Art Jam (Session 3)

 

Between working on other projects, I also caught up on the third art jam session, which involved taking a character from a television series and another from a video game and fusing them together to create a third character and have them do some kind of activity or pose. The characters that I chose were Jasper from Steven Universe and Undyne from Undertale, and since both are similar with certain aspects of their personalities and interests, I decided to put the resulting character in a fighting stance with a weapon (also a combination of weapons used by both characters).

Jasper

Undyne

To push the design further, I also took elements from both characters' alternate designs and emphasised some of the motifs (with Jasper's being diamonds and taking the heart design from Undyne's spear). I decided to add the background elements as well, as they are also associated with either character and it helped the design 'pop' a bit more. I would've liked to have had more time to put a little bit of extra detail. Overall, I think that this activity was really fun and it's definitely something I'd do again if I had the time.

Art Jam (Session 2)

For the second art jam session, Meg had us completing an 'ink blot' challenge, where we had to make assorted random shapes on a canvas and then make them into creatures and/or people. I found this to be both a challenge and a lot of fun; I find that one of the things I struggle with the most is pushing my shapes and exaggerating features, so this was very good at helping me to do that.

Minor: Orthographs and Finalised Designs

Since my characters are all created from a set of bases, my orthographs required me to sketch them out first before mixing and matching them to create the characters that I wanted:

The final sets of bases for the heads and bodies:

These are the final orthographs for each character; as I was creating them, I took the opportunity to make some final tweaks to designs to correct things I wasn't happy with which will be shown in better detail with the coloured versions below. For these orthographs, however, I decided to show the differences between textures by using a lighter blue colour than the outline and then geometry hidden by the current angle of the character using red.

When modelling the hair onto Kit and Evie, I intend to use the places where fringes/extra strands of hair and where the hair parts as guides on where to separate the geometry.

These are the final designs of each character:

Minor tweaks have involved:

• The removal of tails from the animal characters; since they are seldom seen from angles in which they would be visible nor are they used for expression at all, I thought it unnecessary (and it would likely complicate the process of making and rigging separate body bases if I had to have multiple of each just for tails pertaining to each character's species). 
• I wasn't happy with the proportions of the characters in the last set of their designs, so I went back in and tweaked it a bit with the bases.
• I made smaller changes to individual designs (particularly in regards to fur patterns) to compensate for the losses of the tails as well as human hairstyles so that they are slightly more appropriate for 3D modelling. Detailing for clothing will also be better suggested through texture (drawing on hemlines and the like).
• I went back and revisited my idea of making Alice into a dog following merging her design with Violet's; since the imbalance of dog versus cat characters was bothering me, I decided it would be best to make it so there was an even split. 

For the 2D characters and versions of 3D characters that only appear in photographs, I still followed through with using the orthograph bases I'd made for myself so I could see how they compared with the others, and so I could put their art into a newer version of the lineup I'd made previously. Characters here include Renée (Kit's old best friend) and human versions of all of the classmates. 

As for the finished lineups, I made three separate versions for my art of; one with every single character design (including both human and non-human versions of the same character) and then human and animal designs.

Toolkit 3: Photogrammetry: Projection Mapping 2 (Part 7; Complete)

 The next tutorial involved continuing from where the previous one left off; by taking the exported .tif file into Photoshop and editing it to make it fit convincingly with the combined wall and ground shape.

Bringing the file into Maya by applying it to the wall and ground shape, and then altering the second shot camera's position for the first keyframe and then re-keying it to accommodate for these changes.

Setting up a 'software' light to be rendered using the Maya software without having to edit the directional light already existing in the scene by duplicating it and assigning it to a layer, and then placing a lambert texture (renamed to 'Shadow_Catcher') on the objects in the scene and adjusting its settings. 

Changing the render settings and then taking a test render through Maya software.

Adjusting the Shadow_Catcher shader's settings, adding the blocking planes from earlier back into the shot, and duplicating one of the corner pieces to move it to the side to create a more convincing shadow.

Exporting the information out to take it into Photoshop.

Opening the exported file and the file that I was working on before in Photoshop, pasting the exported shadow onto the canvas, and then setting its layer to multiply before lowering the opacity. This was then duplicated and parts of its edges erased to create a better-looking shadow. 

Dragging the updated texture back onto the wall and ground shape.

Reapplying the shaders to the container, making a new one to add to the blocking planes so they fit better with the rest of the container, deleting the software light and then bringing the spheres back into the scene.

Setting up some render layers and then rendering them out using the render sequence options.

Opening the renders in After Effects and changing the settings from 8 bits per channel to 32.

Continuing to work on the composition by putting in the different sequences, and editing them to better fit with each other. This is done by changing layer types, adjusting opacity settings, and adding effects such as exposure.

Toolkit 3: Photogrammetry: Projection Mapping (Part 6)

 Monday's lesson had us continuing with the Photogrammetry tutorials. The first step of the next video had us deleting all of the render layers that we'd made before as well as putting everything in the scene onto separate layers. 

Setting up the rest of the scene by adding loops to the wall, deleting faces from the ground plane, and combining the meshes together before merging the vertexes together.

Setting up a surface shader on the objects and inserting the original lens corrected image as a projection.

Editing the projection and camera projection attributes.

Laying out the UVs.

Setting up a new camera and keying two different positions in the scene. 

Baking out the container body and background (wall and ground) into tiff files.

The results: