Monday 26 October 2015

London Court Previs Model

By James Ball

When our group went to scout out our locations for the pre-vis stage of our group project we worked out that the London Court Model could be broken down into simple blocks.

The list is a follows.

  • North Tower
  • South Tower
  • LC Upper Left
  • LC Upper Right
  • LC Lower Left
  • LC Lower Right
  • Floor Plane
  • Left Fence
  • Right Fence

By organising the model in this way it cut down  on the modeling time and it allows for more dynamic camera angles for we can simply  hide all of the buildings on the right side and to shoot from the right and the same goes for the left.


To start out I first modeled up just one building section. This could then be copied across and moved down to match up with the existing ground plane then the left side could be copied over and mirrored for the right side. I repeated the same process for the fence and the Towers as well.


I finished it off and it didn’t quite feel right. So I took a little bit of artistic license and stretched all of the buildings upward and this gave me the creepy, claustrophobic vibe I was going for and below you see the final result. 


As always, this is Ballzy247 signing out.

Sunday 18 October 2015

BITEY!

By James Ball

This weeks blog Post is going to be a little briefer than usual. I got to go to another talk by Susan Erokan on Monday. This time organised by my UNI, so that was cool. Got to learn the manual mode on the Canon 600D’s and do a bit of photography. Our class also got an introduction the the program Mudbox. For CIU this week we learnt all about Semiotics and we also got placed into the teams we would be in for our final CIU task.

Image 1: Bitey

On the homework face of things, I haven't gotten much done due to some pressing close to home family issues. So I’m sorry to say this but no coloured in 3D Face mask this week. Although I did find this interesting site called Bitey.com which is the home site for ex Disney animator Adam Philips located in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. He is the is the Person behind the Flash animation classic The Last of the Dashkin with the first episode airing in 2004 on Newgrounds.com. in my research on this guy I also found an Artist Interview by Draw With Jazza  and you can view it here.

Also this crazy shit came out this week . . . ENJOY!




As always, this is Ballzy247 signing out!
   

Reference

Image 1: Bitey, Retrieved on 11/10/2015 from - http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/brackenwood/images/2/2e/Bitey.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20091229182337

Monday 12 October 2015

Mingling with “SHIENCE”!

By James Ball

SO how do I start this week's Blog Post? . . . Yes That Will Work . . .  BLAM! Shiny Creepy Hollow Face!

https://skfb.ly/HzpH

Next week Blog post will will been even more creepier when I have an actual texture on.

So . . . Quixle. A bit of advice to anyone buying this piece of lovely software in Australia the pricing they have on their site is in American Dollars and not Australian Dollars. so the final price ended up being about $74 Australian. This is also a software that is still in development and still has a couple of bugs that need fixing but that aside, this is a powerful program for what it is and how fast you can ic tan produce a PBR Rendered object. I still have a whole lot more to learn about this program and in the not too distant future it look like there is a massive up update coming. Speaking of Massive, I would also love to try out and play around with that software one day, you know, MASSIVE the software they used to create the armies in Lord of the Rings. 

 Image 1: Massive Rendered Crowd

For the last week it has been fixing up and correcting documentation and getting down to creating concept art for our group assignment in ANI210 and getting it all compiled together for monday. Also  I’m sorry but we’ve unofficially decided to keep a veil of secrecy on this artwork and anything associated with “Project Bunri” under wraps till further notice. Like a real Game or Design Company would. Give it a couple of weeks maybe.

On Thursday evening I went along to a Q&A Session with Robert Stephenson one of my class mate’s and listened to Dreamworks Studio Rep Susan Erokan (previously Production Supervisor for Character Animation at Dreamworks Animation for 12 years) that was a very informative evening and what was great about it was afterwards talking and mingling with not only Susan but also Aaron Welch of Red Bird Creative Perth and friends from the Trimester ahead of me.

