Common Art Project Proposal

This semester for the common art class we are creating pieces that can be displayed in a VR gallery.  We can work in teams or on solo projects.  I am choosing to work alone on a personal project.

After getting approval from the faculty to work on a project that does not directly relate to my specialty, I have decided to move forward with my idea to work in ZBrush and create a character bust sculpture.  Although I am studying animation, I come from a traditional sculpture background and I want to learn how to sculpt digitally.  My personal goal for this project is to have a finished and polished piece that I could 3D print and put in my portfolio.  I think that 3D printing might be out of the realm of what I can accomplish during this semester though, so my end goal for this class is to have both a high res and game res character bust that is textured and can be displayed in VR. 

As far as my subject matter is concerned, I am choosing to base my sculpt off of the illustrations by Chiara Bautista.  Bautista’s work features stylized women with horns and tentacles and themes of love and heartbreak.  I want to capture this stylized look as it borders on realism but isn’t quite there which is similar to my own style.  I had considered going for full realism but as this is my first digital sculpt and we don’t have that much time, I think it is wise to go with a familiar style.  One thing I’d really like to capture is Bautista’s textures and shading which seems to me like a mix of watercolor and cell shading. 

While there are a lot of Bautista works that I really enjoy, I couldn’t find any that I really wanted to sculpt.  None of them really spoke to me so I decided to move forward and create my own concept drawing based on a few specific images by Bautista but adding my own emotions and themes.  Right now my concept features a girl with antlers with little models of the solar system hanging off of them.  The girl looks up at the stars smiling slightly but she has a heart shaped hole through her chest with the Earth suspended in it.  I’ve always been fascinated by space and to me this piece represents dreaming big but remembering where you came from and where home is.  

Schedule:

I don’t really know much about ZBrush so my plan is to dive in head first and learn as I go.  Nick and my peers have graciously offered to teach me and give advice whenever I need it so I’m confident that I’ll be able to pull this off.  My plan is to go to all the 3D classes and work and I’d also like to devote at least 8-10 hours per week on this project. 

May 25: Project Proposal Due, get feedback on concept and schedule from faculty and peers

June 1: Block in ZBrush

June 8: Focus on Face

June 15: Small Details

Midterm Jun 22: High Poly Sculpt Finished

June 29: Fix any issues on High Poly Sculpt, begin on Game Res

July 6: Finish Game Res

July 13: Textures

July 20: Textures

July 27: Get into Engine, last minute adjustments

Final Aug 1: High and Game Res model, Game Res model in UE4 with Textures

Reference

I will be basing my sculpture off of the illustrations by Chiara Bautista but I will be using other artworks as reference too.  I have created a Pinterest board where I have saved a number of Bautista’s works as well as traditional and digital portrait sculptures, illustrations by other artists, and tutorials that I think could help me. 

Here are a few images from my Pinterest board as well as some of Bautista works that I’ve drawn from the most:

2D Figure Drawing

This week we are submitting our 3 best figure drawings studies.  .  

2D Week 15

This week, I worked on helping the other teams with animation state machines and adding procedural animation to their characters.  I also worked with Kay who created a new rig for Connor's  updated face tree model.  I was able to do a fair amount more with this rig although there are still limitations as we are still in the proxy phase.  Overall, I probably spent about 3 hours working on stuff for this class.

2D Week 14

This week I worked on creating procedural animation for the Tinman's head to follow the player and I also worked to make the wave animation blend better with the idle as well as be triggered by the player entering a volume.  This was very challenging and required a lot of research into different blueprint techniques.  I spent about 6-8 hours getting this to work properly in VR.

2D Week 13

This week I worked on fixing the face tree animation, creating a wave animation for the tinman, and creating a bounding box in UE4 so that the animations only play when the player crosses the threshold.  Overall, I probably spent about 2-3 hours creating animations and working with the other artists on my team.

2D Class Week 12 Concept Round (Value Pass 01)

This week I animated our face tree to make it appear as though the player is waking it up.  Kay created a very simple rig (one controller) that I used to create a simple shake animation.  This assignment took about an hour from beginning to end. 

2D Class Week 11 Concept Round 01 (Thumbnails)

Here's the animation I created this week for our proxy Tinman.

I spent about 1.5 hours on this assignment from the animation and putting it in engine.