Maya - Lighting and Rendering - Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion works as a shader to create realistic shadows and decay of light. By laying a ambient occlusion render over the top of a normal render and using the multiply setting in photoshop you are able to create an equal blend of both renders. 

Editing in photoshop.

Final Image.

 

Collaboration - Skit Ideas

As a group we have now decided on our logo and production company name. Torran has edited my design to make a smaller logo as well as creating a blog layout. 

After our tutorial with Alan we have decided go with the idea of "The wrong response to physics/ science". We are now deciding on the style and time period we want to use for our animation as we are starting to create a framework for the skits. 

 

Maya- Arnold Lighting and Rendering - Mesh Lights

This tutorial explains how to create a mesh light and the pros/ cons of using them. Mesh lights work in Arnold render and can be attached to objects. The process is fairly straight forward and is effective. The only cons are that mesh lights take a long time to render and they interact poorly in close proximity to other objects creating lots of noise which creates a messy render. 

Final Render

Character Design - Week 2 - Research

 I have begun to research into my character design project. I had never heard the term Kaiju but after researching I am familiar with lots of films that they are present in. I very much like the style of the vintage kaiju posters. I also researched Tokyo and what the city landscape looks like. The thing I think I will struggle with most is the Chibi art style as I have to make a monster look cute and friendly. 

Kaiju in cinema and comic books.

Kaiju film posters.

Chibi art style.

Tokyo landscape. 

Week 2: Dramatic Arcs - Moom Poses

In this weeks tutorial we looked at how to pose moom in a more naturalistic way. There are many instances this will be useful in the future as not every shot is an action shot. This was also helpful in terms of practising posing a character and building up speed in this process.

Life Drawing Week 1

For the first week back we had no model, instead a tutorial of sorts on different techniques to make the life drawing process easier. A few of us took it in turns to pose for the tutorial and below are some quick sketches. 

 

Character Design - Week 1

 For the first week of character design we were briefed on the project and each given a creature/person as well as a specific art style which I will, over the course of this project, have to create a character from. I have a Kaiju and my art style is Chibi/cute. This will be an interesting learning experience for me as this is defiantly not my art style and I have much more practice with human characters. During this weeks class I was given an object (80s mobile phone) and had to sketch the object. The purpose of this exercise was to get me thinking about the type of character that would own this object and how the object in that character world. 

The second task was to take an already existing character (Tigger) and create an entirely new character that would fit into this world.

I also started to draw different Kaiju in the iconic Winnie the Pooh style. For the next class I will start to research Kaiju and their history as well as Chibi art. 

Maya- Arnold Lighting and Rendering - Physical Skylight

 This tutorial elaborated on the Physical Skylight lighting option that gives the impression of a realistic sky in the the render view. This is an arnold light. This light works with/ overrides the skydome light which can be seen in the node editor. This pairing creates a heliodome so that the light source (sun) works in a 360 degrees rotation to simulate the different times of day.

Example of light working in render view. 

Example 1- Midday 

Example 2- Sunset

Example 3- Test with different sun/sky tint.

Example 4- Test with different sun tint. 

Week 1: Action Arcs - Moom Poses

 For the first week of Maya tutorials we looked at Moom, a pre rigged character, which we had to place in five different poses based from  five images of our choosing. This is a nice way to start as I still have limited experience with Maya and found human rigs difficult to create. 

Collaboration Briefing and Branding Ideas

 During our collaboration brief my group were given a sentence to respond to. 'The wrong response to', this will be the base of our collaboration project, and from this we need to come up with a short series of comedy skits. As a group we started to brainstorm some ideas about what these could be. 

Initial ideas to theme,

We have also assigned roles in the group, however this could change to suit the workload and groups ability. As a group we will all take on screenwriter and researcher as these are highly collaborative roles.

Director- Molly (mollysuniartblog.blogspot.com)

Producer- Alex

Marketing/ Media Planner/ Graphic Designer- Torran (torranrodgerscaa.blogspot.com)      

                                                                           Brooke (bubblinggin.blogspot.com)

We have also each come up with ideas for our production company and the overall design that we are going for. 

My quick sketches for logo and name.

Personal designs for logo.

Drawing Practice

 As we will soon be beginning 2nd year I realised that I have struggled to practice modelling in maya as well as life drawing and traditional sketching. I have found the past few months draining on the creative process however I have been practising digital drawing in both Photoshop and Procreate. I have been testing out some new styles and just becoming more confident in creating digital art as I found this area so enjoyable in first year. These sketches are a mixture of original characters and pieces created from reference images.