Trying Shading in Drawing

If I want to follow with a Carrier path in animation I have to improve my drawing techniques and styles I have to practice. A suggestion I got was to practice shading in drawings. I have drawn a few objects from games I like and decided to try to shade them in well. I think I did fairly good, but just like anything to get better I need practice.

The way that I tried drawing was by, firstly lightly shading the ares that should be shaded in from the direction that the light was coming from (where I positioned the light), then by adding in more shading to where the shading should be darker. Then another layer of even darker points and so on.

I drew a Hollywood set chair, Overwatch Rip-tire, and Dark Souls Sorcery Clutch Ring.

I feel that I did fine with the objects them selves and the shading on the objects however the shadows on the ground were mostly tacked on as a last minute thought. Since these are pencil drawings they are fairly unprofessional, I might do computer drawings in shading later, once I get more experience.

Considering that I had one image to go of off for the design and ideas of how the lighting might hit the objects, a way to improve the final look of drawings like this is to get some real life examples in front of you which is what I will try next time.

Finishing off my Main Synoptic Project Models

Considering that the main models have been finished last week, I have been working on the texturing for all of the objects of the model. Since last time I have found a good texture to use as a Stencil in Mudbox. Considering that spaceships have hulls that are made up with multiple plates, this fits the design fairly well. Plus it was a lot easier than sculpting all of these tiny plates on the models (like last time I tried). I have used this stencil on all of the objects for main star fighter.

I have also learned that you could isolate faces in Mudbox. This is useful if you don't want overflowing of colour onto the connected polygons. You can do this by right clicking onto the object (you have to select the object or faces first).

I have added a lighting effect on the cockpit window and addition engine front vents. I did this by creating a diffuse layer of bright orange before adding a incandescence layer of the same colour and tint, then blurring the edges of the colour for a glowing effect close by.

Another idea I had was to increase  the amount of polys for the separate objects. When I tried the same result occurred when I did the same to typewriter body (the edges all curled inwards that made it look disfigured), so for now I have decided not to sculpt the objects. It will be an extra goal if the rest of the project is finished.

As a side note, I am replacing the bronze with a silver so the colour seems more "sleek" (by the way, the images you see now are not rendered).


My only problem with texturing these objects are that you can see some of the texture be in jagged lines (the main body cockpit window), I believe that it is from the polygons not being UV'ed in the right direction after more polygons were added to the UV shells. I don't think that I can change the poly's this late in production but is a goal I can look into later.

This week is my final time for completing my models for the project(first version) by Friday.

As for the rest of the team, Conor has finished almost all of the coding for the game, Jacob has finished all of his VFX work and wants more to do and I still am not sure what Gabriel does these days. Aside from scrums to tell our progress we don;t socialise because we are busy (mostly) with our work. We do seem to work well as individuals in a team but other than that, I am not sure. My main ways of communicating with my team is to see if they have any errors and changes that they want me to make with my portion of the work.

Considering that I learned more in my software and learned from my mistakes in work flow, I would say that this project has helped me. This will still be the core of my work for the next five weeks. My main goal is to finished texturing the model objects bring them into Maya to render them.      

Development of Future Technology Essay

We have been asked to create an essay and presentation of a future technology that has recently or will soon take root in our society. I choose the subject of 'Augmented Reality', if you don't know augmented reality is when digital assets are brought into the normal world. It can be seen as the opposite of Virtual Reality (VR immerses you into a digital world). This is a gathering of my findings so far.

I have some examples of AR in real-life casual use. Some of these for small scale use include mostly small app games on mobile devices like Pokemon Go and AR Tower Defense.

Some of the few products that have gained recognition is the IKEA AR catalogue (it allows you to try furniture in your home with digital assets beginning placed through the screen into your room) ; information from the Digital Marketing Academy shows that within a few months it had 8.5 million downloads.The American Apparel Colour-Changing App (allows you to change the colour of clothes to see what would suit you) and Shisedio Makeup Mirror (allows you to est make up on yourself to see how it would look).

For more large scale devices there are, the Microsoft Holo Lens, the Vuzix M-100 and the Atheer One. All of these Headset products are used either for real-life convenience (such as finding highlighted locations) or for adding more interaction for certain systems. 

Other fields that have expressed interest in this technology are medical science and architecture. More information will come along as I find new information.

The Issues With Baking

I am determined to finish my industry standard project however another problem keeps popping up everyday. With the final stretch being in sight but with another roadblock, the phrase 'So close yet so far' is very reminiscent.

My issue is that when baking down the high poly models to the low poly models is that either (my fault) the UV's don't align with each other. That forces me to re-texture the model, though the sculpting is able to bake on the low poly normal map. It must been taken into Mudbox again to finish it (like the typewriter body).

My second issue is that even if they match up the result is just bad (look at the lever arm). Apparently, this is just because of the software view and when rendered it looks better however I rendered it and it still looked bad. I just don't know how to deal with this. For now I have ignore it to complete the other objects.

At least I have finish two parts of the typewriter that are ready for the final scene. For the rest of the objects if baking doesn't work with the textures then get the sculpt from the normal map and import them into Mudbox to finish the texture.

Something else I have learned is that there is no need to add extra smooth layers to models when you are not going to use them. It just adds more to render time.

My next steps are to see which objects need to be sent back for texturing and those that don't to finish this project.