This is a creature design I did over the past couple of days for the "Creature of the Week" contest on Conceptart.org, the brief was simply Annihilators from Nessus, the ninth circle of hell. Demons are pretty easy to throw together, so I took the opportunity to have a go at digital painting and see if I could explore the process, more than the concept. To begin with I went through ideas very quickly, then once I had a sketch of something that a good design, and sat well in space, I moved onto to painting in a simple top down light source, and in doing so added all the details ()this was the part that took the longest). I then got some images of marble, rust and ink in water, and used them with blend layers to add some textures and "grittyness" to the design. I finished by using dodge and burn to bring back some of the highlights and dark shades that were lost in the texturing.

Overall I am quite pleased with the result, while conceptually weak I think it provided a good opportunity to practice "rendering" and get stuck in pushing digital paint around. Also it was a good experience working to the deadline of the competition, it is all too easy to get complacent with work and let things drag out much longer than they need to.

The Brave Little Tailor, Original Text

For my project I have decided to work with the brothers Grimm tale “The Brave Little Tailor”. In a nutshell it is about a naïve, bravado tailor who goes out into the world to seek his fortune; however when he finds himself in sticky situations his naivety comes across as shrewdness and his bravado courageous. He owes his success as much to good luck as to his quick tongue. The first half of the tale we see the tailor overcome physical adversity such as out witting giants, and in secound half over come social adversity by overcoming class boundaries and eventually becoming king.

The tale is morally ambiguous; on the one hand it could be pointing out the usefulness of being witty and agile, on the other it could be saying that to be successful in this world one must resort to cheating and trickery. The Brave Little tailor is as much a comment on the world as a moral guideline.

Above is the 1938 animated short by Disney of the brave little tailor, sadly in this moralistic version the ambiguity is replaced by definite guidelines. The morally vague tailor is replaced by the typical good guy (Mickey mouse) who unwittingly finds himself in a perilous confrontation with a giant. Any commentary on classist society restraining the protagonist is done away with in favour of the conventional love story between Mickey and Minnie.

What is interesting when comparing the Grimm adaptation with the Disney is that they both use this folk tale as a vehicle for the different moral objectives of their time. However I would like to point out a key difference, the brothers Grimm collected the story from the people of the time, granted editing of the diverse range of folk tales did take place, but the moral objective was decided by the people who told and retold the story over generations. The Disney version however was produced by Walt Disney himself, the moral objective was decided by him and a handful of his peers. In a sense we have top down versus bottom up, something which after all these years is becoming relevant again. So a possible direction for my own project might be what moral objectives would a modern, internet driven bottom up culture push through this old story? What medium(s) would it be in? Would it be told in one way or many ways? Hopefully I will be able to answer these questions and incorporate these elements into my own take on the narrative, art style and presentation.

Lighting Tutorial

Above is the results after a lighting tuturial I had. The tutorial covered realistic lighting and shadows in Maya, through the tutorial I learned about:

-Types of lights in Maya
-Photons in Maya
-Global Illumination
-Final Gather
-Mental Ray

After setting up the scene (Box with a hole in top and a ball in the corner) we first began looking at the various types of lights in Maya.

-Spot Light, projects a cone of light from a point.
-Directional Light, projects a plane of light, only rotation affects this light source.
-Point Light, projects from a point all around it
-Ambient Light, similar to point but will always project everywhere aswell

After playing around with the types of light, we found that quadratic decay provided the most realistic results. Under the mental ray/global illumination options on the light is the option to turn on photons, these are almost like balls projected from the light and bounce around picking up surface colours. By playing with the extremes of the intensity and exponent we gained a better understanding of how these work.

What I found out about lighting was, while technical, it also required a lot of playing around and seeing what worked best, constantly changing lighting and render settings to find out how they effect the results.