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.

2D Class Week 10 Concept Discovery With 3D

This week we explored our concepts even more.  I am on the character part of the Tinman team along with fellow animator Will.  We decided to do a Toon Shader for the proxy model I created last week and then we drew over our renders to create a better design.  Then Will and I picked out our favorite elements from each drawing and he drew a final concept.  I then adjusted the proxy model in Maya and created another render.

This is my toon shaded render for the proxy model I created last week.

This is Will's toon shaded render of my proxy model.

This is my quick concept drawing over the render.   

This is Will's first concept drawing. 

This is Will's second concept drawing. 

This is Will's final concept drawing where we decided the elements we wanted to combine from the previous concepts.

I adjusted the proxy model to better reflect the final concept drawing.

Here's the revised Tinman in engine next to the old proxy.

Will updated our page layout so I adjusted my old pages to the new background:

Overall time spent working on this week's hw is about 5 hours. 

2D Class Week 09 Shape Language

This week our team focused more on shape language for our character and environment.  Since I created the character and character shape pages last week, I was assigned by the team to revisit the character shape page to more clearly define what we wanted the Tinman to look like.  The team sent me a few images that they liked and Will made several silhouettes that we chose from to move forward.

I created this page using the images that our team chose to use as our primary reference and the silhouette that Will made.

After Will created his silhouette, Connor made a proxy model in Maya.  The team decided that it was too robot looking so Will drew over Connor's model to create a more refined Tinman.  I decided to create a page showing our silhouette and final concept render.

After Will created the final concept render, I went into Maya to create a proxy model using basic shapes.  I tried to scale him to the UE4 model to create a midsize character.

The rest of the team worked to create other elements such as the environment and set dressings and then Yan combined all of our models into one scene and Leah created lighting.  Here's what it looks like:

After we set everything up, our team got the opportunity to see the results in VR.  This was really amazing as it was my first time getting to put on a VR headset and see something I created.  I think we really nailed the scale and the mood.  

 Overall, I probably spent about 2.5 hours on my portion of this project.

2D Class Week 08 Artist Discovery

For this week, we worked in our teams to create our layout style guide for our character and our environment.  I was on Team Tinman, lead by Leah and including Connor, Will, Kay, and Yan.  Our team worked together to create 12 distinct Pinterest boards and then each of us chose to make two or more pages for our style guide.  I chose to make the character and character shape pages for our style guide.  Total time spent working on this assignment is about 3 hours.

3D Class Working in a Game Engine With Final Prop

This week we exported our textures from Substance Painter and imported them into UE4 to create a material.  Spent about 1.5 hours on this process and playing with different settings.

3D Class Week 07 Bake Maps and Digital Painting for a Prop

This week we continued work on the cannon by bringing it into substance painter and baking our high res models onto the low poly cannon.  I pretty much followed Nick's videos on this with a few color changes and a different alpha stencil.  I did play around a bit with some of the materials on my own but wanted the cannon to look like Nick's overall.  I was pleased to find some really cool options and as I get more used to procedural ways of creating materials I find myself enjoying this process more.  After I was done painting my cannon, I did render it out and combine my renders into one document.  Nick's tutorial on presentation was very useful and I can see myself continuing to use these methods of display in the future.  Overall, this project took about 2.5 hours.

Halloween Sculpt Off

We had an in class sculpt off with a Halloween twist.  I chose to make a werewolf.  Done in about 1.5 hours.

2D Teams

I am on a team lead by Leah and including Will, Connor, Kay, Yan.  Together we will design the Tin Man.

2D Class Week 07 Basic Lighting

This week's assignment was to take a picture of an object and try to set up some interesting three point lighting on it.  Then we had to paint the picture in Phototshop.

Anthony helped me take a picture of my Soldier 76 statue and then I hoped into Photoshop and started out by laying some of the strongest lights and darks in the photo.  I tried to take more of a painterly approach and I didn't really care too much about blending, I just wanted those really strong shapes to stand out.  Overall, this assignment took about 5-6 hours.  A lot of the end time was just noodeling with small details and trying to figure out when I could consider this project done.  I really enjoyed this assignment as I view myself as more of a painter than a drawer.

2D Class Week 06 Value

I went for a more marker inspired style for this homework.  I didn't want to blend my strokes as I find they add character and life.  Overall the assignment took about 3 hours to complete.

3D Class Week 06 UV and Digital Sculpting for a Prop

This week we continued working on the cannon.  We created UV's and then imported our models into ZBrush to create a super high res version.  Then we decimated that model and exported as an OBJ.

This homework took about 7 hours because I ran into issues in both the UV stage and creating a high res base in Maya.  I learned a lot though and I'm really happy because this is my first time doing a lot of this stuff.