Bishops, Bishops everywhere....

Hello everyone, I hope you are all enjoying your time on this small corner of the internet :D, I come to you with new models and stuff, as you guys/girls are aware I am currently making a chess board with a full set of pieces well I learn how to rig better since its not easy -_-, but anyway I have already created the Pawn piece as you lot saw last post the finished model and a lovely marble texture after finishing that saucy model I set about doing the next piece the humble Bishop...

I knew this was gonna be harder than the pawn....

The base of the model, the main shape etc wasn't too much trouble the base was the same as the pawns base as well as the neck the different was the collar near the base of the top was where it started getting a little annoying.

The second big problem was the cut, as you can see the Bishop piece has a slit in the top, not actually sure why you chess buffs out there may know please leave a comment with le answer, now it was very hard to do this slit very hard indeed i finally found a way to do it but was left with a bit of a problem. 

Looked good until I zoomed in on the slit its self....

This was the problem that I was greeted with....

The cut had left almost a scar across the slit its self which when renders made it look pretty dam ugly, and sadly so far I haven't been able to fix this well, I did do a fix which got rid of the scaring but left me with another issue....

Bit of a bad render because its not that close and hard to see. "Took the render quickly and without a mouse so it was kinda hard to control the camera" As you can see the scaring around the slit is gone YAY!! however this fix also removed all the detail of the model so now its pretty undetailed  and low poly, useful for a low game feature, not useful for when its on its own and people are viewing it and.... judging it :( hopefully soon I will have a fix which will get rid of the scaring but allow the model to keep its detail if not then the shape is gonna have to be scared.

Till next time.

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Spot of chess anyone?

Hello, hello, hello how is everyone today in today's post I shall be showing everyone my next project that I am working alongside Nigel and its the creation of a chess board with all the pieces etc, and I have created my first model to go onto the board, I started basic and the most common piece on a chess board and that is "The Pawn"

Real life Pawn piece made out of wood.

And now you can compare that to my rendered Pawn piece and it doesn't look too bad at all.

Now it does actually look like the cover to a twilight book which I totally forgot about I didn't even know that I put it in a way which does actually make it look like the render of the cover until I was told by a friend who likes twilight it looks just like it xD "Any authors out there that need covers made for there books *cough* *cough* I am your man!" 

Theres not much to say really about this piece other than it was pretty easy and I think it actually looks pretty sweet so its a sign I guess that I am improving and getting better at this whole 3D modelling stuff which is very very good to hear. Today I am starting the next piece which is the Bishop and is a little bit harder than the simple Pawn to model posts when its done :L I shall leave you with some test renders I did of the model trying to get a good marble texture on the Pawn choose which one is the best I would help me big time I think number 3 is the best buy hey ho.

Texture 1

Texture 2 little bit different to 1

Texture 3

Till next time.

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Ladies and Gents I give you Nigel....

Hello again peoples of the internet, I am back with the update I promised a few posts ago its the finished Nigel model complete with legs and everything !! Like i said before this has been my first time doing a model this big and a human one so forgive any issues, the legs were very very hard for me to do since after struggling for a long time on them I found out I kinda modelled the chest wrong and had to adapt which took me an hour just to get the base shape which left the bottom of the chest all messed up and I had to go back and sort out the chest or put it this way he would have looked like a alien "Not a bad thing xD". Nigel now looks kinda normal his feet may be a bit big I will get around to scaling them down sometime, but for the mean time he serves his roll well a test model for modelling, animation, rigging and if I get around to it sculpting, the next step for Nigel now is rigging which I had a play around with last night and found out its not easy to line everything up and sighing when i remembered the state of his hands when I modelled them the fingers are actually messed up making it hard to get the rig on the fingers hopefully it will come to together in time and we can starting making this dude walk, run, sing, and jump "I kid about the sing part :L".

Before anyone says anything I have already had loads of people say he looks like slender man because of the lack of face XD

As you can also tell from the model I started sculpting basic muscles features as you can tell from the chest area and stomach including along the arms, this is only basic very basic when i finished the model it was pretty late at night and I decided to stop because I was tired so I only did a bit of basic muscle definition.

