Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

Today's morning session (on a Monday i might add, which is a little weird considering im used to a Tuesday sessions) is for pixel art, which was abundant due to the technological limits that earlier systems and computers placed on art implementation in games. The great part is this type of art still advanced and can look great even in the current age , it just takes good use of the skill to make it look great. I accidentally ended up going through like half the lesson before realising i should be blogging so the first image is gonna show the first few things we did alongside what the current task is. The first thing we made is a line of pixels, then multiplied what we made and adjusted them to make a box, then duplicated this and drew connecting lines to make a cube, its pretty interesting to see how working from an isometric or orthographic view means you construct objects to convey their 3D nature. Using that box created from pixels we could also draw a Ellipse inside ...

A little bit of a late update on this (the sketchbook assignment is a real time sink), this is the completion of the modelling for the Starship enterprise that we were set a few weeks prior, likely this is going to be used in future lessons for us to map and texture it (at a guess) The start of this is composing the central ship part, the flat spherical shape that is at the front, which is made out of a cylinder and then extruded to provide the lower and higher ridge that are on the shape. Had to extrude a fair number of times to get some of the tapering of the shape on the bottom and top right as it has alot of layers to it's design. Here the shape is just about done, and its been smoothed to give it more natural curves for its shape, it looks a little peculiar from some of the attempt at matching to the source image making it look a little bloated on some surfaces.  Now it's on to the engines, which are bizarrely complicated ... at least for me, wh...

Might be a short post due to the nature of trying to follow the lesson more than trying to blog. Today's lesson is so far very interesting as we're learning a new program for use, which is Mudbox, which seems to essentially be a fun version of clay modelling, but more seriously its a really impressive modelling/sculpting tool. And the results of using it for an hour or so are.....; ....Interesting to say the least, this program has huge stores of tools and options and appears to be fairly straightforward to learn but difficult to master and to make extensive use of. We've covered so far the tools of Sculpt, Smooth, Grab, Flatten, Freeze, Stencil and Stamp and likely a load more. the program is good at presenting alot of the essential information front and center for the user. This is from further playing around with the tools, using combinations of stencils with stamps, as well as the use of the bump map which adds some seriously nice looking detail w...

Promise to make more posts = no new posts for two weeks, well I'm already off to a shaky start. For this weeks work (two weeks worth) As though carrying on from the skeleton assignment, we've decided to hit the gym and get some muscles. So we had to cover a muscle map of a front and rear view, and give some highlights of some of the key muscles. Much like with the skeleton assignment I definitely got a lot out of this work, it reinforced things i knew or rather had put into practice within my art work and gave me a clearer thought on how to structure a body effectively. The couple of sketches i did first were; Sadly this sort of overlaps with the full body view drawing (i skim read my assignment and only realised this afterwards) but i still think it has relevance as a close up drawing looking at the pectoral, abdominal and general chest muscles on a male adult. the interesting part is how so many components exist around the armpit and breast area where you have load...

Time for some new year's modelling and apparently this means setting course for the Starship Enterprise; firstly we were given the reference image for the various views of what we are up to model, so the first step is setting up a new project in maya, setting up a plane and assigning its material first to lambert, and then to the image we were give. Planar mapping helps to get the image displayed correctly on the plane. Then we duplicated it for for how many views were were using (3), following this we duplicate the plane and cut faces into those planes to grab the specific viewpoint that we want. To place it in the correct place we also had to set the translate coordinates to 0 and then move the face of the plane to the correct position. the first point sets the pivot, the second sets the image. The end result of placing these about looks a little like this.  by creating a primitive cube and then using the 3 key to show the smoothing of the model we can se...

A new year has started, but that still means more work to do; From the title you can imagine that we are working on Lizard people (well not ours) we're working of from the tutorials of fzdschool  and using his lizard guy painting tutorial as a basis for learning how to develop our own skills in defining shape, darks and lights within a painting. This being the base image we're working with (the black and white) from here we have to paint the base colour layer to separate the image from the canvas. okay i think this looks nice, i tried not to be too fussy with how close to the linework is, but still i wanted it to show most of the form that the initial drawing had. making this base colour layer makes it so we can make use of white when colouring without it dissapearing into the background, as well as providing a point of references where light and dark elements in the model can be shown. Some more progress, and a few tweaks here and there (layer names...