Fashion Videos

As I have a job with a clothing company over the summer, I have recently come across s really nice fashion video that I like the look of. I when it comes to me shooting the video for blazewear. I dont want to just place the models in front of the camera, make them stand still for a few seconds and then walk off. I want it to be a bit more dynamic which is going the whole video more attractive. I have to make sure I don't think too much about how the shots look, I need to keep in mind how I am going to show off the garments. 

PPP Lectures

If their was one thing that I have struggled with most this year, It would have to be Most things we talk about during the lectures of PPP. At the beginning of the year, the first few lectures that I went to, I was just unable to keep up, trying to write my notes down and listen to what is being said at the same time made me forget what I was suppose to be writing down. I then started to use my laptop during the lectures which allowed me to follow the lectures easier being able to get more notes which was good. I was never able to write about how our lectures followed our course areas and write blogs posts about it all efficiently. It is something that isn't an easy job for me and next year I will more than definitely une the student support a lot more often to allow them to go through my notes with me.

Social Media (Lecture)

Social Media has become part of our culture. Today their are not many businesses out their that haven't got access to some sort of social networking website such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked in. Social media is portrayed in a bad way in some ways because its something that our generation have grew up with and in some ways have become to dependent on it. Their are many pro's and cons of social media, the pros being it is very easy to connect with someone wherever they are around the world. Its quick, simple and in a lot of cases, people check their Facebook a lot more than checking their emails. Its just a great way to meet and chat to people you wouldn't be able to go face to face with very easy and have a conversation with them. Something as simple as a comment on one of your favourite film makers videos can lead to a conversation about your own work and its even a chance to get some critical feedback which could be very beneficial coming from someone of their status.  A few weeks back, I posted a comment on one of my favourite film makers video that he shares on Facebook. A conversation arose and it lead to a professional Flatland BMX riders Keelan Phillips contacting me about including him in one of my next music videos. I haven't got round to fitting him in one of my videos but he handed over his number to me and told him to contact him if he was needed. Opportunities like this, in particular, wouldn't arise if it wasn't for the social media and its networking.

Cyriak

When we had the lecture from the animator, It was great to hear how a professional animator works. I didn't know nothing about Cyriak before this lecture so I didn't know what to expect and I was really surprised how laid back he was and how 'normal' his working routine is. Nothing much different to how one of us students works. Sat at his desk, looking on the internet, grabbing inspiration from interesting things he comes across. 

        

  

Pay Rates

From the last couple of jobs I have had outside of Uni time such as the wedding video and the Ministry of Sound video, I have had to sit and have a think about how much I am charging people and am I charging the correct amount. At first I knew that I would have to charge cheap rates as I would look stupid turning up to my first wedding shoot charging 600 pounds and handing over a piece of film that wasn't worth what they paid. For my first wedding, I charged 200 and I feel good that I have put together something that a lot of people have told me that it is worth the money. I no I have probably lost out of money as its took me a very long time to edit but allows me to go to the next wedding and charge more knowing the quality of work that I will hand over will be worth what I am charging. For the my next job with Ministry of Sound which is on the 6th June, I am getting £150 which I am very happy with but I think I should limit the time I spend on the edit to ensure I am earning a decent amount for the amount of hours I am spending on the work. Last time I spent far too long going back and forth changing bits and bobs which meant more hours I was spending messing around, I was losing out on money.

Steadicam

From the last few film projects that I have been involved in, in and out of Uni time, I have found that not having some sort of rig to steady the camera shots has really made a difference in how I wanted the shots to look. In some cases there is no need for a steadicam or a glidecam, but it has come to my interest lately, of getting in one of the professional steadicams. It is something that I really want to try as I know when its used well, the outcomes can be absolutely beautiful. I have looked on a few websites just to get an idea about what sort of procedures you have to go through to get trained as a steadicam operator. Not so much now, but in the future. 

