Wednesday 10 October 2012

Starting Year Two

Year two has finally got off to a start after a long summer, but one which I needed, to try and start the recovery from the last few years which have been both physically and emotionally draining. I still don't feel like I'm completely there yet, I've become very anxious about things, become stressed very easily and am still suffering from unbelievable strain in my neck, but apart from that I can say that this year has been much easier to start than last. Things in my life away from work are settling down now and becoming easier, but its still hard to shift the feeling that anything can go wrong at any moment, but I am a positive person, and I believe we only get one chance on this rock so its best to try and enjoy things whilst they last, because, unfortunately, nothing lasts forever.

Okay, so now I've got the doom and gloom out of the way lets move on to week one of year two of BA Hons game art and design. The best way to describe would be to say that the week has started nicely. Monday started with our visual design lesson and we where at Abbey Park getting the year off to a good start with some nice environmental stuff, focusing on lighting and shadows, all be it the actual day was overcast and the lighting was crap, but hey, we're artists and we press on. After spending a few hours at the park, getting a few thumbnails down and plenty of reference I'd found a small section of the park which had been built specifically as a garden called 'Redland Garden of the Senses'. In here i found a wooden construction, similar to a tunnel with overground foliage all around it which looked fantastic, something that could easily be seen within a game environment, not only this but it provided me with the chance to put a bit of perspective into practise in case I'd gotten a bit rusty over the summer break.




















Above you can see a page of my thumbnails with the idea for the final piece in the top right.

And below is my final piece, although the task was technically to focus on colour I felt the need to do a grey-scale pencil drawing to start off the year. I havn't managed to get much drawing done over the summer and felt this would get me back into the flow of things. I will 'hopefully' do a colour version of this as a digi-paint as a lot of other students are doing. It is just difficult as although I feel I am a fairly decent artist I have limited understanding of Photoshop and digital painting in general and although I don't like to name names, I get the feeling that others with lesser artistic abilities than myself are able to produce much better digi-paints purely because they 'know-how-to', which is frustrating.

Game production also got off to a 'nice' start, with the Trash Project set by Blitz. The project I feel is going to be an easy-ish start to the year to get back into the swing of things, the main challenge and focus of the project is to be able to produce convincing game art at a strict budget in terms of tri's and texture space, which will be a fun project and I currently feel quite comfortable with producing decent work with a small poly/ tri count. I have already gathered some good reference and have currently got a decent start with building the assets, the wireframes can be seen below. The trash currently stands at around 498 tri's with no smoothing groups applied.

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