Wales Games Development Show 2012.

So, since my game was one of four projects chosen by our program director to be shown at the Wales Games Development Show tomorrow the 22nd of June, I have to get up at 04:50 AM to take a train at 05:50 AM so I can get to where I'm suppose to be in Cardiff.

Much hassle with us being expected to load the equipment we need and everything, thought I was done with the stress for now, but lets hope this is worth it, I think its going to be representatives from companies throughout Wales, so the problem is that I have no intention of working in Wales after I graduate in July. So I don't now if this is really worth the effort, but anyway I've got nothing else to do anyway.

I'll tell you what though, I am for DAMN SURE going to catch up on my sleep after tomorrow.

Continued Progress.

I continued on my new character-in-progress.

To finish off the head I added a dead eye (to make him look more interesting in the same way that the scars do, it gives him a kind of visual backstory), colour for the head veins and a kind of spreading colour from the neck to the cheeks like as if he has a kind of spreading illness or maybe it is a normal feature of this species physiology.

I have also started on the body of the character, since one of the characters for my final major project was a big muscly guy, I wanted to try something more subtle and interesting for this one, I want the character look slim but also like he could be a fierce fighter, so I'm going for lean sinewy muscle type, also change the anatomy and the traditional musculature since he belongs to an alien species it would be somewhat strange for him to have completely human anatomy I think, and it also makes it a little more interesting to model.

I chose for the character to have these "tripod" like hands because, besides the fact that it looks damn cool, it also distances him from the traditional human body shape.

From School to Portfolio.

I've more or less finished my degree and can finally begin doing more work on my 3D portfolio, especially things that I WANT to do, ok the last year major project was pretty much all me without any restrictions but I must admit that I chose to do some pretty boring models, at least character models. I was learning at that stage so I didn't want to be over-ambitious and risk failing completely, but NOW I can start to populate my portfolio with the interesting and ......well cool ideas I've had over the years since I started my degree, and I really feel I am getting better and better at modelling and texturing, the latter just recently as I discovered the freedom of actually painting my textures entirely in photoshop without relying completely on photos.

So, I sat down the day after our degree show at Patti Pavilion in Swansea and opened up zbrush and just really wanted to try another approach to create good and sound groundwork for character creation, which is to use the default heads and bodies that comes with zbrush as a starting point, this way you get correct physical proportions for your character ( if realistic proportions are needed ).

This is a great time saver and really allows you to concentrate on the creative side of the modelling process, previously, when I first started to learn how to use zbrush, I was following tutorials that started the process from scratch and completely built a body using zspheres, which makes it necessary for you to constantly check if your proportions are getting screwed.


Anyway, this new character I am creating sprung from a concept I did when I was practicing my drawing in the second year, An alien warrior.

This is after I had done the first changes to the default head and had brought it in to Maya12 to do some retopologizing.

I am basically just going after what I think looks interesting and since the idea is this is a warrior is from a Tribal culture I also want to add maybe piercings and tattoos.

The first pass of poly-painting the head, I am doing the body and head separately to allow me to concentrate on one thing at a time, I am basically building this race of creatures and want to create the "face" of these creatures.