Ministry of Sound Summer Tour - Working to strict guidelines

On the 6th June, The summer tour for Ministry of Sound begins and that is when I hop on the tour bus with them as theirs official videographer. I am told that their is guidelines that I have to work to which include obviously the things they want to see in the videos with all the correct logos, tabs and most importantly they want the nights to look as fun, busy and exiting as they can be. Im still waiting for the guidelines to be emailed over to me but I suspect from looking at other ministry videos I should think their will be some sort of interview which will mean I need to think about sound recording. Sound from my 550D wont be a very good standard so Im thinking about taking out an XD Cam as the sound from them is very good. The video below is an example of what I think will be expected. Its clean and includes everything that is needed. The sound is good from the interview and from the club shots which is essential.

I have been sent over all of the logos and graphics that the ministry team must have which they can use for the videos. Some of those are needed, some of them are just their if we feel we need to use them.

 

Job for clothing company

Last year I helped model a few garments for a clothing company called Blazewear. Blazewear is a worldwide company now who produce heated clothing for all different kinds of needs. Sports, including golf, horse riding, skiing and also produce garments for everyday winter use. I was approached by Phil Shaw, the founder of Blazewear and I have been asked to shoot a video to promote the clothing range which will feature on their brand new website. The job is booked for the summer so I have got plenty of time to come up with some ideas to not make the video too boring. What I want to really ensure is that the focus is on the products that are trying to be sold. A lot of videos I have saw, they are very focused on the models and not enough on the products. 

Skins - Connecting with your audience

Over the past couple of weeks, I have sat down and watched series 3 and 4 again. The last time I did watch both of these series, I didn't come close to thinking about the analytical side of tv series. I just watched it and never thought about it after. This time round watching series 3 and 4, I had much more of an emotional response. People will say that the tv show is a bit far fetched and over the top but we still get to know these characters really well and we connect with them even more because they are around the same age as us which means probably a lot of things that happens in each show, a lot of us have experienced something simular. Taking away all the drugs and getting 'wasted' I think the most powerful message that skins delivers, is the way they portray relationships between each other and their families. Many of us have experienced their first 'love'  through their teenage years, which is why I find the story of Emily and Naomi so powerful and all of the way through both series, all we want is for both of them to be together. I do think if this show was aimed at an older audience, I don't think the message, or even the whole point of the tv show would be understood half as much. 

Sound in UNITY

Due to time constraints, I knew my sound design wasn't going to be what I wanted. I just wanted to make sure I got an initial sound in the main area to give it a bit more atmosphere when walking around. I wanted to give it a silent feel as if no one is around but with the sound of nature in the background. From looking and playing other games. I realise now how important sound design is. Just from putting the 1 sound into my game level, It has improved it a great deal.

Terrain Assets from UNITY

Due to lack of time, I used some terrain assets which Annabeth recommended to download from the unity website. If I was to attempt to create my own tree, it would have took me a long time due to the style in which I wanted them. So i used one of the trees that came with the assets package. Also due to something going wrong with one of my own mesh's from maya which was grass I used one of the plants also from the package. The problem was, when i walked over the grass, it randomly shot me in the air. This did it on most of my groups of grass so I removed them because of this.

Working in UNITY

When I took my maya models into unity, their was only a small amount of things I needed to do before it was more or less finished. I used the unity which was free of the unity website which meant that I couldn't work on the college's Unity. That wasn't so much of a problem, it was the fact that the version that I used to create my game level, wasn't the pro version which meant that I couldn't use many of the 'pro' assets. The only one that I really needed was the water. I had done too much work on the terrain and other parts of my surroundings to just import everything onto a new unity project on the pro version at college. If it was a week before, I would have done so but due to time constraints, I had to just leave it without water. I also wasn't able to have shadows which was a bit annoying. Shadows were a part of my main plan to give my environment the look I wanted but since then I realised I couldn't do so, I changed the colours and the time of day which made up for not being able to have shadows.

More Assets (lights)

As my environment is quite dark, I think having some sort of street lights to light areas up will be a nice touch. That is why I went back into maya and modelled these lights to go in my scene.

I then attached two point lights to each light and added a flare to each point light to give it more of an actual lamp effect. Im also going to model a light which will go on my porch roof lights up part of the house and area around it. At the minute I have just got a point light in but no source, so its just a light floating. 

