Take us to your master!

Hello citizens of the world, back to on topic posts after we went a bit off topic last time with that Oddworld Book, however it was a good off topic and kind of important as it was to do with art and 3D art. Anyway I started getting some concepts together for what my final big model could be for my EPQ the model that I would rig up and try to animate which I would hand in along with all my other little models which I am now calling to keep the marker and my EPQ teacher happy "In game assets"

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.

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.

Introductions....

Well hello there, as you can see from the small description under the title of the blog, this is going to be a blog to track my progress during my time on the EPQ course. For those people out there that don't know EPQ stands for "Extended Project Qualification" and is a A-level course my college runs in which you need to complete a project on a subject of your choice it could be anything you wanted as long as you can put a title to it your good!


So i choose to do animation and 3D modelling because its what i want to do at university and its what i want to do as a future career more focused around games than animated films. At the moment i am not too sure how often this blog will be updated but it will be regularly as i am working on my project over the summer holidays so i have plenty of time to work on it. "I say that now but two months is going to fly past! :L" I will posting new stuff i make with screenshots i will explain it and how i learnt it so maybe you guys/gals out there that want to become animators and 3D artists can learn as well we can learn together! :D 


I also suppose i better tell you all why i wanted to become an animator, well for starts i love games, they are wonderful i grew up playing them and still play them to this day, they are one of the ultimate forms of media the player can lose themselves in this created world and become one and really get lost in the sometimes magical and wonderful story's that games bring.
I decided animation and modelling because this is what everyone sees when they play a game they don't see the code and the other things that make up the game they see the models, the characters I wanted my work to be seen by the masses and I wanted to create these wonderful characters that hopefully the player can relate to and form a bond with.


I finally knew i wanted to be an animator when I got a game called "Kingdom Hearts 2" on the Ps2 when I was younger and I watched the opening cut scene to the game and it was just so well animated I wanted to do what they did "Heres the opening to the game if any of you wanted to see it, its pretty epic!!" 

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

Till next time.