Week 09 - Adding materials

As I was looking around in my walking simulator, I noticed that the size of the character in comparison to the objects in the room made it very difficult to tell what things were. As a normal sized character things are more obvious as you can see the whole object, even if it is just a greybox whereas when you are small and on the floor, everything just looks the same.

I decided to download some free material packs from the asset store. We aren't supposed to texture as it would take too long but I felt I needed at least some basic materials in my game. You can't select faces in Unity so when you add a material, it adds it to the whole object. Because of this I went back into Maya and separated some faces from objects such as the floor and part of the lights.

In this screenshot you can see that I used a glass texture for the window. I needed this to bring some light into the room as even with lights it was too dark. Unity has a pre installed glass effect which I had previously tried using. It made the object see through but it was completely invisible and did not look like glass at all so I decided to use the one from the pack which looks like it has a rough glass texture.

I added a metal material to the key as before it completely blended into the book underneath and most people who tested the game completely walked past it. One problem I found is that the materials stretched on each face causing strange patterns like what happened here. I also had the same problem when adding a material to the sofas. I don't think this will be too much of a problem as it is only supposed to be a greybox in the first place.

Week 09 - Life Drawing

First off we did five 3 minute  poses. I arrived a little late so didn't have time to start the first one.

We looked at perspective in this session. There were some pieces of paper on the floor around the model which we could use to help find the horizon line and vanishing point. Unfortunately I didn't use these and went straight in to drawing the figure with just a basic idea of where the horizon line was. I added the paper after but found it much much harder this way round.

In the next pose I very lightly sketched the paper on the floor (though you can't see it clearly in this photo). Using pencils made it much neater and more accurate, though this also means it takes more time to draw.

In this picture you can see the lines better. I'm actually quite with this as it is very accurate. My usual problem is placing the feet and proportions as I can't always tell where I should be drawing parts.

Next we drew around the figures and added the detail to the rest of the room. This was a lot of fun and a good way to quickly understand perspective.

Lastly we were allowed to do whatever we wanted. As I hadn't used a felt tip before but had seen others use it, I decided to have a go.

I wasn't feeling very good and couldn't bring myself to add much detail as I usually do so this was a great way to very roughly draw the body.

Week 09 - Value, Form and Lighting - Armored Tank

During this week's lesson we watched a video on lighting.

We were given a blank image of these boxes where we used what we learned from the video to colour them in. This was really useful as I'd never learned these rules before.

Our assignment was to create an armored tank to show what we learned. I created a mindmap of some tanks to help with my design as I'm not good at machinery.

Using features from different tanks in the mindmap I made a sketch of a tank.

 Next I made the lineart. As I made most of the lines straight, I held down shift on Photoshop to ensure a neat image.

 I used fill to colour each section as the lineart was already neat enough to use.

 Without the black lines it is easier to see the form of the tank.I made lots of slanted and odd ledges so it was difficult to work out what shade each part needed.

Although I didn't fully paint it this was good practice as I had to keep in mind which direction the light was coming from and work it out as I went along.

Week 09 - Axe Prop

Today I decided to work on some of my props for my battle arena.

 I started sketching an axe and a sword, as I had included weapons in my mindmap. I knew I wanted some sort of Celtic design/pattern on it so I tried some out. Next I made a quick model in Maya. I left it relatively simple to keep the triangle count as low as possible as most of the detail could just be added on with a texture.

 I rendered the model in Maya and saved the picture. I then opened it in Photoshop, copied it twice and edited the levels to make it clearer to see.

I wanted to think about what sort of designs I could use without having to sketch it out each time or texture it and found painting over the model in Photoshop to be very quick and helpful. I thought of what both a wood and metal axe would look or leather parts on the metal. I like how all of these look though I feel I could add more Celtic style patterns in the metal to make them all look like they are part of the same scene.

I will definitely use this again, probably for sketching the patterns on the fountain or column.