Mo-Capaholic!

Hi everyone,

Once again I have managed to ignore the blog for quite some time, maybe it is time for me to realize that I won't make more than one post every month. I guess that is ok as well :)

Now I have been working on animations and would like to show you what i have accomplished during the last few weeks. We have had an assignment in school were we were supposed to plan and execute a motion capture shoot. after that we should use the data we had gathered, clean it and then use it to make animations. I have never animated anything in 3D before so this was a big challenge.

I have certainly learnt a lot. I have learnt about how to plan your animations in great detail and how important it is to be well prepared, both for the shoot and for the work that has to be put on the animations after the cleaned data has been processed. I have learnt how to make an animation tree, and I have realized just how many animations there is in a game on the market. It is an absolutely HUGE amount of work.

I am very happy that I have taken this course. I have new knowledge of what is desired of my models if they are to be animated properly. From here I want to use everything I have learnt of movements, typology, rigging and skinning to make the best models that I can.

Here are the finished animations that I made for the imaginary game "Everybody's Party Games". My team got the assignment to do animations for a bowling mini game. In the mini game there was supposed to be a walk cycle, game play animations based on the players skills and celebration animations dependent on how well the bowl went for the player.

Enjoy :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L26aANf88Gk&feature=youtu.be

My next assignment will be to make a really well modelled and refined model. I will show you my progress as I start working on it here in the blog. I haven't decided yet what to model, but I am thinking of maybe making a vehicle or a gun.

I will keep you updated on my progress, keep gamin'!

Rapid prototyping

I am really bad at updating I have realized. I do loads of stuff, but never get around to show anything. I really have to get better at this :)

So here is something I can actually show you. I haven't got around to do anymore 3D I can show you unfortunately. There has been a lot going on that has taken up time (Zelda). Instead of any 3D I will instead show you the things I have done for our game design course where we have been doing rapid prototyping.

Me and my BFF Stina made a sandbox storytelling game, and I would like to show you what I contributed with. The task was to make a sandbox game made out of 49 squares (7x7). On each square an event should take place, and the result of the game round should be as a readable story. We decided to set it in a fantasy world with a murder story. You wake up beside your husband who has been brutally murdered. The soldiers of the county are chasing you, but you still want to cleanse your name of any disbelief.


I drew the map with the 49 squares and various game features we had added. I also made the items. Stina had already drawn some of them in the event cards (one for each square), I had to come up with the ones she hadn't drawn, and colour the ones she had. It took quite a while to finish, but was very fun.


I hope I can upload the entire game so you may download it and play it at home :)

I will try to write something as soon as possible and not forget this time :)
Have a happy holliday :)

Workin'

Hi everyone.

It was ages since I last posted anything, I know. I really have to learn to upload things more often! Anyways, I have been doing things, I haven't just slacked off and played Oblivion (or have I....). Ok, there has been a little Oblivion, but a lot of drawing and modeling as well. At the moment I am modeling a retro futuristic bus for my coming portfolio (yaaay). I have also been drawing for a storyboard for class and sculpting a bust for my zbrush course.

That is the thing I thought I should show you now. This week we have practised beauty renders and how that works. Last week we managed light rigs so, today we were supposed to make a final render as the assignment for the last week of the course.



My next picture is from a 2D course, the one in with the storyboarding. I created a concept for an alien that the protagonist hunts down. I have shown you the concept for the character before, Logan. This is her antagonist in the story. The one she is supposed to bash the head of. I would like to sculpt this in zbrush later, and maybe put it in my portfolio as well. I think that if I can model assets from the same story concept it will give my portfolio a more complete look, so that is what I am going for.


The 3D bus of course isn't part of this universe, but is another idea of mine.

More on that later fellas, gonna model some more and then have a hamburger with my friends :)
Ciao

Boarding a mood

Yo everyone!

I have made concepts of the main character before and now I wanted to continue working with the other elements of the show reel to be. So I decided to make mood boards for the elements that I will be working on in the near future, the alien and the passageway in which my character Logan will move in.



I have quite a clear idea of what I want the setting to look like. I am thinking that the setting should be kind of like the corridors of nowadays ships, but with a futuristic touch. I want it to be narrow and suffocating in the corridor, almost a bit claustrophobic.



For the alien I had more problems. It should be really gross and slimy and awful. I had insects as an inspiration as I wrote the manuscript for the show reel, but I looked more and more on deep sea creatures as I created the mood board. I want my alien to have lots of legs and tentacles as well as those really creepy huge eyes that the deep sea fishes has.

I started searching for insects but couldn't find that many interesting pictures. Therefore I googled instead "gross insects" but I had to go back, it was too much. It felt like there was something creeping over me as I looked at those horrid pictures. Yuck!

So anyways, this weekend my mother is coming to visit, so there will not be that much done.
Hope you have a great weekend :)

Conceptalicious!

Yo everyone!!

