One week to go

Benn enjoying easter time off Uni a little too much perhaps, as I have neglected doing any work until recently :s But fear not I am on my way to finishing my Digital Design project which I believe is in for next friday, my only issue I think is going to be colouring using the live paint tool in Ai.

The Empire so far (look at previous blog entry for image being worked on)

In other news I have been playing some of the Gears of War 3 Beta with my group and have to say it is looking to surpass previous Gears titles by far when it comes to multiplayer. The level designs, though small, are well planned out and weapon placement is in no way biased which means those 'trick shooters' with the longshot will be nothing to fear once more. There is however a problem with players who like to sit tight in a huddle waiting for a power weapon such as the 'One shot' to spawn which leaves human counter parts across the world spamming their gamepads furiously. Needless to say it is fun when you win.

You've got to go deeper

Taking a break from design work - sort of. Today's post is all about MINECRAFT! Recently I bought some Magenta/Green glasses to take advantage of it's 3d anaglyph mode and it was awesome to put it frankly, I even built myself a mini castle just to test it out. Not the best thing out there, but it's not like I spend every waking moment on it.

Swords, swords, swords

Been playing around with Lightwave some more, this time with some texture packs a friend gave me so I can get the hang of UV mapping and applying them to the model. So far it's been a success, they don't look fantastic but then again these textures weren't designed for the model I whipped up. I'm looking forward to designing some of my own work to create models of but for now I'd like to take babysteps so I don't miss something important.

This model has far fewer points and polygons attached as I took out that which was unnecessary such as all the innards, kind of like gutting a fish.

EDIT*: I just figured out how to increase the resolution of the texture >.<  So now it looks better atleast. Also colours don't match because I inverted the texture in places.

New Project?

I'm really loving this blog as some potential good fortune has come my way, although I can't really mention what it is. Although I can say it has me interested in Adobe Fireworks and Lightwave, as such I was playing around yesterday evening with some basic polygon construction and managed to build myself a nifty little blade. 

Lightwave

Ofcourse this would need alot of work done to it, reducing the number of points, applying textures, finer details etc. But if I stick at it a bit more I'm sure that I'll be able to develop some brilliant models.

The Research Book

So the research book for Digital Design Assignment one has been finished and handed in, I neglected to photocopy  my sketches so I'll have to wait till after the Easter holidays to get it back. I do however have my work in progress on the Empire Theatre.

Empire Tower Base

It's taken me near enough 2 solid hours to get this far, but that's an assumption because I did it other the course of a 6 hour day, so it may have been substantially shorter than that, I'm not the best time keeper.

Oh and I'm currently engaged in 2 projects at Uni, the other being the design of a full graphic novel based on the invention of *picks out of tutors hat* THE WORLD WIDE WEB! So I'll get some of my sketchbook work up on here soon such as character design, boy this will be entertaining to say the least.

Digital Design Elective

So at this point it's actually April and I've started my elective for this year 'Digital Design'. The people on this module are expected to have no understanding of illustrator however my mind is BLOWN by the work they asked of us. The first assignment consists of an illustrator image and a photoshop image, after picking a building in Sunderland from a list given to us we were told to head out and take various pictures. One of these images is to be reconstructed using illustrator to a realistic photographic level, and here's the image I picked.

Empire Theatre

However before we do any work a research book is to be assembled, which makes no sense because the whole point is being able to work in it as you progress not make the book hand it in then do the work, So naturally I need to include some test images such as these.

So begins University work

So not far into Uni we started our digital design module, not a great deal was expected from us as most had little or no experience. The main focus of the module was the introduction to Illustrator and Photoshop, now I am a long time user of Photoshop and instead of listening to the tutors step by step of 'how to make a new layer' I decided to do this.

Sir Upperdog

Next we were supposed to then mess around with Photoshop a bit then be taught a little on Illustrator, having nothing to do I went straight onto Illustrator and did this.

Ofcourse I had not seen the flaw in working fast as soon I was left with nothing to do . . . nothing except stare at facebook for another hour, which although easy to do leaves me feeling dead inside haha.

A growing sense of illustrator

Say hello to Fang, one of my original comic style drawings which I used whilst increasing my knowledge of illustrator.

'Fang' the bat

I've been finding it much easier to use the pen tool at this point and have some more images to show for it, the Dragon was used to create a jigsaw which was sort of an ice breaker task we were issued on the first day of University.

Dragon - all visible strokes

And then of course for fun, what's art without some anatomy in there too . . .

'Skull' - One of my proudest designs

'Ribcage' - Following the style of Skull

Getting to grips with illustrator

The following images were simply a means of learning the basics of illustrator such as the Pen tool and Live Paint.

Manga Girl

The very first I produced were based off sketches I found using Google images, most of my practice came from using other peoples sketches.

Centaur

       

Mecha Dragon