Common Art - Week 5 - Composition

Reference from Sparth, more of his work can be found at https://www.artstation.com/sparth

 

Here we focused on composition types while also taking a look at a variety of artists and trying to incorporate a part of their style into our illustration. I really enjoyed Sparth's designs revolving around sci-fi environmental pieces and really enjoyed how visible his brush strokes were in all of his pieces. 

I decided to make a radial composition of a space station built into an asteroid that had a spaceship crashing into it. I started off creating a proxy composition inside of Maya and getting some basic idea of what lighting might look like. I toned down the brightness of the orange light in the final scene as it felt like things got a bit blown out in a number of areas. I feel like overall I missed the mark quite a bit and it didn't come out that well.

3D Art - Module 2 Week 5 - Cannon

This is the beginning of a 3 week long project creating a game ready model of a cannon. I decided to go with a sci-fi cannon. I have a pretty good start for the low poly although I am thinking of some small changes I may make to simplify it. I have some turbine fins that I placed that I might remove as it is extra detail that isn't super important along with some areas to remove from the low-poly and get put into the normal bake.

Here is the wireframe. There currently is 14116 faces / 28102 tris.

These are the references I have been using and basing my model off of. I am taking bits and pieces from a variety of them for the barrel shape, the array of panels, and the leg components. I like the industrial look but I didn't want to lean into it too heavily and introduced some smoothness to parts. I also ended up steering away from the bottom 2 images 

Common Art - Week 4 - Use of Basic Lighting

This was a lighting study done using a screenshot from UE5 with primitive shapes and a 3 point lighting setup using lumen and then using it as reference to paint inside Photoshop. The shape outlines were traced over directly from the screenshot but all painting was done using it as a reference. I approached the shading in a similar non-destructive approach as the contrast assignment using many solid color layers, masking them, and using a variety of blending options. Overall, I think I matched the screenshot fairly well though there are definitely some areas, such as the green triangular prism, that didn't work out as well.

3D Art - Module 1 Week 4 - Blueprints

 

We started to dive into Unreal Engine 5's blueprints this week and started to gain a basic understand of what they are capable of. We started with basic movement using the event graph and being able to alter the starting attributes via variables. The goal was to take the environment created last week, bring it into UE5, and add motion to it.

Common Art - Week 3 - Value and Contrast

For this assignment, we took a piece of linework and shaded it non-destructively. I decided on an environment piece which turned out to be very challenging and time consuming but exciting to work on. This is the first time I have done shading in photoshop but using solid color layers and masks felt familiar with the process of texturing in Substance Painter so the concept was easy to grasp. 

3D Art - Module 1 Week 3

For the initial part of the assignment, we went about setting up a sample hierarchy that could show animation. This was more to show the parent - child interactions and not a proper rig. We then took the model and put it into UE5 to test some basic materials and taking a look at how emissive materials interact with Lumen.

For the last part of the assignment I created an environment primarily using primitive shapes as well as some customized but still simple shapes. I went with a sci-fi lab for my environment. I intend to have a the lasers (red objects) the glass containers (blue spheres), and the cameras (the small black cylinders hanging from the roof) animate. I have a couple of other thing I may animate though I would like to see how they look first.

 

Here is all the reference images used to establish the environment. There were a couple of other things I would have liked to make though limited time meant I had to cut out some of the extras.

Common Art - Week 02 - Use of Silhouettes

 

The goal was to create a house that might be seen as part of Valhalla from the Poetic Edda. After researching medieval Nordic houses, I came to these designs. There were a lot of triangular or slightly rounded triangular roofs and then rectangular bodies for the houses. There was also the occasional round structure though much rarer. Most of the structures were made using wood though there was also some that had attachments made of stone so I put columns and archways on a number of designs. Overall, I wanted to get the feeling that people would live in this house in groups and be fairly communal but also be strong and sturdy while also representing the warriors that would live in them.

Module 1 Week 2 - Basics of Topology

We went over some basic tools for modeling and how to apply them. We also went over the basic idea of smoothing and how to incorporate it.

 Here we expanded on smoothing and how to use it to create paneling for separation between parts of an object. We also looked at some material setting to help us better understand how exactly the form existed in 3D space.

In this section, we went over some basic curves and nurbs tools and then how to get to a poly model out of the nurb. We also used a couple more tools to expand on the poly model afterwards.

For the final section, we took a robot model provided for us to edit. We used parts of the robot to kitbash and expand on the design. We also needed to add some modeling on top of it of which I decided to create a model based on a couple 2D railgun concepts I came across and then combined parts together.

Common Art - Week 1 - Use of Basic Shapes

 

2D is not my strong suit however these are my attempts at some creature designs focusing on shape language. I decided to go with a series of turtles so that I could focus on the shapes and push them into different directions while working with the same animal.

The first turtle ended up being a bit of a happy accident. When I started adding circles to the shell to represent the scales, I felt like it started to resemble a mushroom, specifically the fly agaric. I decided to try and push it more in that direction with the shell while keeping the rest of the body and legs round.

For the second turtle, I wanted the shell to feel like it had mounds of rock on the shell with the shell itself overall being squarish like a box turtle. Overall the shapes feel a bit weird and it feels really boxy. I tried a couple different ways of blending the colors so it felt a little bit softer but I don't think I quite hit my goal.

For the third turtle I referenced a snapping turtle but felt the spiky shell alone didn't really stylize it much and just felt like a normal turtle. I tried putting more triangles in the head and legs but got varying success. While trying to make the legs have some thickness I think I ended up losing the triangle shapes. I also think the feet and shading in that area didn't work out so well. The head worked out a bit better though it could still use some work.