I have been concepting the character of a very short animatic type of film that I am working with in school. The assignment is to create a manuscript, break it down, make concepts and create a storyboard that you are supposed to animate in After Effects.

I have written a short manuscript where the female engineer Logan sneaks around on a space ship and kills aliens. She works on the ship and it has been attacked by insect-like aliens.
So, I have been drawing on the concept of the main character Logan (I know it is a man's name, but I liked the idea of it as a name on a woman :)). Last week I made some silhouettes and now I have been cleaning and put some colour on the concept. The colour really isn't necessary for the assignment, but I thought that it would be fun.

I know that the concept is very sketchy, but I really wanted to post this, so I did it anyway. Well now you can see how I work :)

So any ways, it is Saturday, and time for some cosiness :D

CIAO

Summer is over

Hi again.

Omg, my last post was right after GGC and I haven't as much as look at my blog since then. It is really time to make an update!
This summer I have been studying life drawing with Pernilla Person as our awesome teacher. I have learnt so much and I am so grateful that I have had the opportunity to take this course.

I thought I should post some of the work I did :)

During the course we worked from using simple lines to get the feeling of the pose right, not concerning ourselves with proportions and details.

The next week we added volumes! It was important to get everything at the right place this early in the drawing process, that's why using simple volumes such as boxes and cylinders are so important. That way you can easily change what you have done if you recognize that some thing doesn't fit.


Later in the course we focused more and more on details. Learning about the anatomy and putting the muscles where they were supposed to be. Now there is actually a person instead of simple volumes :)


Also we had the amazing opportunity to draw a female model in a wonderful medieval dress! It was awesome :)



In our last week our job was to build a sculpture with clay, using all that we learned during the course. It is hard to show you in a few pictures of the enormous development in my drawing techniques, but when I look back at the first pieces I made for this course I am very glad of all the things I have learnt. If you have the chance to take this course, DO IT!

Now I'm gonna watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid!
Ta ta

At long last

Hi everyone.

It has been a long time since I last wrote in this blog, and that has been because of the huge amount of work that we did right before GGC, but also because after the conference I needed some chill time.

Summer has arrived for real in Sweden and this is a great opportunity to relax a bit and reminisce about the project I have been a part of.

As I have told you before I have been working with the project Bane for the last ten weeks. It is a teambesed multiplayer game for the PC in an fantasy enviroment where the players main goal is to capture nodes to gather the Abzolium resourse to win the match. The students in the group wanted to create a great artefacts for ones portfolios, get experience and we also wanted to continue working with the game to get a future game release.

When I joined this group I decided that I wanted to work mainly with art. Last year, on the project SAGE, I did not get very much art done. I was producing the group and made almost all of the animations, but no art of my own, concept art, textures or models. Therefore I wanted to try and figure out this year what I want to work with in the future. If I want to create 2D art, 3D art, animations or if I want to design or produce.

During this project I have learnt soooo much. Prior to working on Bane I have made nearly no textures or 3D models for a real game project, and now when it is all over I realise how much i have developed, and that I am actually pretty proud of the art that I have produced for the game.

Also, GGC went very well. We got very good feed back that we can use in further development. A lot of people thought it looked great, and hey, then I have done my part right!

So, one week after the conference I feel happy and optimistic towards the future. I have learnt a lot, things I can surely use in the future. One thing I haven't learnt though is what I want to do in the future. As I have told you guys earlier I loved our way of working where I had a varied tasks. I made concepts, models, textures and even collaborated when creating the level. This is great for me, I realized that I even enjoyed working with creating UV-maps for a change when I had been texturing for quite some time. I hope that there will be some diversity in work later on in my career as well.

As I said earlier, I haven't figured out what will become of me further on in my career. I do like diversity in my job, yet I sill know that you have to be especially great at something, and what that is, I haven't realized yet. But, I don't feel any stress about this. I have my whole life to learn what I want to do!

As, I have said I have learnt alot, and nearly everything has been from making misstakes. Small, but important things that you need to remember every time you are making artifacts for your game. I have written about this earlier (That really long and exhausting blog post, remember?), all theese small things make up a whole that creates a better workflow. I do believe that it is a great start for everyone on the team working in the same area to write down guidelines for how artifacts are about to be produced. Then everyone can produce things more efficently, not everyone has to be there at all times to give instructions or help on things that are made.

Furthermore, which I have also discussed in earlier blogposts, the key thing to remembver is to have great communication. I think we had quite good communication in general between, at least the artists in the group, but I am sure that many things could have been better, and that if we had made this project once again, we would have done things alot different.

So this summer I have decided to focus on life drawing, in which I will take a course, and I will also try to do some modeling and animation. I made 2D animations for 3 years but haven't tried 3D animations at all, so I am really pepped to see how it works and learn a lot.

So, to everyone that have followed this blog, thank you, and do keep reading. I will try to continue my updates during the summer, posting art that I am creating.

What happens next year, I will try to figure out during the summer. Hope you get a great summer!

CIAO!