Thierry Doizon

I love this piece of concept art especially by Thierry Doizen because of the mood he has created in the scene. In both images it feels like their is no one around and it feels quite creepy. The way he has included the street lamps with a slight bit of fog to make the lights flare slightly in the top image gives it a real sense of realism. Also reflections in both images really tell us a lot of about the scene, we know it has been raining, more than likely cold and damp. Little things like these can make a huge difference in your pieces of concept art so next time I come to do a concept painting, these are the things I am going to think about more.

Terrain Tool

As i mentioned in a few blogs before this on, A lot of my scene has been modelled in maya so I wasn't going to rely on using the terrain tool too much. One thing I found handy using the terrain tool was for the starting point of the game level. I wanted to create some sort of walk way which leads you to the main area. I made the terrain rise really high and then made the brush smaller and put the opacity right up and then lowered a track into the risen part of the terrain. I am happy with the track I have made, but now I need to work on the texture of the walls as at the minute, its just stretched grass. 

I have also used the terrain tool just to show a closure in the area behind all my big trees. I chose a really thin brush which hopefully would have gave the effect of more trees in the distance. I might add a few more trees as well just to disguise the terrain in the background. 

Particles

To add to that magical/fantasy look, I wanted to add some sort of particle effect which would look a bit like pixies, or fire flies. I had a play around in unity with the sparkle particle effect. Not being that familiar with particles, It took a while to get it how I wanted it to look like but with a long time spent playing around with the values in the inspector, I got it just how I wanted it to look.  I was thinking about making a little log fire to go in my environment and using the preset fire particle effect, but it didnt fit in very well with the rest of the environment. 

Bump Mapping

Because I didn't bump map anything in my animation module, Bump mapping was brand new to me in this module. I knew that bump mapping was something that would turn my game environment from good, to great.  In the image below, the bump map was too high which means I have to turn it down slightly to get the look I wanted.

From looking at other games for example gears of war games, I spent an hour looking around some of them environments, and i could notice parts of the scene that has been bump mapped. But if you didn't take much notice of this, you would think that it was all modeled that way to make things pop out. 

Texturing

From looking at peoples blogs from our class, I can see that a lot of people have done a lot of work on the texturing in photoshop. Working over images from the internet or even painting the textures themselves. This is something that I wish I have done more now, now I more or less at the end of finishing my environment. Not that mine doesn't look very good, its just I no I could have really brought the boots texture out by hanging the tone of the leather here and their and work on the shading a bit more.

Texturing

When I knew what my plan was for my game environment, the one thing that was worrying me was texturing. As the two main parts of my scene are odd shapes, I knew it would be a challenge for me so it wasn't something I was looking forward to doing. When it came to it I knew that I was going to have to unwrap it in a certain way and to be honest I wasn't that much of a hard job, it was just knowing what way to unwrap it which was the hardest part. Which the Boot being the main asset in my environment, I knew that I was going to have to make a really good job of it for me to get a successful looking game environment. If i didn't make a good job of it, the whole environment would look, cheap, boring and wouldn't make people want to walk around the area.  

Below is the UV map for the boot itself. You can see I broke the book up into simple shapes so it would be easy for me to texture. For the front of the boot which is very round, almost a sphere, I used the spherical mapping, It unwrapped the front of the boot first which was the front and two sides, and then i mapped the top of the front of the boot second which then allowed to me to join the two together to allow me to texture it easier. If i didn't join them together, the would have been a chance that I would have had seams running through the front of the boot. For the rest of the boot I took separate projections from different angles and then put them close together on the UV map so I wouldn't have much trouble matching up the textures for each part of the boot. Below to the right is the textured UV map that I used for my boot. As you can see, because I placed everything close to each other and UV mapped the boot efficiently, it was very easy to texture and gave me a result I am very happy with.

I didn't have much trouble with the roof as all of it was pretty much taking different projections from different angles, which needed different textures applying to each.

Andrew Shek

Recently when looking on F**K yeh concept art, I came across this work by Andrew Shek which really stood out for me. I love the definition in each character, from the colours to the actually character design. It is also quite a simular style to my character that I have made. Very precise lines and a blunt, bold colouring style. 

