Arthur Rackham

This is work by Arthur Rackham, I think this is the sort of direction im going to go when it comes to 2D aspect of my project. The illustrations have a timeless but gritty feel to them. I like the way he uses composistion to depict these very dreamlike images, it feels almost like the tales are being remembered years later.

The Skillful Huntsman

The main inspiration for my project this year came from The Skillful Huntsman. A book created by a tutor and 3 of his students at the art center college of design. The aim of the book was to visualize the brothers grimm fairytale "The Skillful Huntsman" for use in the entertainment industry. The aim of the book was exploring various concepts for the characters and environments, and while the quality of the work is to a very high standard, I felt the over all tone was fairly bland and the ideas were not different enough. For example even though 3 artists produced work for the book, it is very difficult to tell the work apart. This synching of styles would be good in perhaps an actual project where the artists have to work in tandum, but for a book concerned with concepting I think it falls short on ideas. Nonetheless theres is some outstounding work in this book.

Hard Body Sculpting Project

This project's aim is to explore the ways in which a hard body model can be sculpted and mapped. To begin with I used an older, low poly model (below) but quickly found out in Mudbox that the differing sizes of polygons at higher subdivision levels were altering the quality of sculpted detail massively.
(below bottom). So I began modeling a new house with the aim of keeping the poly's the same size and also keeping them all quads (which is better for sub dividing).

Below is the initial concept work I made last year, and I used it as a rough guide for my model.

Starting with cubes I blocked out the basic shape of the building and then began subdividing and attatching the pieces together. It is important to note that when sub dividing hard body models you must crease all the edges first, otherwise the model will round at the corners and the form will be lost. once I has happy that I had enough (evenly sized) poly's I began to add the details such as the shambles and balcony's. While I could of added this detail in Mudbox, I felt that i could get more definition if it was included on the base mesh, and I wouldn't have to worry about stretching poly's.

Nixon Troll

The first small research project I completed was a simple troll head. Starting with a couple of orthos I doodled over summer I set out to model a low poly mesh, sculpt and paint it up in zbrush then export the maps out and stick them on the original low poly mesh in maya.
Above the Orthographics I worked from, and below the initial low poly mesh (Left) with a subdivided counterpart (right).At this stage I made my UV map (on the low poly mesh) by creating a seam from the back of his neck upto the top of his head, and also removed the horns to reduce deformation. Once the UV is made you cannot go back and begin editing the mesh, moving vertices is ok but I found out the hard way that if you begin merging or creating verts then the UV map will need to be created again, along with any other completed texture maps.

Next I fired up Zbrush and began to sculpt in the details, initially I found the navigation in Zbrush to be a little tricky as it focuses on moving the object rather than the camera however I soon got used to it and really enjoyed sculpting in the texture. The results can be seen below.Once the sculpting was completed I changed the material to a standard grey one and began poly painting, which I could then export as my difuse map (colour). Below is a quick video of the finished sculpt, ready for map exports.

One issue I had when exporting my maps from Zbrush was with the normal map. At first I generated the map from object space (below top) which took into account the direction of normals in a set 3D environment, so once it was applied to my low poly mesh I started getting very strange shadows comming from the normal as it had transfered information about the whole object. What I needed was a normal map generated from the tangents of the poly(below bottom). This way it would be effected by whatever environment I put it in. The Last two maps, Displacement and Diffuse, were quite straightforward in comparrision, only thing to note is that in Zbrush you need to generated a displacement map before you can get your normal map.
As the whole project was based around getting the most from low poly meshes I used the displacement map as a specular map. The end result you can see below, I found mental ray was far better at producing results with the normal map. I also applied the same textures to the higher subdivided model as comparison.