Sams VR Blog
Just another myblog.arts site

Category: Virtual Spaces

Categories
Virtual Spaces

My Character

In our lesson with kelvin we started to construct clay figures which we will later use in our project.

First we made a skeleton out of metal wire and gradually from that we used more and more wire and wrapped the skeleton so that it got thicker and studier. after i had finished this part of the task, which actually took a while to complete, i started with the clay and wrapped strips of the hard drying clay around the skeleton and when the strips were wrapped up from there i molded the figure into my desired shape that i had in mind. To be honest i wasn’t working from a plan i was just going from my imagination to create a character to what turned out in the end was completely random. i’m not entirely sure why but the finished product closely resembles a platypus on its hind legs, theres not really any reason for this apart from the fact that i figured it would be easier to mold a snout rather then a face. I wanted to create a character that partially represented different forms of society, such as that cute appearance of the platypus but in reality it can be deadly, i’m not sure where this idea came from but again it might have been just in the moment as i was constructing the character.

if i could do this again, i would have made an actual plan and multiple designs before making the clay structure however this did not happen and i eventually drew up the plans after the character was made.

Change of mind

whilst i was at home i was looking at those wooden figures that people often model into a certain shape, and they have very posable limbs which means its very easy to put the figures in difficult positions. For example you can make it look like its doing a very complex ballet move.

Drawing designs

I since i had made the actual character out of clay and i was having thoughts about actually changing the whole character up and making it look more block like, i decided to draw some detailed ideas about the more specific atributes of the character, and add details such as what the hands would look like, and what the character would look from a birds eye view

Final design

Finally i had finished the designs of the character in both the clay aspect of the process and the drawn up plans aswell, all i had to do now was complete the 3D model on the computer, and as i have had some practise in maya i think the outcome of making a figure in maya would be the best bet as i feel i am the most confident in the process and even though my skills in that software are rather limited, i think this figure is quite simple to make so i am confident in my abilities on Maya.

Categories
Island castle island castle Virtual Spaces

Maya Floating island with a castle

Critical Apprasil

the initial idea that i had was to make an island that had different features of a medeival town on it, these would include a number of houses and farms and then the main piece to this creation would be the centre castle, which would be in the centre of the project.

Soon after we got the brief of the project i watched Avatar 2 and got an idea for my project. i could have the caste and the town on a floating island, as that could look very interesting as a project but at the same time it is very imersive as a whole because it adds an element of fantasy into it.

there are quite a few things that i think could have gone better as a whole in this project, i procrastinated alot and i feel this really held me back because when i eventually started with the project i had about 5 days til the deadline and all i had to show for it was a moodboard of my ideas and a largely empty blog. so thats probably the thing i regret the most when i came to the project as a whole, and i think if i had started earlier then i would definetly have gotten more work done.

one of the most tricky parts to the project was actually trying to get the castle to look realistic but with a lowpoly feel to it, i decided in the end to make just castle on its own whilst on the floating island, i thlught this would be an easier project to do as making an entire town was going to be incredibly time consuming and i doubted whether or not i was going to actually be able to finish it to a good standard. Making the castle was relitevely straight forward as all it was was a number of towers of different sizes, however the difficult part was making sure it looked decent and that it would be able to effectively look like a realstic castle.

when i had finally finished the castle and island, the next part was probaly the trickiest and most complicated part, i had to add lighting and animate a camera on the model then record the camera going round the model. the lighting wasnt a problem, but trying to get the lighting to fit the model and light the exact part that i wanted it to light was very fiddily so i decided to just go with a skydome light, and scrap the idea of lights in the windows of the castle. The next part was the camera and this was difficult however i have used keyframes on premiere pro before so i knew the basic principles of keyframing a shot although it was still a tricky part to the animation even though i managed to get it finished and to a decent standard.

overall as i said before i tbhink the largest issue with this project was that i left if to the last minute and i think the original idea was quite ambitious however i feel that i succeeded in creating a decent looking model with lighting and a camera and i know that i will make another world shortly but this one will be larger and maybe i will be able to make a town or city with water features and so on.

On my laptop i did not have adobe aftereffects so there was no way for me to render and then export the file to after effects so i have taken a screen shot of the project to show it at its final stage.

Categories
Virtual Spaces

World Building

with my world building artefact, i was very eager to get started, this seemed like a very enjoyably project and something that i would have alot of fun with becasue i have always been really interested in how worlds are built on video games or something like really VFX based films. the breif for this project was to create a world that is based of the city that you grew up in, and include three of the major landmarks for that city.

I the city that i grew up in is London so i had a vast amount of landmarks that i could choose from, i could have done the Shard, could have done one of the many parks that liter around the city. In the end i chose to do Big Ben, the London eye and tower bridge, as all three of these locations are very obviously in London and all are massive tourist attractions.

Now that i had the landmarks chosen i had to figure out how i was going to make them, i could either import images from the unity store or i could make them on a software such as Maya. Surprisingly i started on the landmarks by constructing them myself but then i realized that this was largely time wasting and there where easier ways such as importing the 3D images myself so i decided that was the best way to do it.

I imported all three of the major landmarks, and set them on the world by basing them around a main road that would stretch through, and they would be on either side of the road. I included a number of Lamp posts and phone boxes and Letter boxes, to really give the impression the the city that im making is London.