Colour

For my game level I was starting to think about colour and what colour I wanted my surrounding to be. For my idea of having this big old boot as a house and the surroundings being huge trees, I thought of the fim Avatar. We see these big beautiful locations that have trees hundreds of metres high fulls with lots of beautiful colours. This is something that caught my eye straight they way so I had a play around the the colour of some Point lights in unity and placed them in the trees. I wanted my environment quite dark so I dont want much light from the trees hitting the main part of my scene which is the boot. Also I want to keep it quite dreamy and relaxing so I cant go too dark also. 

Final Crit Feedback

On thursday, we had our final crit which involved us playing each others games and then leaving some notes for them to look over and make ammendments before the deadline. Here are the notes that I got back from my class. I have find them really useful even tho I was getting close to finishing my game environment. Their are things that I have changed from this feedback I got. Things that I didn't recognise myself, others picked up on which could be vital in most circumstances. It was also good to see everyone else's work to see how they have worked and what they have produced in the same time as yourself. 

I think at this stage of where our group is it when it comes to to crits, doing this sort of crit where we have a 1 to 1 experience with whatever we are having our crit about and then writing things down on paper allows people to express their opinions more clear without worrying about talking in a full class. Obviously that is something people need to get used to, talking in a crit in front of the class as its a crit and its all about helping each other so if theirs something that your not too keen on, it needs to be said.

More Skate Videos

Over the summer I am looking to get involved in shooting some sort of skate/BMX video. But I dont want to go down the obvious route and get a fish eye lens out and do what we see 80% of the time we watch a skate video. I think working with the high speed camera is something I want to incorporate as it can show off the very fine detail in the movements. The video below is very basic but shows off a lot of fine detail in a skate trick. A lot more effective than running around with a fish eye.

This video is from one of my favourite TV documentaries, Concrete Circus and is by an Independent Film Maker, Kilian Martin and what I love about this video so much,  is that it is beautifully shot. n a lot of 'normal' skate videos, shot framing, colour correction, isn't something that is focused on much. As long as the trick is their, the video is 'successful to them'. In the video below, each shot is beautifully composed and we get this from the very first shot when we have a wonderful shot of the skater doing a handstand, whilst balancing on his board with the sunset behind him. 

Ho Tak Lam

I was browsing vimeo the other day and I came across this animation which is the official music video for 'Near Lights by Olafur Arnalds. The video is about the working life of people and what is going on in their lives and how work can make you forget your wish but what is the most important thing. At times you may need to stop and think about your life.

What I love about this piece of animation is how it portrays this message. Showing this man going through life, looking as if its a huge struggle. With it being a silouette of him, we never see his face, which is hard to see his emotion. But in this video we can clearly see what this man is going through and how he is feeling. When he misses the train, we can see from his body language that he is a bit peed off with life and looks like he just wants to give up.

I love the music choice, it picks up pace as we go through and ends up very dramatic. The music speaks for him in a way, because we have no dialogue, I think the music can be portrayed is this man. I have just found out that Ho Tak Lam, the animator of this video, hasn't even graduated yet from a University in Hong Kong. At the minute animation is becoming something that I am really enjoy watching and also enjoy the creative side. In the future I would like to create a music video which is animation based as the outcome can be very effective and also its something that isn't done that much.

'Working after working, it is many people’s life. No time for them to think, dream or even taking a rest. They work for money just like a machine. But where are your dream? Money can make you forgot your wish. Money can takes away all your time. Money can destroy your life. It is the life you are dreaming for?
Rethink your life!'

Halo - Textures

I have been a big Halo player since Halo 3 came out back in 2008 and have always thought the graphics were amazing. I started this course and learnt about textures and I realised when going back to this game that it is the textures what make this game really nice visually. When you looks closer, some maps that you play, they are quite blocky, but due to the well worked textures and bump maps, it makes it looks very detailed. But if you strip all the textures off, the importance of the textures would become more apparent. 

