Oliver Castle - BA(Hons) Computer Animation Arts

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.

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.

Today was 6 hours of digital drawing. We had a little bit of infomation on composition, and how to use leading lines to draw the viewer in, so I sketched out a redo of one of my thumbnails. Once we were done with that I spent the rest of the day doing thumbnails/sketches for the final 3 shots. I'm trying to focus on the idea of where the bamboo comes from, how it's grown, farmed, etc.  So far I'm working under the idea that the people reuse the old zinc mines and grow the bamboo in the pooled water at the bottom. Like how many quarries are turned into lakes once they're used up.

Oops, completely forgot about these. We went through perspective drawing in today's digital drawing class. So I figure I should upload these too. Here's a one, two and two three point perspective shots. Not a fan of the last one but oh well. Here's the above shots without the guidelines.

Digital Painting was spent learning how to use brushes, as well as how to make our own. I'm almost glad I haven't finished all my thumbnails yet, because now I get to use the things I learned for the next few! Almost. Not actually glad, but it's close. Anyway, here's the stuff I produced in the session. Might end up using them for my thumbnails, but they probably need a little adjusting.

Isaura Crit - Oliver Castle Invisible Cities 2017 by Oliver Castle on Scribd

These are the colour keys I made as a quick test using one of my Isaura key thumbnails.

We spent this afternoon learning about perspective; 1, 2 and 3 point. It's a useful technique that I'll definitely be using in my final few thumbnails. Would have been nice to learn it a bit earlier though, I've always been terrible at perspective, I just can't seem to imagine how it's 'supposed' to look. But I suppose I could have learnt it in my own time. Upper Left: 1 Point, Lower Left: 2 Point, Upper Right: 3 Point, Lower Right: 1 Point (But using non-cubes!)

Since not much has happened over these two days (due to them being literally the first and second days of term) I decided to condense them into one post. Not really sure what I'm doing for this but here goes. Just a small thing I modelled while listening A nice little house we were tasked with modelling On Monday we started with an overview of what we'll be doing in the Autodesk Maya part of Toolkit 1, followed by a brief session of messing around in Maya and learning the basic interface. Luckily I already had a decent grasp of it from my previous year so nothing to hard, though I am 100% certain I've learned a lot of things in, how should I say, far from efficient ways. Mainly due to me just stumbling around the program in a crude attempt to learn it. So I'll be sure to pay extra good attention in following sessions since it's good to crush bad habits as soon as possible, lest they grow into horrific unchangeable problems. My Master Studies from Mond...