Oliver Castle - BA(Hons) Computer Animation Arts

Today's session was all about texturing and learning about the different ways to achieve said task. First, via photoshop; creating a flat texture from an unfolded UV. Not bad, looks nice, if a little flat. The second method was to use Autodesk Mudbox to "paint" the 3d shape (in this case a cube) with multiple layers to create the texture. For my layers I went with: The Diffuse (The "Base Colour" layer) The Specular Layer (Which affects how reflective and responsive to light the cube is) And the Bump Map! (To give the texture slight depth) All in all, it creates a nice little rusted metal looking cube. Looking forward to using mudbox for my city later on!

Today's session was the next step up from last week's walk cycles. This time we recorded ourselves doing a 'silly walk' (a la Monty Python). Then we sketched it out on paper. And animated it! To be honest, I'm not really proud of it. The walk was so odd it's kind of hard for me to actually figure out what the hell I was doing and that naturally made it hard to translate it into animation.

We spent today working more on the chicken coop, specifically readying it for texturing by fixing up the UVs.

Here's a couple of initial thumbnails I did in today's Digital Drawing session! Not really going in with the intent of creating buildings just yet, but more to try and break down and understand Nithiyendran's "Language" (Or how he comes up with his pieces) with the goal of then "Rebuilding" a city from those parts. As part of this idea, and to help me in the later stages, I tried to also do this with Nithiyendran's colours. Essentially taking the colours I can find on his pieces and slapping them on a spectrum. Hopefully this will help me decide on my cities colour pallette when I get to that point.

Trying something new with my work diaries, audio logs! I'd appreciate any feedback, since I'm really not sure if or how this is going to work! More Infomation on Nithiyendran Website Instagram

Just a quick picture of today's Maya work, getting started on digital sets and it's coming along nicely. Unfortunately I'm out of the tutorial system right now so I can't continue but I'll just have to come back to it once I'm all hooked up on monday. Still, I'm happy with what I got done today so it's all good.

Walk Cycles! That was the focus of today's session, and I was rather excited to get stuck in with it. I've tried doing walk cycles before in my own time, but I could never quite get them to look right. The stuff I did today finally does, even if it's a little rough. Nice and simple really, just have to get that curve right for the person bobbing up and down. It looks a little weird, but that's just because people don't usually move faster than most cars. Not the easiest image to actually decipher, since it's just a mess of green blobs, but it works so who cares. He's a little shaky, but I think he'll get there in one piece. Wherever there is.

Just a couple of drawings from the life drawing session from today, I 'decided' to go for a lower angle on some of the pieces, just to see what it looked like. I rather like how some of them turned out. I think I need to work on my proportions though, I still can't seem to get them right.

Today's session was spent working on creating structure based on shapes, for now only really working with simple/basic shapes (Squares, Circles and Triangles). We also touched upon using things like repetition and direction to draw the viewer's eye.