Some parts of scenes where their is suppose to be indents in walls or floors, a lot of the time instead of it actually being modellel that way, the bump map makes it look that will. You can see, bottom left of the screen shot above, that part of the wall, the indent is actually their but if you look at the screen shot below, the walls look like they have indents in them but when you go up close, its actually just a bump map 

This is not just in the scenes. If you looks at the gun, you can see that apart from the obvious bits of modelling on the gun, a lot of it is just a bump map.

More Mood Boards

I thought id put another mood board together looking at some different 'magical forests'. I wasn't too sure on what I wanted my surroundings to look like but now from this mood board I know I want to make it look, colourful and magical. I like the use of blue in some of the images below and I think it could go well with my boot house.

Concept Art

Below is a piece of concept art that I did for my game environment. It isn't very good quality but the full res copy is in my submission disk. Concept art isn't something that I am familiar with but I feel that I am improving each time I do a new piece. This is my second piece of concept art as I changed the layout of my environment. I was half way through finishing it before I changed my layout so my first piece is unfinished. 

Sectors and Services in Leeds

As I am studying DFGA, it is important to keep my eye out of how well the industry is coping. For example, the animation industry is not doing to well, they introduce tax breaks to gain the amount of animators in the country after canada attracted more workers due to the incentives and their early breaks in tax. In the Software, computer games and electronic publishing industry, their are around 723000 people employed within the UK. As the Film Industry grows, 1 VFX house cannot cope as there is too much work out there for them.

• Advertising 

• Architecture 

• Arts and Antique markets

• Crafts

• Design

• Designer Fashion

• Film Video and Photography 

• Software, computer games and electronic publishing 

• Music and the visual and performing arts

• Publishing 

• Television

• Radio

UV Mapping My Hill

For my environment, I wanted to model most of it in maya before taking it in unity. 1 reason being that I am a lot more comfortable with using maya at the minute and also I feel I can do a lot more with my environment manually which im hoping I get a few more marks for. In my scene, I have my boot which sits on top of this little platform. When modelling this, I found it pretty straight forward, at times having to change things to suit the boot but when it came to texturing, it was very challenging. 1 reason was none of it was unwrapped. It was all separate projections from different angles which meant I had to do a lot of going from photoshop to maya to check the different parts of the UV map that I had textured didn't look different. Here below is the final UV map that I used. As you can see, theirs a lot of different textures which made it very difficult to work with having to use the clone stamp tool an awful lot to get things right.

Assets - Game Environment

 For my game environment, i have started to create assets that will be placed around the area. I have just finished texturing a wheel barrow and I am very pleased with the result considering it is my first go at UV mapping properly. I am currently working on a couple of benches for my game which isn't taking me too long

Their was a couple of tricky parts that I found difficult when making this wheelbarrow. 1 was warping the plank of wood to fit around the curved bits of the barrow along the tops. When warping in photoshop at times you can over do it which leaves the image very blurred which
doesn't look that good when you apply the texture in Maya. A bit of fiddling around I finally got it to the best i could make it.

Another hard part was actually taking the UV snapshots which I need to get used to a bit more. I took separate snapshots from each angle but then left them on their own on the UV map which made it hard for me to figure out which bit goes where. Next time I will work it out before hand an sew more of the edges together to make it easier for me to texture in photoshop.

LIMBO - Sound Design

When I first started this course, I wasn't I huge 2d game player. Apart from the old mario games, I never really sat down and played a 2d game. After hearing this huge hype about a game called LIMBO, I thought I should buy it and have a play. I can safely say its one of the best 7 pounds I have spent. From just playing for the first 5 minutes, you are utterly blown away by the sound design. I found myself lost in this world with the character because I had a decent pair of headphones on whilst sat in the dark. At times I found myself jumping out of my chair when any bit of action happened and at times I had to take my headphones off to give myself a break from the tension. This game to me is all about becoming immersed into this world with this little boy who is looking for his sister whilst having to work through a number of puzzles. 

You know this game relies heavily on sound design as if you take your headphones off and play with low volume, the game doesn't have half the effect on you as it does with a set of headphones on white the volume turned up. Every minor sound going on around you, from the atmosphere around you to your own footsteps, it all adds up to, in my opinion, perfection when it comes to sound design.  

