2013: Weather Demon speedpaint

And we are caught up, woohoo! To celebrate, here is a 30 minute speedpaint I did earlier in the week with a 'weather demon' theme.

2013: Thinking of Art class

Another class we have is Thinking of Art, where we learn new techniques, art design, colors, and other fun stuff. This year it's been focused on digital art, and this is what I have done for it so far. The first assignment was to come up with 20 character thumbnails for heroes and villains who had to share a theme but look distinctive from each other. The second assignment was a character mashup where you had to do a game character in another game style, or which I choose Ezio and Mass Effect. Not all that pleased with the latter however: I like the basic design, but the art is not at the standard where I am at now, and it has been bugging me so much that when I have time I will probably end up redoing it.

2013: Zombie Scarab Cyborg Guy

This is something that happened on a Sunday with nothing to do. I try to put some thought into the character designs I make, but with this, I went 'eff it' and just winged it to see what would come out. And what came out was a zombie scarab cyborg guy. Yep.

2013: Concept Art class

Getting closer and closer to being caught up with recent work now! Let's take a look at some of the things I did for Concept Art class that I am happy to show. The first thing I want to show is an assignment where we had to take a picture of ourselves with a certain emotion, and then amplify that through digital photo manipulation and painting over it. The picture I took of myself looked like sadistic glee, so I ended up with a violent-happy biker ork.

Second is an assignment that spawned off of the previous one. We all had to vote on the one we liked best, and then come up with 25 quick thumbnails and an equally quick initial speedpaint based on that character, based on a brief that would accompany it.

 

The character we voted on (not mine).

2013: Shadowrun.

Here is something I had a lot of fun and frustration with. When I made this, it had been a while since I had made an elaborate piece that was also purely for myself, so I decided to fix that. I had recently played Shadowrun Returns along with a friend of mine, so I decided to draw the characters we had made in our individual games and bring them together. Not happy with how my Ork guy turned out, but the woman is preeetty cool.

2013: Rampart WIP.

This is still a WIP, but I wanted to share it nonetheless. Of the Combaticons I did back in 2009 I still like Rampart (one of the few ones I came up with myself) the best. It's a clunky, bulky robot that looks like a cross between WW2 and Cold War machines, how could it not be my favorite? I wanted to learn myself to better use Maya, and so I decided to turn it into a full fledged character model. It's not done yet, since I keep working on it in the little bit of free time I get between schoolwork, but this is where I'm with it now. The black body is just a place holder until I am ready to fill out his inner workings.

2013: Project Sell-It

Project Sell-It was the first project of the 2nd year. In this, we had three weeks to work together with marketing students to come up with a game that we would pitch to a publisher. We were tasked with coming up with a game that would last 5 minutes, had monetary value, and would deliver an emotion.

What our group of five came up with was a game which would abuse a loophole. We came up with something that had 5 minute play sessions, but which also had multiple divergent paths as well as multiple areas and three diverse characters. It was based on the 'save scumming' principle, which comes from games that allow multiple choices (mostly RPGs): Do something, then reload to see how it could have been done differently. So for our game you could play it, then be encouraged to start up again and see how you could have done things differently.

It was story focused, but did not have dialogue or anything written down: Everything would be driven by what the player did and saw to tell a small, personal story. The setting was post-apocalyptic, but tried to offer something different by setting it right after the bombs fell. The boy had to go into the city to find medicine for his father, the old man had to go into the subways to retrieve a photobook he left behind while he fled the city (the only keepsake he has left of his friends and family), and a teenage girl that has to go into the woods to hunt for food. It could be monetized with an initial sale that offered the three standard characters, and then it could be taken further by offering new modules, each with (a) new character(s) and/or area(s).

2013: Project 'Vrij'

The end of the first schoolyear came with Project 'Vrij', a free project  where we could do what we want as long as it had to be a ride of some kind. What we ended up going with for this was an interactive installation where the user would step into a booth where they would meet an actor that played a doctor. They would focus on the screen, which would show a serene image while the doctor asked them questions, but then it'd take a turn for the worse, the world turning nightmarish while they were placed into the role of a patient that had forgotten about why he was in a mental installation.

One of the things I did for this project and can show is the unused flashback images, which would trigger at certain intervals. These images would flash very briefly, telling a story of what happened to that patient while also serving as shocking images that build in intensity. We ended up scrapping it though.

2013: Lizard Dude.

Earlier in the year I did a quick drawing of a lizard man in a modern-ish setting. I took a liking to it, and when I had nothing to do one day, I decided to work it out a bit more in photoshop.

2013: Cyberpunk Noire.

While I wanted to get into the Game Art course, prior to joining I had no experience with working in game engines or, for that matter, working with 3D software. So the "3D Modeling in Maya Autodesk" and "Unity" classes were my first run in with both. I took to it surprisingly well. Each class had their own final assignment: For Unity, it was to simply make a game. With 3D Modeling, create a room, texture it, and import it into a game engine. Because they were both due shortly after each other with only a few weeks apart, I decided to use this overlap.

Two early WIPs.

First, I made a Unity game that would use the (untextured) models from my Maya assignment and expanded on these with some low poly extra models. Programming has never been my strong suit and while learning to use Unity it continued to prove tricky, so I decided to focus on creating something that would focus on the visuals and audio. Because I didn't yet have textures to work with, I played around with colored shaders, image effects (thanks to my school's Unity Pro desktops) and the lighting.

The final result can be seen in action here: https://vimeo.com/67118069

When that was done I moved on to wrapping up the 3D part of the assignment, and gave the room (not the hallway and city I made for the Unity part of it) textures before importing it into Unity to work on it further there. I already played a bit with Image Effects, and decided to take it further here, and it led to a pretty spiffy result.

2013: Worldbuilding seminar.

Now we get to the good stuff. The first half year at the HKU was fairly light on actual art assignments, and while I kept myself busy with several sketches, that is not material I deem good enough to share on this blog. Instead, I will skip to the first truly interesting thing I did. The month January is always reserved for seminars taught by 4th year students, and I choose worldbuilding because that offered a chance to do both art and design.

We were tasked with creating a planet with it it's own culture, ecosystem, religion, etc. I decided to try something different and base it on a gasplanet, where several kinds of creatures would thrive. The most important part of this ecosystem were floating micro-creatures that grouped together and formed giant organisms that were, essentially, islands. The animals that lived on this world were divided into several types: Flying, able to land, and ground locked.

It was a very fun seminar that allowed me to go wild with my imagination, trying to balance all the various factors out to keep it both fantastical but also believable within it's own rulesets, and I am still pleased with the results.