Wednesday, September 23, 2015

First Experience with UE4

For this assignment, I had to make a level in UE4 with four areas (or a single place with four rooms). I learned a lot with this project and had many issues to work with. Counting some technical issues, the biggest lesson I had to learn was having everything to a scale. I started with a MASSIVE plane of land to work with. But when I started putting things in, everything looked so small. And I don't know if foilage with the foilage brush is scaleable, but those came out even smaller. So I had to accomodate to the plants as my measure of scale. I started over a number of times, making the area region smaller each iteration. I finally settled on a size that might be big enough. I definitely want to go back and polish more though.

The first region is an enclosed village. It has shops, a pub, homes, and trees. There are a lot of trees in this region.



The second region is for a woodcutter who has hidden himself away amongst the trees. Within the lush forest lies faint traces of his presence with axes marking tree stumps. The woodcutter is also the village's herbologist who'll trade their goods on occasion. He's a grumpy dude who hates having to interact with others, so sometimes, people from the village will commute to him. 



The third region belongs to a family of fishermen who live on a small, humble coast. Their little inlet opens up the bigger waters, which they will venture out to on their little boats. They live by a lighthouse that has always been able to lead them back home from their trips. The family lives a ways from the village, but they will also make trips to sell their goods.


The final region is the home of a hermit flower girl. Though she lives in complete isolation within a flower field, she's relatively close to the fisher family and her friendship with them is what keeps her from going insane. Living in an area of lush flowery, she makes her living by selling to the village. She doesn't make the trips herself, but the fisher family will include her goods when they head out to town. The village's blacksmith is a definite fan of her products.




Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Making an organic model



The assignment this week was to model a starfish character. He came out quite pudgy and would be quite squishable. Even though I already knew a way to model, I learned a different (an more efficient way) to model a character. Below is a sample of the starfish as a solid and its wireframe.



Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Redesign a Nintendo character


The second assignment was to get into groups of three and redesign a Nintendo character. The group I was in took Ganondorf (from Legend of Zelda) and made him cute and small. This is the model sheet for the redesign.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Intro to Photoshop























For my first assignment, I went abstract and just used different tools. Then filled in shapes while playing with watercolor brushes and layer styles. Threw on a noise filter because why not?