If you look at the picture above, I placed ruler at the top of the cars, so all the corners fit into the piece, making it perfect. 

This is an interesting way of doing perspective and is found most useful when creating corners and buildings. As the perspective is above the field of view, we are looking up to it, like its bursting out of the page.

A different way of doing two point.

This is a different way of doing the process above, the only difference is that the ruler and perspective points are located above the picture. This is as if we are looking down at something, like in the picture, we are looking down at the spaceship. Steve said to us, its as if you have an imaginary camera and depending on where  you want it, depends on where the perspective points are located.