And that's Nigel at the moment, I will go back and do more like I said at the moment I have started modelling other stuff "Non humanoid things" which I find more easy than a whole character maybe I have found my thing what I am planning on modelling now is chess pieces to go onto a board I finished the Pawn piece last night it took only about 10 mins to model so I hope that proves I am getting better "Granted it then took another 10 mins to re make it since i deleted it instead of saving it -_-" I shall do another post sometime which the Pawn renders and such. Anyway before I go I will leave you will some test rigs screens where I was trying to line it up.

Till next time.

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Glass Effects nailed!!!

Hello everyone two really good pieces of news i have finished Nigel he now has legs and feet and can run and dance like a real boy, I am gonna get a post up sometime soon with the finshed screens some low polys and high polys etc, most likely the weekend when I hope to be free the second epic bit of news I think i have finally nailed how to create perfect glass I may put up a little tutorial of how I did it as well which may look good for the EPQ and plus it would be nice to make something so I don't forget how to do it, hell one day I could be working for a big company like Valve and they could demand a glass effect made :D "Wishful Thinking" so yes in short it would be helpful and plus I can help out anyone else out their that wants to make a sweet looking glass effect in blender. So thats it for this little post enjoy the glass effect screens below.

Sorry for the lack of screens its late at night I am very tried -_-

Till next time.

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Human body

Ladies and Gentleman Let me introduce you to.......... "Drum roll please"

Nigel!!! Why did I call him Nigel I hear you scream! "Well the answer to that is its a classy name :D and its what a classy model needs". I have decided to make this my main model for my project hopefully if everything goes right with it i will be able to rig it successfully and animate the classy devil ;)

Not that classy devil...... -_-

I started him today sometime in the afternoon and that's how far I got bare in mind this is the first full body model I have made, and its the first humanoid body I have made "Hence why the fingers are a bit messy" Hopefully I will get around to finishing his chest and giving him legs and that sometime this week maybe Wednesday, when he is done the final pictures will be posted up here, I have however taken more pictures than just that one so please enjoy since the first picture is a bit hard to see since its just wireframe as always if you want to see the picture bigger just click ^_^

Very low poly

Mid range poly

Very high poly quite high in fact it lagged my laptop and nearly crashed blender >.<

Test render of Nigel with mid range polycount 

Till next time.

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Characters and stuff.....

Well hello there people of the internet, today's post is going to be about characters and stuff. So as I may have already said my final aim for this project is to model a character, rig said character and animate it, I am slowly starting to find out what I like to do and at the moment it seems like modelling is my love so I may change my project to just making a high quality character and leave out the animation side of it, one of the reasons for this is not just because I like modelling its because i lack good character art to model from since I am not the best drawer in the world, I have asked my friend who is an amazing artist to draw me up some character art to model and he did it however i lost the link he sent me so I cant get the art again >.< since his internet is currently down "saying that I did see him today and totally forgot"


Hopefully I will follow through with my first plan since I have already done planning into it and that lucky if I cant get the art of him there are lots of free character art on the lovely internet which I could use as long as i quote the sources so the examiners don't fail me as soon as they look at it -_-

A lovely bit of character art done by David Revoy for Blender cookies 2011 character modelling tutorials.

Good thing about that lovely bit of art above is its totally free to use, ahh there are kind people on the internet.

After researching enough and reading books I have finally found the correct order of events in a art section of a games studio that involve a 3D artist basically this is the chain.

Concept Artists:

The first line of arty people these guys/gals create the concepts for the characters, weapons, world and draw them up in pen and pencil then scan that drawing into a computer and finish it up on a bit of editing software for example "Photoshop" or "GIMP". "For any examiners out there that think I have put the word GIMP down as a joke I am not joking its actually the name of a piece of editing software see link at the end of the post for proof :)"

Once the Concept Artists have done their amazing work the finished drawings are handed over to the 3d Art team.

