Life Drawing

I haven't posted in a while so I thought I'd put up some life drawing sketches I drew on Tuesday at Ten Feet Tall in Cardiff.
I haven't drawn any life drawing for a while so I was pleasantly surprised how these turned out. I'll start off with my favourite from the night :)

This one took around 25mins to draw:

(25mins) She moved in this one which is why her hand looks pretty big:

(15mins) Male model:

20mins:

25mins:

15mins:

10mins:

8-10mins:

Veg Face!

I haven't been doing much recently in terms of work I can post on my blog. I've finished a 2 and a half week work experience at Red Wire Media in Cardiff Bay and I've also been modelling some props for GamesLab while trying to look for some sort of job. Unfortunately the job hunting isn't going so well at the moment, but I'm not giving up yet! :)

Something that I CAN post on my blog is this painting I made for my Nan's church's harvest. It was her idea to make a face out of Fruit and Veg so I designed the face and painted it for her.
It took me around 2 days to complete using acrylic paints and was a nice break from being on the computer and using traditional media instead. And she gave me £40 for making it ... Score!


The paper was pretty big so I used coffee to stain the paper around it so it wasn't so white. The cluster of berries on the right cheek was supposed to be raspberries but they didn't turn out so great and now they look more like blackberries ... so now that's what they are ;) they were actually the hardest thing to paint and the easiest was probably the melon fringe.

I'm really happy with the result seeing as I haven't painted for a while, and I realised it kinda looks like me! ... It's just a shame the photos of it didn't come out so great

New Showreel

My last showreel was put together pretty quickly for the uni's end of year show, so now that I've graduated and have lots of spare time on my hands I've been working on a new showreel which is hopefully a lot better than the last one. I've put in a few more things in this reel to show a bit more variety of skills

Hope you enjoy!

inform.Animation IP

For the past 2 and a half weeks I've been in Sardinia, Italy on an intensive animation course called Inform.Animation

Quote from the website:

"InformAnimation is a Summer School organized within the Erasmus Intensive Programme, by the Alghero School of Architecture of the University of Sassari in collaboration with a consortium of European academic partners"

It was a great experience working with students from other countries including Greece, Spain and Italy. There was a bit of a language barrier which again was an experience as I had to try and get my point across through simple language. I definitely learnt a lot when it came to working with others with different languages and methods of working.

The project was aimed towards using animation to inform members of the public or other social groups of a specific cause. We had 6 different briefs and were separated into 6 different groups ranging from 3-4 people per group. I worked in a group of 3 (1 Greek girl and an Italian boy) My project was for the Archipelagos which is an institute of marine conservation. Our brief was to inform about the importance of Posidonia Oceanica which is a seagrass meadow in the Mediterranean. It is a habitat for over a thousand different species of fish and works as a shelter and a place to reproduce. We had to inform the viewers of this and
also the dangers that humans place on the seagrass, and the consequences it will have on the beach, as the seagrass protects it from beach erosion. The short animation was aimed towards schools in the Aegean, local communities, as well as tourists that visit the Aegean islands and the wider public in Greece and abroad.

In the brief, the animation was aimed towards a wide range of social groups so we tried to mix facts about how much seagrass there is in a square metre etc. (for the adults) with cartoony animations (for the school children) This way we thought we could keep both age groups entertained while still being informative.
Each group was supposed to have constant feedback from their contact providers, but unfortunately for our group, we had no contact at all from ours. This made things difficult as we had no contact from the people who we were making the animations for, so the tutors running the project got involved and advised us to split our project in 2 as they thought our idea would work better this way, one targetted towards adults with facts and figures, and the other towards children, with metaphorical images telling the information. This spilt happened on the Monday and the deadline was the following Saturday

We all agreed to split into 2 projects, so I would work on the children's project, the Italian guy would work on the adult project while the Greek girl would help out on both. Everything was going well until the stress within the group started kicking in, so we decided to work as 1 proper team again and work on 1 project. Unfortunately that didn't work because of personal feelings from another member in the group, so we had to split the group completely, and I ended up working on my own. Because of what happened, I had to ask for some help from 2 of my friends, just so it could be finished in time for the Saturday deadline

I really enjoyed my experience in Italy. I learnt a lot in my 2 and a half weeks on the intensive course, and gained a lot of valuable experience, it's just a shame the group divided like it did

After less than 5 days of work, this is the end result. I wanted the piece to have a narration over the top so that there would be no words on screen, only images so that the children would keep interested, as I felt that too much text on screen could lose their concentration. Unfortunately I didn't have time to record the narration, so instead, the version you see here has subtitles to represent what I wanted the narrator to say. The music is also there as a placeholder
I characterised the fish and gave it a style so it was bold and colourful for the children's appeal. I tried keeping everything simple and metaphorical so that the images could help tell the story
And here's the result:

• Danielle Parness helped me with the animation for the 2 shots with the Pollution barrels on the boat
• Stephanie Seed made the countdown timer on the last shot

SHOWREEL !!