About a hour after I posted my Blog post last week I went to see the Ridley Scott Film adaptation of The Martian. Great movie, and they really Science the Shit out of it. If you haven’t read the book then go listen to the audio copy illegally here and remember you didn’t see this from me.

So this is some NASA news that they really didn’t make a BIG announcement for like they did with the Flowing Water on  Mars thing.  Red Water Ice and Blue Atmosphere on Pluto. NASA, Never A Straight Answer. in their defence however they did have an article about it on the front page of there website, so yeh.

 Image 2: global mosaic of pluto in true colour

Finally if you’re one of the few regular reader I have on my blog you may have noticed a layout change. I’m going to roll with it for a little while I think but do let me know what you think. Also a shameless Plug must also go to my website which I have recently given a facelift and Mobile interactivity you can view it here. http://jaegerfruit.com/

And no I’m not going to make anyone else a website I’ve already spent too long making it look the way it is. But that’s enough ranting for one blog post.

So as always, this is Ballzy247 signing out.



References

Image 1: Massive Rendered Crowd, Retrieved on 11/10/2015 from - http://massivesoftware.com/images/wcm-rtr-agents.jpg

Image 2: global mosaic of pluto in true colour Retrieved on 11/10/2015 from - https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/global-mosaic-of-pluto-in-true-color.jpg

Saturday 3 October 2015

A “Foody” Opinion!

By Jame Ball

Right now as I type this, I am sitting down at my computer munching away at an obligatory Grand Final Day Aussie Sausage Sizzle. As I do this, I’m thinking “I don’t even like AFL that much at all I don’t get why this is SO much more important than say issues like where is all of the funding for creative Australian industries gone to?” but that’s another topic for a different time and a different place. On second thoughts however, they were some really darn nice sausages. I just pulled the packaging out of the bin and apparently they are Ground Beef and Caramelized Onion flavour. See, I’m an Omnivore! 

Image 1 - Sausage

Since I’m on this tangent of Food and not yet on a tangent of what I learnt this week let’s talk about Mince Meat. The type you get from Coles or Woolies. I remember a time when the Mince Meat you got from the shops was in fact minced down into thousands of tiny little pieces. But no, now when you get minced meat and you may as well call it meat Spaghetti because when you take that stuff out of its pack you better remember to break it thoroughly apart because if you don’t then you're getting Mexican style Beef Spaghetti Nachos, which now I’ve said that doesn’t actually sound to bad.

Continuing on, this week I found out that I do not like doing Documentation. I can do it and I did do it but I still hate it. The 2 pieces of documentation that I was assigned were the Work Breakdown Structure and the Essential Milestones document. Both were describing and detailing a summary of our work flow for the next 13 weeks. I am probably going to sound silly but Is it just me, or is nearly every single piece of documentation our team has written up for this project just summarizing our work process for the next 13 weeks but in just a slightly different way each time? I think I want to cry now.


Image 2 - PBR Example

In class we got a very detailed tutorial session on how to think about edge loops when it came to organic modeling and an introduction to Physics Based Rendering or PBR and how to Incorporate it into a design workflow using a program called Quixel SUITE which is a Plugin for Photoshop CC specifically designed for a PBR workflow. This coming monday when I get paid, I will buying the academic version of the plugin and experimenting like hell to get to grips and get familiar with the software. You can learn more about it HERE!

Finally in My CIU this week, we went deeper into digital media. Our main in class discussion topic was “THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIA”. The way I see this discussion topic is like this “what kind of response do I want to evoke with the chosen medium” and I going to be sticking with this for a while to come.

Lastly in a couple of hours I’m going out to the cinemas to go and see the new Ridley Scott Film The Martian. If it’s good enough I may even do a review but who knows.

As always, this is Ballzy247 signing out!








References

Image 1 ‐ Sausage ‐ Retrieved 03/10/2015 from ‐ http://junkee.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/sausage.jpg

Image 2 ‐ PBR Example ‐ Retrieved 03/10/2015 from ‐ http://www.marmoset.co/wp-content/uploads/header01.jpg