Life goes on...

So its been a while I know....so, let me bring things up to speed.

Dare has finished obviously, we did not win anything but it was worth every minute. It was a fantastic experience to see what its like to produce a game in 10 weeks. Anyway, our game website will be up and running shrotly so I'll post the link to that when its done.
I's now november, and I'm over a month into my 4th year. Its taken a while but I've eventually chosen a subject area that I will be investigating for the year, and that is interaction in motion comics.

For this I will be producing an interactive motion comic for use on touchscreen devices. (or at least, thats the plan!)

Dyed World!

This summer I competed in Dare to be Digital. A competition to create a game within 10 weeks. It was an amazing experience. Here are a couple of promotional images for our game "Dyed World".... The evil Lord Cinereous has stolen all the colour in the land! As the player you must help 'Hue', a young apprentice wizard and his uncle return colour to the land using his magical wand!

DARE!!

So, after a build up that seemed to last an eternity, dare finally starts tomorrow. I still dont think its sunk in yet! I'm looking forward to getting stuck in and bringing this game to life. Its been a busy past few weeks, amongst Zbrushing, some photoshop and some maya, I spent 3 days last week camping and kayaking in the ardeche in the south of France which was pretty spectacular! To give ya an idea of the scale of this gorge check out the pic, you can see the river at the bottom...

3rd year finishes!

So, 3rd year finally finished yesterday, last assignment handed in WOOOO HOOOO!

Unfortunately its not much of a break as I only have a few weeks until DARE starts, for which I have to practice and brush up on alot of things...

An unexpected visitor

A piece I completed a short while ago...An ship malfunction has caused this space traveller to eject and parachute to the ground to avoid going down with his ship. Unfortunately his parachute has got tangled up in the trees above, leaving him in a bit of a tight spot with the locals!

3rd Year....

Ok, so now we're about upto speed!....3rd year. I'm currently nearing the end of the year actually, as with 1st and 2nd year, its been very interesting, this time learning 3d animation, creating environments, making a video, our personal project, and digital media practice amongst others...Here's a few examples from the year..

This video was for character animation, for this I decided to create a dinosaur character, one of the main aims of this particular module was to demonstrate a walk cycle.... and show a change of emotion...

For my personal project I was fortunate enough to get involved with a team as a character artist with Tern TV (a UK television and digital production company based in Scotland). Tasked with developing character designs for a book called 'But-n-ben a go-go' by Mathew Fitt. This was a fantastic experience and I really enjoyed trying to visually identify some of the characters from the book based on the text.

One of many early concept sketches....






Some refined designs....

Some colour concepts....

2nd Year...

2nd year!

So this time modules we more in depth and to be honest I found the learning curve to be huge, especially concerning Maya, UV mapping, texturing and lighting. 3D really was the main focus this year as I felt this was an area I'd very much like to develop in.


So here we have my attempt to create a human figure, I got completely lost with the head, hands and feet!




With a little more practise I was able to create the following troll character... I felt quite surprised at what I had achieved at the time...





3 Characters I sketched out during lectures...of course I was still paying attention!







With the focus I was putting into modelling, I figured it would be beneficial for me to try it the traditional way. Really enjoyed this, and its ashame that I didnt take any further pictures as it exploded into a thousand pieces during the baking process!







Half way through 2nd year I got involved in creating a game with a fellow student who was studying games production management. Below is an early snapshot, basically players have to defend the castle from waves of enemies... Unfortunately due to other commitments it has kinda taken a back seat, but we should hopefully get back onto it shortly...





I also got some work with Whitespace Solutions and was employed as the environment artist, creating two games for Dundee's science centre. Games can be accessed via their web site here -www.sensation.org.uk/multimedia/

Apologies for the slightly 'jaggy' lines....the resolution provided by the client was was 640x480, but I guess something got slightly re-sized when they put them up on their site which was a bit of a shame.




During the summer between 1st year, and 2nd year, I worked with a company who painted sports grounds, mainly tennis courts, which was fantastic fun...however, they also invested in some kit to make signs.....for which I did quite a few designs...cut out of stainless steel.





I also took part in BBC Prototype. For 6 months I was an artist in a rapid prototyping team and we worked on 3 different briefs. A valuable experience.

Again, there were more modules and work produced, but I'll leave the rest for now and move onto 3rd year.

Uni - The beginning!

Ok, to try and highlight the progress of my skills I figure I'll include a small selection of pieces from uni beginning with 1st year, then 2nd, then to my current one, 3rd year.

So, in first year, I was basically introduced to Flash and Maya for the first time. Both of which I remember seemed very daunting, but I was excited to see what I could do!

So here we have the my first attempts at an environment in Maya for my 3D module...

In Flash we had to create an animation, for which I had to animate "brilliant scientist sniffs bright light"......!

I kinda liked this particular concept I did, and so my character was born!

Finial animation can be seen here ...Was a nice introduction to animating in flash, and was especially fun animating the change in facial expression...

Sticking with flash, we also had to produce an "interactive" piece... For some reason I decided to attempt a kinda interactive narrative using little army soldiers ....with my head. Yes, I did paint my face green, and yes, that is a salad bowl on my head, also painted green.







Lastly I had to create an illustration in response to an unpublished script....






1st year in a nutshell! There were a few other modules but I wont bother going through them all for the sake of getting up to speed...

Do we DARE?...Indeed we do!

Off to a good start as I've just found out our team has been accepted into Dare to be Digital 2010!