I finally have a showreel put together and up on Vimeo after many error messages

This is my showreel I will be sending to potential employers, so any feedback would be much appreciated thanks!

Hope you enjoy!

Hand In Work

I haven't really put up anything since finishing uni so I'd better start now :)
My showreel is currently uploading on Vimeo so it will be up on the blog shortly, but in the meantime here's the reel I handed in for my final deadline ... it's got my Personal work which is my Tank Alien and my Spaceship, and the Collaboration work which I modelled a small spaceship for and a wall for the wall smash shot in the film ... it also has the particle tests I made for those walls

It's a bit long because I had a lot of stuff to hand in, but it gives you a chance to see what I've been working on the past months:

[p.s. Try and watch it 720p if you can cos the quality is much better :)]

IT'S OVER!!

Glammies was a couple of days ago and I think the affects of the alcohol are still in my system which obviously means it was a great night! :)

Our film was in the show. We didn't win, but like I said before it's not about the winning, it's just about the opportunity to show everyone the film we've been working hard on for the past months. We had a great reaction to the film which is what we always wanted. Everyone had something nice to say which was really heart warming and I really appreciate all the positive feedback.
There was a lot of amazing pieces in the show so it was very tough this year, but everyone did a great job of their work, even the ones that hadn't been nominated, I know they had amazing pieces too.

So it's all over and now it's time to look for a job. Now that the Glammies is also over I can finally put up my showreel and all my other work I've finished. The film may take a bit longer to put up because we just need to sort some stuff out. Hope you all enjoy!

It's Nearly Over!!

For some reason blogger hasn't liked me for the past few weeks. Either the server is down, or it constantly refreshes the page so i can't get to my dashboard, or I can't copy and paste things which is a surprisingly big problem! ... so any who, that's why I've been a bit behind on updating recently ... oh, and because we've been super busy trying to finish our film!!

We got nominated for Glammies which is great! It's not about the winning, but just the opportunity to show everyone our film on the big screen. We hope everyone enjoys it!
At this stage, 2 days before Glammies and 1 day before we're supposed to hand in our final piece, it's going to be a push to finish. Me and Joe have done all we can so we're literally in uni just supporting the motion design guys as they try and finish bits and pieces off, ready for Glammies.
I believe some of them will finish for us, but unfortunately we've had trouble with others who have been quite unreliable the past week, so they are holding us back a bit. We appreciate everything they've done for us, but at the same time we just want to give them a little kick to finish it off ;)

Hopefully in one of the next few posts I'll be able to put up a video of our film so you can all see, but at the moment every ones work is on Lockdown until after the Glammies, so all I want to say is GOOD LUCK, POB LWC to everyone who's nominated and Well Done to all the 3rd years! It's been a great 3 years and I know a lot of people have amazing work that unfortunately won't be shown at the Glammies, but I'm looking forward to seeing them all at the exhibition instead :D

Wall Smash Test

For the bit in the film when the Big Alien smashes through the wall, I was playing around with particle and fractal effects in 3Ds Max

There's an amazing tutorial on Youtube where he goes through the process step by step in great detail. All you need to do is download a free plug-in which he provides for you with a link

The link for the tutorial can be found here for anyone who's interested:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxCPtUnN-Ns


For my first attempt I followed the tutorial exactly just to get the hang of things. It was a quickly modelled wall following the guy's instructions, and eveything else I followed exactly too.
And here's my first result I got from following the tutorial.

I was very very happy with the results. For the final comp I needed to change a few things like the size and amount of bricks, the speed, bounce, size of the hole etc.

I made the floor too small so the bricks fall into space which is pretty funny. Hulk Smash!!

Ultimate Image

For Business Studies we've had to create an Ultimate Image, as in an image which represents you as a person/artist ... and here's mine!


It has a lot of meaning behind it (lots of cheesy stuff) but I'm happy with how it turned out.
I better explain what I mean by there being lots of meaning behind it, so now prepare yourself for the dreaded CHEESE!

The 3 characters are ones that I have modelled the past couple of years of uni. I have modelled others, but they weren't anatomical like these. The further back the characters go means that they were the earliest characters I modelled, with my Big Alien at the front as he is the one I'm working on at the moment. (The only bad thing about adding him in was that his textures aren't finished, but luckily they look good enough to work in the image) The monster at the back was my first attempt at modelling a character, and Modo from Biker Mice From Mars was my 2nd anatomically correct character.

We've been learning about layouts in Business Studies so I laid them out in a triangle so that it draws the eye down to the Big Alien in the middle. I decided to make a half and half image with coloured characters and the wireframe counterparts because as a CG Artist one of the things to look for is a good clean mesh, so I can show off both my skills of modelling and texturing in this image. I was inspired by Alex Ross' comic concept cover for Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, as seen below. It gave me the idea of halving the characters into two with the coloured and the wireframe while making them look like one being


it's CHEESE time!
You might be wondering why I used my Tree from my environment project as the thing to split down the middle? Well I thought that the Tree could represents my ever growing growth of skill and knowledge as an artist. The Tree is my source of energy which lays above the clouds which represents my imagination. The light source emitting from behind the Tree is my power source which is shining down on the character models to represent my imagination's power helping me create these characters ... I warned you it was CHEESY!!! :)


Here's an example of the Ultimate Image if we were allowed to put text. It's just my name in the middle as I am the creator and it's a nice blue to compliment the orange colours beaming around the image:

Big Alien Renders WIP

After handing in for 1st Submittal I also did some extra details to the Tank. I was stuck with texturing in Photoshop over a lot of Easter so once we got back to uni I was able to texture in Mudbox which is so much nicer to use while texturing!