Papers Monsters

A couple of weeks ago I bought Paper Monsters of the App Store. It was a game that I was told to play by a few of my friends and I think it is a really fun game. So simple but yet so addictive. You area little cardboard box character going through different worlds trying to collect as many buttons as you can. From your first look you would think 'ahh, a kids game' but infant it can be very very difficult.

Putting gameplay to one side, it is visually beautiful. All the textures and assets are very simple but again really well designed. I like the way things like the grass have been done. Very simple planes with a flat colour on but fits in perfect with the rest of the game. Along with all the other assets of the game. For my environment I am going to keep my assets very simple and as low poly as I can. 

XD Cam vs DSLR

During the wedding that I shot a couple of month back, I was shooting with both a Sony XD Cam and a Canon 7d. My plan was to be able to get as much footage as I could from 2 different angles as I was the only person shooting the wedding. It was the first time using the XD Cam so I was worrying about messing up some of the shots due to me not knowing the camera that well. I was quite familiar with the 7d as iv shot with it a few times and I also have a 550d myself. I had a 50mm 1.4 prime lens and a 17-40mm f4 lens on the 7d which was useful as I could get a variety of shots such as some nice closeups with the prime lens and some nice wide angle shots with the other. The only downside of the dslr on the day was having the two lenses which meant I had to change lenses often and at times their needed to be an instant change of focal length. That is where I thought the XD cam came in very handy. I would be shooting some footage of something close up such as the cake or flowers, but then straight after I would need more a wide angle shot so it was handy to be able to change focal lengths on the camera itself without having to change lenses.

The XD Cam was a lot easier to handle when shooting without a rig and gave me the more steadier shots. Having the 7d in the hand made my shots quite shaky especially when the 50mm prime lens was attached. Here is where some sort of steadicam or glidecam would have come in very handy.

Another great thing about the XD Cam was the sound input. I was wondering before the shoot whether to attach an external mic to get the best sound but I was told the sound that goes straight into the built in mic was very good. Looking back at the clips now, the sound was fantastic. At times maybe i should have raised the level of the sound input as at times its a bit quiet but again I could only do so much on my own with two cameras. Sound for the speeches were just what I wanted. 

The Shoot of the Wedding

With the long wait over, the wedding of Sean and Rebecca came. And I can honestly say it was the most nerve racking moments of my life. I knew attempting to shoot the wedding myself would be a big challenge using two cameras, setting one up on a tripod during the ceremony and having one camera in hand to move about with. Their was a couple of issues I came across during the day but I will cover that In the blog post I write when the video has finished. From this, I have got together with a friend of mine who is a photographer like myself and we have come to a decision that we are going to work together for wedding videos. A few reasons we came to this decision, one being that its very very hard to cover all of the wedding by yourself, having two people in two different places is always very good especially during the wedding ceremony. Also when it comes to the edit, its always great to have a second opinion. Im at the editing stage now and im constantly swapping and changing which is delaying when its going to be finished.

I will write another blog post when the video has finished and I will cover the day in a lot more detail when I do so.

Perfect Presentations

In this lecture, we were being taught how to create and present a good powerpoint presentation. When we think about a powerpoint, it can be very boring and dull, lots of writing and un relevant information. The presentation is all about who your delivering it to, its not something to benefit yourself when delivering. Creating something that Is easy to follow, not something that you have to spend 5 minutes reading 1 slide.  There are certain rules that we try to stick by at this level when creating powerpoints, these are things such as including clipart. It can look very cheap and in most cases its not relavent to the learning. Clip art is more primary and secondary school level. Bullet points at times can be very tedious and quite distracting to the speaker. Adding pictures that is the subject of what you are talking about is more beneficial, or even a video. On our course we tend to do a lot of presentations and I do think after this lecture, taking these points into account, I think it will benefit my outcome.  

Contextual Studies Practical

For my practical side on context of practice I decided to make a video that emphasised how typography can change what the film could be about. I changed a couple of film covers, replacing the text with text that looked like it would be from a different genre. 

Touring with Ministry of Sound

A few weeks back I was invited to go shoot a film on the Ministry of Sound tour to promote 2 of their new residents and to promote the event itself. I wrote a blog post about it a couple of weeks back so this blog post is more about the video itself.

