I haven't posted since the end of the semester, I've been reading through the course blogs, but neglecting my own. I'll start off by posting a few images of the most recent scene I've been working on for Modelling / Texturing practice. It is based on a digital painting by a French Concept Artist over on the Concept Art forum (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=174898). The shot is a imagining of 'Kings Landing' from George R.R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels. I thought it had a great composition, which showed the expansive city as well as some close-up detail. I decided to aim for a still render, with a lot of detail involved.

The area is blocked out and some detail has been added. I've been teaching myself Mudbox recently, which has only been used to Normal-Map the Archway bricks at this point, but I'll be Normal-mapping the rest as I go along. The real difficulty will be in the texturing, getting the right balance of detail and style. The lighting is also going to take some thought.

Edit: Still texturing:




















The Original Concept Piece: 







I'll continue to work on this and post updates. I'm not sure how exact I'll be keeping to the reference yet, but I'm hoping to not stray too far. I'm also in the process of more researching and soon-to-be drafting my Dissertation.

Here are all the Ncloth tutorials for this unit. Learning the Nparticle system was really helpful, especially when it came to working on the E4 sting and the knowledge of features such as Cache Blending and Contraints are going to really come in use soon.

Making of Zombie Hand

As I'm away next week, with a badly timed holiday, I'm aiming to get my 10-second E-Sting finished by this weekend. Everything is modelled / rigged, but now the refinements in camera-placement, lighting and animation needs to begin. Below is the zombie hand, which bursts from the ground.




The texture images for the TV still need to be created, which I'll do in After Effects. I'm hoping to get a nice dirt shift and erupt effect using particles or soft-bodies in the next couple of days after some advice from Alan in the morning. I have also blocked out the scene, but it seems a bit bare without the painted backdrop. The staging needs a bit more of a dramatic effect, but this should all be done soon enough.

I've been progressing with the Zombie-arm for my sting over the last couple of days. I created a very simple medium-poly arm/hand in Maya, using similar methods as the cartoon characters I made for Narrative but with more realism (Like 4 fingers, thicker arm etc) I then UV'ed it and brought it into  Mudbox, software I've only just started using, which I think will get a lot of attention over the summer.  I created some mesh detail such as scratches, skin creases and damage which I'm trying to get onto the low-poly version without too many mistakes (At the moment, the normal map seams are causing trouble). I decided to paint it in Mudbox for the main detail, which is an incredible tool. The texture was then easily transferred to Maya.  I'm going to add more blood / lovely rotted flesh.

Hopefully by the end of tommorow, the arm will be rigged and ready to animate, along with the normal map having no errors. I then need to create some terrain and focus on animating the arm and the dirt, for the final video.







The dirt-covered remote that he is going to be holding is also done:

After a brief tutorial with Alan yesterday where he gave me the go ahead for my idea, I started to think about the production. I've been looking at my concepts and thinking about the advice Alan gave me, which was to use staging and lighting to centre the clip around specific objects. I've now started modelling the props, which are thankfully few in number. From my concept, I've listed the props simply as two different Gravestones, a Television and a Television remote. The environment modelling will be the ground-plane with dirt/grass, whilst the background which will be visible when the TV lights up the scene, will be a Matte painting. This allows all the focus to be put on the Zombie-arm, both animating and modelling.

I've used Mudbox to add model-detail. The Gravestone is the first model I've done using Maya with Mudbox, it's pretty basic, but I've got a set of tutorials which I'll work through before doing the arm's detail.




Mudbox:


Textures:

My inital E-Sting idea is below, concepted. I like the theme and the idea, but I think it needs a bit of a work. Maybe the hand needs to drop the remote at the end. I've been trying to think about how much to show, as 10 seconds isn't really long enough to gather the scene. This is why I've tried to make it seem very enclosed with the first shot being dark, with the hand outlined and the TV appearing in shot once turned on.