So Slow

Good job this is just a personal project, as its going at a snails pace so far.

Not a great difference since last, but its got the dorsal wing in there now, as well as cuts in the wing ready for the flaps (which are difficult to see at this distance).

Progress of some measure

So I've been lazy the past few days. At least one day can be blamed on a hangover though. Anyway, here's the latest update for the shuttle. Its coming along nicely, but I will need to do a lot of cleaning up and vertex manipulation to use all those vertices efficiently.

I know its bad, but I cant help but think of dolphins when I see my model in its current state...

Face Topology

A character's topology is paramount when it comes to them being ready for animation. A good topology allows the job of the animator to be a little less difficult, not to mention it is just good practise to only have polys where you need them.

Josh has started on one of the characters and as far as I can tell is currently focusing on the face. He spoke about wanting to be better at creating good character topology and I think this project is his way of gaining knowledge and practise in that area.

^ Josh's work so far in this specific area.

As far as I can tell I know less about topology than Josh, so hopefully I will convince him at some point to post updates of his work on his Blog so that I can link you to it in hopes you can see both sides of this project.

Work Begins

Whilst there are still so many variables to consider and decide on, there is one thing I can be doing one thing that is definitely needed and highly unlikely to change, and that is the space shuttle.

I've decided to build the space shuttle Atlantis from NASA. It may change slightly but for now it is a great base to build on, and thankfully I was able to find fairly clean 'blue prints' of it from http://www.the-blueprints.com/ .

Started the build, only creating half and eventually mirroring it as the shuttle is almost a perfect mirror image of itself if split in half.

This is my second attempt at the build, this time I am using a modular approach; breaking the shuttle into pieces, building them and then placing them back together.

Modular creation is just one way to go about building anything in 3D. For me it is slightly easier for the level I am at with the use of 3D software. It may take longer than other approaches, but it makes the most sense to me at the moment. I know I will have to attach them together further down the line and then clean the hole mesh topology up.

Space Animation Project

Whilst work from university certainly keeps the my friends and I busy, i suppose it is always good to have side projects that further our knowledge and experience of our subjects.

That being said a friend of mine, Josh, came to me asking if I was interested in doing a short animation with him.  After listening to some of the details I agreed, and here is where we are at the moment; details have been discussed, roles, tasks and soft deadlines have been given. Josh will be doing the character art/design/creation and I will be doing the animation and prop creation. They aren't set in stone so no doubt we will be lending each other a hand in order to get things done in an efficient manner.

In terms of the story driving the animation, it is set in space with a crew of only two astronauts aboard a shuttle. They are making their way back to Earth from a long term mission when something tragic happens.

That's all I can say for the story for now as it is liable to change since we are only in early stages of planning and development. Not to mention I wouldn't want to spoil the final outcome.

The animation will run for around 10 minutes, maybe less, and is designed to provoke emotion in its audience.

This blog will be dedicated to our progress and development, as well as the ideas we go through in terms of how we develop the story line and how we go about physically creating this project (models, textures, animations, lighting, scenes etc.).

The title is yet to be decided.

Project: Legacy, Evolution Evolved. Kor R.R.D. - 'Resource Rotary Digger'

You might see a few updates here and there on this final piece, shadows are at least one.

For a background to the machine, imagine Kor living and working within this massive machine like that on navy ships today.

The top half are living and command quarters, the glass is explosion proof and allows them to grow food resources as it acts like a greenhouse when they need it to. The bottom is for machinery and maintenance crews only.

The top half also never moves, it is stationary. The bottom however where the drill bit is rotates at incredible speeds for its size. It is powered by the two massive rocket engines on its side that work in harmony with one another to rotate the drill.

When the Kor wish to move the R.R.D. to another resource rich area, they simply rotate the engines downwards, lift off from the ground, retract the legs and tripods and slowly hover in any direction.

The machine has no weapons for defence, but its sheer size can withstand the hardiest of assaults. If pieces are destroyed or damaged then they can be replaced, as the machine was designed and built to be modular.

