Welcome to 2015

Ok so after my computer dying and two weeks of waiting, i have finally received my new desktop so I thought I would do a concept artwork to welcome The Alien Egg (New computer) to my work style.

Below I have attached images that will be combined into a concept art. I really want to capture the moment of the scene so I want to use dark colors and highlight the important areas. In general I want to capture an epic shot before the battle.

The 40k orks are mine. I plane to silhouette them through Photoshop and create a horde in the scene,

The Last Blog

ANM401.LO14

For all our projects I used Google drive to store files for use on multiple computers. I find that it is a great file management system when used in the correct way. For example when I use it for myself I am able to store files and folders in an organized matter however for most of our projects, the drive was used by a group resulting in more folders than needed and a mix of files scattered around everywhere. The only time I would use google drive would be when I'm either working by myself or with few people so that we can keep it organized and not spend ages searching for files. In sort keep it tidy or don't bother using it.

ANM401.LO06

Twice during this trimester as previously mentioned, my 3DS Max program kept crashing due to a bug in windows 8.1 as well as an over-sized poly-ed creature/environment. To resolve the creature and environments crashing I set up a camera in the scene and removed anything that could not be seen in regards to thhe environment. For the creature I just deleted half the model and then retopologized until I had a ow enough poly count then applied a symmetry mod and collapsed to produce the final model of 4000 polys. As for the program, I had to start using my old 3DS Max 13 program while I waited for Auto desk to get back to me. 6 weeks later, roughly 2 weeks before trimester end, I received a free link to download a 3 year license for 3DS Max 2015. No major problems as they were all easily fixed. They were more of an annoying itch.

Pipeline for the Environment

For my independent learning project, I roughly followed this pipeline.

I began obtaining images that showed the landscape, the building design as well as the plant life. Once I had obtained all my images I then went onto Google maps and located the area I was going to model and trimmed it down to a reasonable size. Whilst I was still on Google maps, I swapped between views so I could see the map version of the area as well as the satellite image. In my spare time I looked up the contour lines to see if there were any hills etc in my mapped area.

For the orientation stage I loaded the satellite and map images of Pripyat into 3ds max and placed them on a rectangle shape so that I could safely position my buildings and trees to accurately reflect the real town.

I skipped the 3d point generation stage because I was quickly running out of time to complete this project.

The structuring and modelling stage went by quickly for the buildings because Pripyat was a workers town so all the buildings were similar to housing commission so I made two different buildings and just duplicated them and swapped around textures. The trees were another matter however, they were incredibly difficult and time consuming to make. I followed many various documents and tutorials to get them right. Unfortunately I didn't keep record of them but most of them were from DT. I did however create a Ferris wheel but I ran out of time to merge it with my scene and texture it.

The texturing stage was fairly quick, I browsed Cg Textures to find some seamless HD quality textures. The hardest part was trying to find the right ones that would match the environment. I don't think I obtained the quality of the textures that I wanted.

The final 3d environment was finally finished however my 3ds max kept crashing due to the high amount of poly which came from the trees. As a result I had to remove most of the trees I had in the environment in order for it to run smoothly without any crashes. I then began rendering the environment which was quite difficult. Some how I accidentally added stuff to the renderer which forced the environment to turn white when it finished rendering. I liked this final result so I included it on the blog but I re-did the render and created I finalized product that was acceptable.

In the end I don't like the environment I made. I would of much preferred to create it in Unreal Engine but was unable to. Over the holidays I am planning to look into environmental modelling in much more detail so that I will be ready for next tri.

Critical comment

I tried signing up to Tumblr but it requires me to be following someone for 2 weeks before I can comment. I have commented on other peoples work from this trimester through out Facebook however I was unable to locate it. I have provided more feedback in person but it wasn't documented. I've commented on one of Azam's posts in Facebook as seen in this picture here.

Environment mishap

Here is a glitch when I rendered my environment.

Individual leraning project

So it's the end of the year and I've completed my independent learning project. I decided to look into the process of creating a 3d environment. For my subject I chose Pripyat near Chernobyl. I did not finish the project to the qaulity I wanted it how ever I am pleased to say I have learnt new ways to create environments, assets and also textures. From doing this project I am now a lot more comfortable with creating environments and I now have a better understanding of my skills and weaknesses. In future I will focus on planning ahead and within scope as well as spending more time on certain details and programs so that I can fully bring my work to life. I do not beleive this project was a failure because I learnt how not to make an environment. With more research and more time to tune my skills I will be able to create the environments I see and bring a certain amount of realism to them. Originally I wanted to create my environment through unreal engine 4 but because we weren't able to obtain our licenses from uni I had to create through 3ds max 15. All in all, everyone has to start somewhere with their chosen field and I started in 3ds Max 15 and by the end of next trimester I will have put most of 3ds max aside and started creating environments with Unreal Engine and Nuke.

Tree Assets

Created some trees for my environment. Quite difficult and required a few tutorials in order to get it right. I made four trees in total however cannot find the files for two of them.