College - Concept Art Unit

For this unit we were tasked with creating a concept, the concept art and the final piece we would hand-in, for my concept I wanted to design murder locations for a serial killer who likes to make art out of his crime scenes, this idea was heavily inspired by Jhin, the league of legends champion, who had been released in the same week as well as Cohen, the Bioshock character, who stood out to me a lot in the game when I first played it years ago. Both of these characters were very eccentric and murdered a lot of people, Cohen would display them after death in beautiful sculptures and Jhin would kill them in such a way that he viewed it as beautiful, so both of these characters have a strong passion for the aesthetics in the things that they did, morale or not.

Jhin- League of legends

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Cohen - Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea

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I made a range of greyscale thumbnails for my concept so that I could pick what I liked and dislike about each one and then adjust my final finished concept using all of these points, the grey scale lets me get across the main focus of form and lighting before having to worry about the colour of things going into the scene, a good way to speed up the process.

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This was my final concept showing a person who has been stripped of clothing and held into position by a series of wires going through their body, they are against a brick wall and covering the wall is pieces of paper laid out in the shape of butterfly wings, I liked some aspects of this concept but feel like it was a little boring and I could have made something more unique and interesting with my theme.

College - 3D Unit

Here is a render of what my final scene looked like for the 3D unit, originally the room was meant to be a lot more full with vegetation and foliage but I encountered difficulties when trying to create these assets due to my lack of experience in the subject (foliage) and limitations on the remaining time before deadline date, If I were to add more to it I would like to have added volumetric lighting where the sunlight comes through the holes in the room to create a dusty kind of effect.

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This is a more close up render of the window to show the grunge effects layer onto the windows glass and the distortion of the image behind the glass by using displacement maps in the glass surface, in-between the two windows you can see the forest image plane I was using as a back-drop, the lighting within the scene once again does not really allow you to see much of the texturing on the window itself so I will upload a separate image in a studio lighting set up to show off some of the assets.

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The Images below show case the door and window that I used within my scene in an environment with better lighting and render settings, now with a more evenly spread and intense lighting set up you can more clearly make out the textures used for the doors which were made using image manipulation techniques from real life photo textures. In the top right corner you can see the UV layout for the textures that I used as well as showing parts of the door not visible in the render.

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With Both of these assets I was happy with how they turned out and was pleasantly surprised with how much better they looked within a studio lighting set up, when able to see everything clearly my favourite asset was easily the window and from a distance I think it looks rather convincing.

Was able to get some of the techniques working, made a small box model to test on and have managed to get the rust texture showing up well, still have a few more steps before its anywhere near finished, also had a go at setting up some studio lighting in my scene as well using area lights and a spot light, think it went pretty well for displaying the piece! 

All textures used besides the custom painted alpha mask for the rust are supplied by Blender Guru from his tutorial and are for learning purposes only.

Recently watched another Blender Guru guide for adding rust to objects with textures and thought it would be worth giving a shot, I'll be using Maya instead of Blender though so it may become tough trying to translate things from one program to another, Will post updates showing progress once I've made some decent advances and understand everything I'm doing.

Wall texture practice

Today I learned how to texture a object in Autodesk Maya using a colour, Bump and specular maps. Still need to look at implementing displacement maps for future use aswell, done as practice for a upcoming college unit which ill also be posting updates about over the next few weeks!
Put in some basic rotating lighting to test how well it was working, kinda hard to see in the 5 second video but a bit more visible if you make the video playback at a slower speed, 1080p as always.

Original Image

Texture in Maya

Village in the Sky- Process

Slide show type video showing the layer by layer process used to make the 'Village in the Sky' college piece. The black borders on the side is where a off screen set extension was, takes away from the look of the video I know but it was necessary to show how it was made.

Royalty free music credit: https://soundcloud.com/lexxan/silent-winter

Village in the Sky - College Final Piece

This is the final piece for my most recent college unit for photo composition animation, Ill upload another video showing step by step for how it was put together as a separate post, which was handed in on the 30th of October. This unit was a lot of fun and more interesting then previous units I had done since it give me the opportunity to learn more skills that I didn't have before like manipulating objects in after effects as 3D layer styles or how to set up lighting in my scene among many more. If there was something I could go back and change about it now it would be to add in more dynamic or experimental camera movements and made the illusion of the camera going into and out of a cloud layer more convincing instead of it just looking like a 2D object. The idea was not specifically inspired by 1 piece but by a variety of other floating islands I have been looking at before hand on google images, the production process was a lot more unrestricted and constantly evolving since I had making something that didn't have to be a certain way, so although I kept it as close to the original sketch as possible a few things changed.

Video - (1080p HD settings recommended for best viewing experience)