Week Fourteenth: Oh God another group project

       I honestly don’t mind group work, but with my marred experience of the first project, I do have a lot of apprehension for them. It turned out, I had no need to worry from this first week. The people I’m working with, are acquaintances. I never really spoke to them, but when I had they were fun to talk to. We came together in a group because we pretty much had no one to go with. I was part of a group of five, but we were told to split, so I volunteered to leave. I didn’t want the original people in the group to split, so I left. For the first couple of days we were only a group of three, and we went off concepting for our own ideas relating to this.
       This project is based on creating a city made out of shipping containers, which we could change the appearance of as long as they retained the basic shape, and function of the container. We had to base our city on one of two genres. The Sci-fi genre or the dystopian genre. We also didn’t have to produce a city, but could produce corridors of containers as long as it was made to look like people lived their daily lives there.
       My idea for this was to base the container city in a crashed slaver transport ship. The corridors through the ship would be based off weapon containers and containers filled with cryogenics pod were they put their victims in the pods for transportation. You would have started in the bottom of the ship and worked your way up climbing through containers to reach the ships core and shut it down. As you go through the ship, water would run down from above, illuminated by the chemicals from the ship’s core, and the walls would have almost cave painting on them showing how the ship got into this situation and how the prisoners lived until it became too dangerous and left.
       When we came back together to reveal our ideas to one another, 2 out of the 3 of us, went with a sci-fi theme. We decided to take elements from each other’s ideas and decided to produce a mafia controlled area, where you would wake up in a place with sleeping pods were the lower members of the mob would sleep and pass through a drug lab area, to a black market area, and then into a club ran by the mafia. We then were given areas to work on, I was given the corridor area with the sleeping pods, as we went later on into the week a fourth member joined us who was tasked to help me out. Most of this week went to concepting the areas and some slight modelling of props and mock-ups of the area blockouts.

I do have a major worry though, everyone I’m working with are so skilled at what they do, and I fear that I might let the group down. I’m not good with texturing at all, and it’s becoming a major issue for me now, as I do consider texturing to be incredibly important in the asset production.

Week Eleven: Lesson's Need to be Learnt

It happened. Death came. His sharp scythe visited my pendrive. It’s all corrupted. All of it. Characters I never thought existed in any language littered my screen. I lost everything. 3ds Max files. Jpg. Photoshop files. So what started this whole situation off? Well I went into university on Tuesday and logged onto one of the new computers in the lab. Then it happened. My pendrive needed scanning, so I scanned it. For an hour and a half. When I got home to check what was going on, all my files were corrupted. I did get some freeware to recover some of my files, but the PSD files was the most important as it contained most of my concepting, and these were the ones I was unable to recover.

So what can I do? Panic? That’s not going to help. Cry? Again not useful. I ended up taking my pendrive to the tech shop in uni to get it fixed the next day.

This whole event has been a major setback in my project, but at least I have the 3ds max file, meaning I don’t have to start from scratch.

So what have I learnt from this experience?

BACKUP MY WORK. EVERYWHERE! I have numerous things open to me, such as one drive, mega, an external harddrive, numerous pendrives and cloud storages. And this experience has taught me a lot about how I really need to become more organised and backup files daily.

Memorial of Work:

Clothing designs for Samshin
Make up designs for Samshin
Colour Palette for Samshin
Finalised Concept for Dokkaedi
Finalised design for Samshin
Orthographic for Dokkaedi
Movement designs for Samshin
Movement designs for Dokkaedi
Orthographic Photoshop file for Samshin
Orthographic Photoshop file for Dokkaedi
Moodboard for both Samshin and Dokkaedi

Week Ten: Scribbles on a Page

Page 1 to 6 going from left to right

And then on the seventh day God gave us light… Or more like incoherent scribbles. Also I'm not god.

So with the wise words just scribble on a page I started my journey, with some doubt, that’ll be able to produce an interesting silhouette. Was I literally just to scribble on a page? Do I scribble some sort of humanoid form? How much scribbling was too much? Do I use straight lines or just curved lines?
I tried all these techniques finding the best way to produce interesting forms.

Drawing 1 involved me trying to produce humanoid forms using mostly curves.

Drawing 2 was done in the same technique as drawing 1, but quicker.

Drawing 3 was the same as the two above but line work is obviously looser than the mentioned.

Drawing 4 is the most different from the group of pages. This one is fully covered with scribbles, no obvious recognisable forms, and I did not try to produce any humanoid forms.

Drawing 5 went back to me producing more humanoid forms than drawing one and drawing two. More humanoid forms makes less interesting silhouettes.

Drawing 6 had more clusters of lines.

I also found that rotating the page allowed me to find more silhouettes which you could only notice from a certain angle. I use the lasso tool to trace around the lines, then the bucket tool was used to produce silhouettes.

To start the silhouetting pairs, grouped all the silhouettes into a PSD file, before filtering out the unusable silhouettes. From over 100, I dropped down to 72. I then went through another round of removing silhouettes, getting rid of the less interesting ones, dropping my amount of usable even lower. From there I place them all in rows on one side of the page leaving the other side blank to produce interesting pairs of silhouettes. I then got rid of the most boring pairs leaving only nine from the 35 pairs.

(Talk about the nine left)

Again I went to 3 more rounds of removing silhouettes to bring me to make three chosen ones. I pushed into these designs creating multiple different characters in a single silhouette form.

I stuck with the silhouette which had the large angled hulking humanoid form and a small fragile human. What I saw in the human form was a female with flowing robes, which I then associated it with Korea.

Japan, Korea, looks like it’s China next for country to inspire me.