Without further delay, the final concept art for Project: Legacy, Evolution Evolved. Kor R.R.D. - 'Resource Rotary Digger':

*Download my entire project files:

Final concept image. References. Progression. PSD.

Final Update of the 'Legacy' project

This is the final update for this project that I will be presenting, though there is the final image to come in my next post.

Since the last update I have made quite a few changes. I took an image i had previously used for colours and expanded it width ways, then feathered it out and lowered the opacity so that i kept the soil-like texture with my already painted brown on top.

I also added dust around the tripod feet of the machine.
Then added the beginning of a hole that the machine had just dug for.

Here I've slightly increased the realism of the hole, trying to give it multiple layers of soil/earth as you would find in real life, until the point where no light can reach - hence why it turns into a black hole.

From this image to the last quite a few changes have been made and certain factors added. I placed smoke coming from the top of the machine, with its antenna showing a red light that would fade in and out as to warn Kor aircraft to move away, as these machines are immensely tall. As a way to try and show the size of my machine i added two others in the background. One that has been destroyed by possible rebels and another that is working just like this one in the foreground.

For increased depth realisation i also placed a tiny silhouette of a human (maybe rebel planting charge or a Kor engineer?) at the right foot of the machine.

To add effect and a bit of life into the scene, I painted earth falling off and out of the cracks of the machines rotary structure, as this machine could have just finished a dig and has retracted itself from the ground.

I have also added highlights along the hull, cables, legs and anywhere else that i thought light would be particularly prominent. As well as adding reflection from the window compartment, making it slightly 'foggy' to show it hasn't been cleaned in some time.

Background Progress

The vehicle itself is almost done. I need to add highlights, shadows and light diffraction etc. but i believe all of that is altered by an object's environment. Therefore I'm doing the background first and then adding those as final touches.

Progress so far on the background:

 I was wanting to go with a dawn look, so I used warm colours heavily.

I also thought that realistically without a huge human population polluting the sky with light sources then it would be fairly clear at dawn, so I added cold blues and purples to try and show this, with the orange still filtering through to show sun up.

I realised I also wanted to make sure that my audience understood the sheer monstrous size of my machine, and to do so it needed some sort of depth. With that in mind I added clouds that were large at the top of the image and small at the bottom. I'm going to add more things in to show depth but this was just another piece that helped to show this.

For colours on the ground so far I've used only one layer of brown taken from the top right of the image, more layers will be built up later on. I also took the trees from the middle image and softly removed everything bar the trees. Then I did an image match to match the colours of the brown floor, and slightly changed the opacity to make them look more 'at home' in the concept.


For the sky I also used reference images, a simple Google image search for 'dawn' lead me to the images bellow of which I used to take colour samples from:

Adding Detail

A machine needs parts right? or at least panels to get to those parts. With that in mind, here is the latest update. It has panels and cables which are used to manoeuvre the tripod feet as well as the legs.

I've also added a huge section for windows. I'll be writing more about their (and everything else's) use on the final piece of this concept work, but for now imagine many of the 'Kor' military living and working in this machine.

Greyscale Update

So i changed the direction of the light source as although this is a vehicle design i want to create a simplistic background for it eventually, and the change in light direction will help me produce something better.

So new light source, and a bit more grey scale detail. A lot more to come:

Greyscale Base

So this is the final design. Obviously there will be more detail to come but this is just a progress update to show how I'm using grey scale in correspondence with light source:

More Drawings

So these are the final 3 quick silhouette/concepts that I'm going to do. Next ill just either do an indepth silhouette concept, only using dark and light values with no colour and then build colour on top of that, or just dive straight in and start doing the full colour concept. Anyway, here are the last 3, you'll see which out of all the concepts I chose to build on in the next post:

The front and back of the bottom image was actually created by using the Battlestar Galactica ship from (believe it or not) the Battlestar Galactica TV show.

(Battlestar Galactica ship)