Week 16

The first week back after the Christmas holiday, jumps right back to where we left off with another lecture this time on advanced modeling in Maya. Chris showed us what edge loops were, I had used them before for a different purpose to what I would assume is the correct way which is to determine the smoothness of an edge in Maya. When explained during the lecture what they were I didn't really realise what there purpose was but after,during my workshop that followed the next I soon began to understand. During the lecture we looked at some very fascinating artists that use a method called kit bashing to make some incredible and mind boggling meshes, one of those artists was Vitaly Bulgraov. The lecture also showed us a new technique called "floating geometry" which still doesn't make much sense I understand how it works I.e. you float meshes above the mesh you want to appear to have the geometry in but I don't understand how you would then go about making that become reality and have that geometry put onto the surface. One last note Chris made was that we are to be careful with the amount of vertex's we use In our meshes; which means a lot of clean up which I think I'm going to struggle with!
        We went back to basics with our workshop on Tuesday getting back into the swing of things after the holiday and looking closer at some tool we haven't used much this project. One feature I was shown was how to make my own tool set which was very cool and is going to streamline mesh creation in future. After that we went onto looking at some of the things discussed in the lecture the day before. We had a go at some floating geometry as you can see below and looked at some smoothers and how using the cut tool on our meshes can alter how geometry is smoothed when smoothing is turned on, you can see below the some of the tests we performed on the geometry. We also used Blinn for the first time and now is probably one my favourite with its dark tones giving the mesh a more defined looked and reflective quality that can be adjusted. During the workshop we were given our next task which is the vintage clock as shown in the picture below. After showing us the image Chris showed us the very basic beginning to making the dial as we haven't been shown how to cut geometry into a primitive before this really helped and was the first thing I attempted the following day.
        I started the next day by creating my own deviant art page that's going to have more of my spare time work in and fan art etc. The link is nathandoye.deviantart.com I'm also going tot be dropping it into the header at the top I figure anytime is a good time to start getting work out there and branding myself. After having created that and uploading some work I began to make my dial for the vintage telephone. I found the making it not too difficult with some problems here and there but nothing that stopped me dead in my tracks. I'm almost certain there is no N-GON's as I checked and checked again for them and kept a back-up of the dial not combined with all the detailing so I can alter it at a later date in case something is broken and I didn't notice.
        Thursday was our first contextual studies lecture, Games Industry Roles and Practices we looked at some really inspiring people including people who have left Norwich University of the Arts and gone on to be successful games artists. One quote that stood out to me was "... there's nothing wrong with the industry..." which made me rather happy to hear especially coming from Siobhan Reddy studio director of Media Molecule. After the lecture I retuned home and detailed out my base to my vintage telephone and then some of the shaft holding the phone. My week was tied up in a very interesting life drawing session focusing on hands and perspective and seeing the effect some small understanding of perspective had on my work has got me really excited about 2D work again and reading up on perspective for a better understanding.
         Overall this week has been very productive with work coming back to full pace.