3rd Quarter Midterms

Midterms are over for my third quarter and boy did I have to amp up the quantity of the work. With the exception of two of these projects all of them took place within a weeks time as midterm projects.  We will start with all there Character and Object Design course work first.

Character and Object Design Midterms

These first two were the only two that were done the week before midterms. Still working on generic character and monster designs but mainly focusing on learning how to digitally draw and paint then really coming up with a good design. 

This guy is a nomadic warrior. I didn't really have any back story or thought put into him, again it's just for practice painting.

 This next one however we started to think a little bit more into creating something conceptually rather then just painting. We had a choice to design an Alien (intelligent) or Creature (instinctual). I choose a creature and from there had to break it down even further having it be from the wild, a pet, tamed as a mount or a beast of burden.  I narrowed it down to a beast of mount of sorts, who ferries a race of people who live in underwater domes. Using its 10  legs it bounces and skims along the bottom of the ocean carrying its passengers in a bubble tank strapped to its back. The head has a proboscis like mouth for scavenging for food between small rocks and eyes on the top of its head to watch for predators.

Now we get into the Midterm work. For our midterm in Character and Object Design we had to design a traveling musician from the future, who was part of an underground movement to overthrow the dysatopian like government. The musician also had to be able to use his instrument as a weapon. This project came from a weekly character design contest held on conceptart.org

These first few sketches were quick and I tried to get as many ideas out as I could. One method I used was silhouetting where I just focus on the characters silhouette. 

I picked a face and then played around with feature spacing and shape symbolism.

 Trying different weight and height sized bodies.

 Costume conceptualization.

 Body turn around for 3D modeling sheets and drawing guide.

 Facial expressions with the chosen face.

 Hand and feet studies with the costume.

 Dynamic pose turn around.

 Concept painting using one of the dynamic poses. In hindsight I would have liked to add a little more futuristic "tech" to him to reinforce the futuristic feel.

 Principles of 3D

This chair scene I did was to practice with 3ds Max's 'Mass FX' feature that simulates physics. In class we learned how to use this to scatter rubble in a dynamic way. I used stock chairs.

 This was the final object for homework we had to make, which used the majority of the modeling tools we have learned so far. Now we are moving into texturing, lighting and a little animation.

 This assignment was given to us for homework, however to link the bullets together we only needed to put a block between each one. Because of my military experience I knew how 50 cal bullets are linked so I went ahead and accurately modeled the linkage.

 For our final project in this class we are building a tank. It doesn't have to be able to go into a game engine (that's next class). We will also be texturing, lighting it and putting it into a small scene so the instructor has given us all quarter to work on it as we learn the 3ds Max. This is my progress so far.

 Visual Language and Communication

This is a funny one. In my Visual Language class our midterm was to pick a peice of art from a list that was given to us, and recreate it in our own way. We were allowed to make changes in our version to modernize it or make it funny. Then we had to write a paper on the use of perspective in the piece. I choose Draftsman Drawing a Nude. This is the original.

This is my version done in Photoshop.

Principles of 2D Animation

The assignment assigned us an Olympic sport by drawing out of a hat. We then had to have a short animation of a cartoon flower sack attempting the sport. This was done with 120 hand drawn pictures, photographed one by one.