With over 3 weeks of editing, I finally came to a finish with the Ministry video. Being rolled back and forth between myself and the design team at Ministry of Sound, the video went through a lot of changes through from point I thought I had finished. Things such as taking shots with the managers in, our of the video had to be done, taking shots of people who were 'wasted' out of the video. Also adding official Ministry of Sound tabs into the video was something I had to include which introduce the dj's on screen and also the event that is shown on screen. This was all because of Ministry's guidelines that they have that which means every video that is being done for them, it has to meet those deadlines. The editing process was long, but I am very pleased with the result I have got, receiving some very positive feedback from friends and other people who have watched the video but most importantly feedback from Ministry themselves has also been very positive. I have now been asked by them to be on the next summer tour which starts very soon but doesn't kick in 100% till May. To me this is a massive achievement and is something I am looking forward to a great deal. Bonus with it being a well paid job for the summer and hopefully can lead to even more work.

Check the video out, hope you like it and feel free to leave me any positive, negative feedback.   

Visual Communication Lecture

Advanced UV Mapping

For our game environments, we are going to have to at some point, texture an object that isn't a basic square or a simple shape. So we did a lesson on texturing more complex objects using the UV Texture Editor. The exercise that we had to do, I found relatively simple but I made one mistake as you can see in the images of my coloured shape that I a couple of the colours in the wrong place but I know where I have gone wrong in this so it would be easy for me to go back and correct my mistake

The process involved taking a UV Snapshot of each of the sides on the shape and then taking the UV snapshot of all of the sides into photoshop and applying your design/colours to your UV snapshot. We then bring it back into maya and applying it to your geometry through the hyper shade action. When it comes to UV mapping for my own environment, their is going to be a lot work texturing this way to achieve what I want to achieve in this module 

Gem Lim - Concept Artist

When having a look through Concept Art World, I came across the work of Gem Lim. These two images in particular stood out for me because I love how the images themselves are quite dark but the light piercing through the environments gives it a very calm and dream like fell to it and that is what I am looking to create with my game environment. 

Starting to Model

I have started to model my environment in Maya as I feel its the best way I am going to move forward with this module. I started a concept paining but I was struggling to get perspectives right and things didn't look right at all. So i feel moving into maya first and then paining over an image of my maya scene will be a more successful way for me to produce a piece of concept art.

This is the area where the house will be sitting on. Its a raised level of ground which you get get to by walking up the little hill at the front of it. I might have a set of old wooden stars at the side of it to give it something extra but up to now this is what my house (currently modelling) is going to be sitting on. Im thinking of having some sort of natural features on top of here also as it will look very plain and bland with just a flat top and a house bunked in the middle of it.

Ideas for Character In Game Environment

The brief doesn't say that we have to have a character included but I thought to help myself and to give the audience an idea of who lives in my game environment I put together a couple of drawings of 2 ideas I had. These may not be ones that I will use as im going to put some more drawings together soon

More Mood Boards

As iv decided to go down the route of fairytales, I started looking at some houses that you would find in a fairytale environment. I put together a quick moodboard on images that gave me a few ideas. I was interested in the big boot as it emphasises the fact that whoever lives their is smaller than the norm. Which is what my game will be, having smaller people live in the area which us humans as the 3rd person controller has just come across. I like the idea of making shapes of doors/windows relate to who lives their for example in one of the photos the door is pointy like an elves ear or have the roof the same shape as a elf/dwarf hat.

BAF Game

Our trip to BAF Game was a real eye opener for me, not just in the game area, but in general. I was going through a very rough patch with my work and was very very close to leaving because my mind just wasn't set on the course I was on. Going to BAF Game wasn't so much useful to me in a way of learning about the software that the guest speakers were talking about because I knew hardly anything in the first place about the games industry. I went really for a bit of an introduction to see what goes on in the industry and to see just how passionate these speakers were about what they do, really triggered something in me and ever since those couple of days, My mind has been set on my course areas.

We had a number of talks over the couple of days from, designers of big blockbuster games to the people more involved with the educational side of games.

Communication Theory