I've been dirtying him up the past few days while also finishing off my Business Studies work, so not much has been added, but here's what I've done with the dirt so far. The greener bits around the hard skin is a falloff of subtler hard skin, so that the actual bits of hard skin don't look as if it's just attached to the body, now it looks more like it's growing around it. The dirt on the face is actual dirt, but I've only managed to add it to the head so far:

Spaceship Renders

After first submittal I added extra wires to the Spaceship, so here are some renders of the Spaceship before and after the added wires. Rendered out from 3Ds Max:

1st Submittal !!

We had our first submittal the day we got back from Easter, which was a lovely thing to come back to, with problems rendering and computers crashing to add to the stress ... Anywho! I didn't manage to finish everything I wanted for the 1st submittal, basically the textures for the Alien, I was hoping to get them done ages ago, but because of having to run around chasing people and setting shots up for the animators, it's all dug into my personal time more than I thought it would, but the good news is that the Spaceship is completely finished, and the film is looking great! :D

Anyway, recap over, here's what I handed in for my 1st Submittal ... this is only my personal work, unfortunately you guys have to wait a bit longer before seeing any of the Film footage ;)

WIPs

So now that all the models are modelled and unwrapped I've been busy texturing my Alien and Spaceship.
They've been taking a lot longer than they should have because as a Director these 2 models aren't the only things I need to spend my days working on, so most days I don't even get to do my own work ... but at least it's getting there and the film is looking real nice! :)

Here are some WIP images for the 2 models starting with my favourite, the Big Alien:

• Alien only has a basic Diffuse Map with Ambient Occlusion
• Only the Body has been textured so far, not the Hooks or Bracelet
• Been working on Normal Maps with xNormal, really nice programme but still need some tweaks to the Maps, so they haven't been included in these images
  

And then the beast of a Spaceship:

• Only Diffuse Maps again for the spaceship
• Ambient Occlusion doesn't work nicely while projecting onto the UV unwrap so it will be added later on as a separate render pass
• Some textures are only there as placeholders at the moment, like the objects below the spaceship
• The giant rock mountain looks pretty gross right now! ... I've had trouble unwrapping it because it's so high poly and I should have unwrapped it while it was still a box (silly me) but at least I know for next time now, so I've been trying a procedural map, and failing at the moment, so the rock texture will definitely be changed!!
  

GROUP BLOG!!!

Everyone check out our group blog!!
If you guys are interested in seeing how our project is going then check it out!!
You get to see what everyone has been up to on our side and the Motion Design side so it's worth a look!

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http://3dmotionatrium.tumblr.com/

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Also, we've been thinking of a name for our film and we've come up with "DAY 83" so it gives an idea of how long the invasion has been going on for ... what do you guys think? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! :)

Update!!

Haven't blogged in a while due to organization and filming etc. ... so I thought the best thing I could do was explain to you guys what's been going on

Soooo FILMING ... We managed to film our main shots in Treorchy the other day, the footage looks AMAZING! and I'm very excited to get the footage out to everyone so everything can come together!
We still need to film some shots in the other location but it's great we've finally filmed so we can properly get going on making this VFX project

Me and Joe made an edit of the film so we have some stuff we can show you guys, but maybe just a sneak peak because we don't want to spoil everything for you ;)

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The BIG ALIEN ... I finished everything in Mudbox. To finish it off I added a lot more detail in the mesh including veins and patches of hard skin so the hard and the smooth blend together a lot nicer.
I also added a stretch to the skin where the hooks are so they look like they are actually attached to his body:


After the Mudboxin I retopologized the mesh in TopoGun so it's a nicer, cleaner mesh to work with.
Taking the mesh straight from Mudbox didn't work because I lost a lot of detail when going down the levels, and the poly count was massive, so I had no choice really but to retopologize.
It was very tricky trying to get my head around all the software restrictions and bugs, but it turned out for the better because the mesh looks reeeeaaaal nice!


So I made a little video comparing my old mesh that I made in 3DsMax then put into Mudbox, and the new one which was retopologized in TopoGun:

Untitled from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

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The SPACESHIP ... I'm in the middle of texturing this bad boy! It's a beast of a ship so it took me forever to Unwrap everything but it's finally done!! :D So now I'm in the process of texturing and it's looking good so far! Haven't got much to show at the moment so when I have a bit more I'll start putting some WIPs up on the blog, but for now here's some Close-Ups of the ship to show you guys all the little details ... Enjoy!