3D Artists:

You peeps know mostly what these guys and girls do I talk about them enough, they take the concept art put it into a 3d modelling program like Maya or Blender and make the models for the drawings so for example, one person would make the player character model well the other makes the objects for the player character to hold the finshed models are handed over to riggers.

There's my buddy !

Riggers:
Riggers use a technique known as Skeletal Animation here is Wikipedia's description of the technique: "Skeletal animation is a technique in computer animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called the skeleton or rig) used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh. While this technique is often used to animate humans or more generally for organic modeling, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object — a spoon, a building, or a galaxy." - Wikipedia on Skeletal animation

The characters "rig" or bones are highlighted in green the animation can use these to control the models moves much like a puppet being on a string.

Rigging is a very important stage with out a rig the model would not be able to be animated easily a model needs a rig just like a human needs a skeleton.

And finally the....

Animators:

After the model is made and fully rigged it is handed over to the animator or team to create the animations for the models such as the famous walk cycle It is worth noting that these three jobs in some companies are all handled by one person like wise their could be a few modellers and only a few animators who would take on the role of rigging themselves as well, this is down to the type of studio for example a big company like Ubisoft will have multiple people doing all these jobs because they can afford to pay all the people where as in a indie company where staff numbers are often few staff may be called upon to do multiple roles and its not uncommon for a animator  to rig his/hers own models.

And like i promised last time heres another picture of my current model enjoy :)

Till next time.


Sources used in this post:
http://www.davidrevoy.com/data/images/portfolio/projects/2011-cgcookie/4_Kara_model-sheet_by_David_Revoy.jpg

Image two in this post is a picture of the character Abe from the Oddworld games series and is owned by Oddworld Inhabitants I do not own him or his design and do not intend to use this picture for the purposes of making money the image is used under  The Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
Where the image was found: http://www.411mania.com/game_article_pictures/12313.jpg


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Sintel-hand.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Coke for everyone!!!!

Quick little tease of my next model I am working on now, nothing special little test render trying to get a metal effect working :(

Till next time

Le Verre à vin "The Wine Glass"

Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs, et bienvenue sur le blog aujourd'hui l'entrée.

I was thinking of doing most of today's entry in French for the lulz really and because it fits the subject of today's entry, in the end i settled with the first sentence and title being in French I did put the translation of title next to it because people may have been like i have no clue what a Verre à vin is so i wont read his entry or on the other hand i would attract more French readers :D
As you can tell from the title this post is all about Wineglasses well, "Why wineglasses I hear you cry". Because today i finally sat down and made my first ever 3D model and rendered it, and I am very pleased with how it came out its not 100% perfect but for a first attempt I am quite happy with it.


Please click any pictures you want to see bigger :)


Heres the first screenshot Wireframe Wineglass:

Not totally sure the finally polygon count on this bad boy, since i am new to this i don't actually know how to find this out "Forgive the Noob"


2. Clay Wineglass, normally called clay because this type of model looks like its made out of clay, "Check me out using real terms ;)"

Now you can see much better here that it doesn't look totally like a wine glass as such, it needed to be a little bit different around the top of the glass and would need to be a little longer it kinda looks like a goblet but hey ho I am still gonna call it a wineglass. 

3. Textured Wineglass

Starting to look much better, after playing around for awhile with the textures I finally found out how to create realistic looking glass which you can see in the finally render below I think it turned out really, really good :)

4. Final Render

Not bad for a first time right ? Please be nice criticize if you want just make it nice we all start somewhere, and finally below I am gonna post some other renders i did with colour changes which I did just for tests.

5. bonus coloured renders

Till next time.

My first ever animation!!

Hello everyone welcome back, i finally have something to show everyone, now its nothing amazing or super cool but it is to me, its my first ever bit of simple "VERY VERY SIMPLE" bit of animation its about 10 seconds long and features a torus moving around spinning, shrinking like it said its nothing special but its a start :D please enjoy.  

Till next time