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     So here's a sketch of an idea i had for something i've been wanting to try in maya for quite some time but never knew if it was something i'd be able to do (without spending an eternity forum/tut hopping in hopes of finding the answers) and i think after i do a bit more research i'll be able to do something like it. The idea is to call for particles to either be emitted from the sphere center or at any random location within the sphere and have a mild velocity going outward. Place a cube somewhere in the sphere and record the location of its 8 vertices. Then, use the "position" of each particle to write an If/THEN expression that basically states: IF a particle's location is within these vecotrs (x,y,z locations) then it's color will change to a random value between white (what all the particles are by default) and blue.

I've learned a bit about writing expression in the past few days, but i haven't learned about conditional statements/test/whatnot yet...so i'll see if i can't figure out an expression for this and give it a go. If anything, i might just be able to use dynamics and state that whenever a particle comes in contact with the cube (which obviously wouldn't be rendered) it'll change to a random color within a given range...so either way i'm sure i'll come up with a technique to make this idea happen.

Finally!!!1|1|11

    So it's been a long time since i've made a substantial posting, and it probably be longer still ttill there's anything really worth it on here - but i figure since i've got the shit to put on here...why not do it anyway?

     So this is the concept i came up with for the wall that goes around the main/initial town in my story (it would be the equivalent to Traverse or Twilight Town from Kingdom Hearts I/II). I was heavily influenced by the Great Walls of Ba Sing Se (from Avatar: The Last Airbender), but there were a few times where the wall just seemed...funny and whimsicle because of how it rose/fell and weaved along the mountain crest.




     I can understand why a wall built like this would have an ever-changing 'levelness', but since there's elemental manipulation in my story, i don't want to be limited to "real world" mechanics...which is kind of why i find some of these pictures i captured so funny.








     This is a pretty good kind of "middle ground" between the rise/fall of the terrain and the levelness of the wall. Again, i wanted mine to be a constant height, so this would only partially represent my idea.









     This is the kind of...aesthetic i'm going for in my wall design - grand, towering, impenetrable, almost as if it weren't man-made. I mean, the ground at the base of the wall isn't 100% level, but they maintain a constant height all around the inner-city. There's far less terrain near the city of Ba Sing Se than in my story, but the constant height thing is almost a must for me.







    This was a concept sketch i came up with for for my main town (after the post below this one, but before my design for the wall) and it might not make much sense to the viewer without any insight into my story/worl, but i'll eventually have some 3D mock-ups going on to illustrate the train routes and underlying terrain (i was kind of aiming for a small mountain/hill range encircling one larger mountain/hill that would have the Archives library sitting atop it)

More sketches and designs to come soon now that i've dusted off my Wacom tablet and found it far easier to sketch "layered" ideas in photoshop than on paper and then transfer.

Train-ing

This is just a draft (slightly composited with some touch-ups in photoshop) of what i'm thinking of making the layout of my first major town (and hugely skill-tasking project) of Quinsa. Since it's going to be a sort of hub where alot of different trains, people, goods, and what have you come through, i gave the train layout a lot of thought (and try not to picture a single set of tracks along each line...there's going to be a few sets and maybe another level in some places - sometimes a larger train will utilize two sets of tracks because it's so huge).

So i'm going to finish touching it up tomorrow and should have a clear 'inked'/line version ready along with some better place markers and more flair.

Just uploading to have a place other than my hard drive to put it.

Do The Hedgehog!

Drawing courtesy of DJ

Raise The Rufus

          So this morning i started messing around with sketchbookpr (continuing from last night) and i just wasn't feeling it, so i decided to go through my vast collection of images from the net and DJ to see what i thought might be fun coloring and getting used to my tablet, and i came across a few chibi versions of notorious FFVII characters. I knew i wasn't going to be able to color all of them, so i picked the one with the simplest outfit and printed out a hard copy. I scaled it down and layed the paper over my wacom tablet and traced over it, transfering it to photoshop. The image to the left is what i got.


          I darkened it a little bit, because when i first traced it (and mind you, no line was gone over twice) i had the pencil's opacity on about 30% - so if i went over a curve a few times, the median of them would be darker than the rest. But i realized that without taking more time to go over and refine it in PS, it would be faster to ink the printed copy, and scan it into PS to then color.




     So the left is the inked version of the drawing DJ did so long ago. It's of Rufus Shinra from FFVII. And the right is what i ended up with after...an hour or so? I'm not sure exactly when i started, but i know i first got on my computer around 10 am and i finished this around Noon (and there was time spent in sketchbook pro, looking for images, printing, inking, and scanning....so an hour is a good guess). It still has that 'sketch' look to it - because of all the little specks and stuff around the lines, but when i'm done coloring it, i'll go in and use the smudge tool to get rid of em.

Look A' Muh Dais

          So this is an isometric sketch i did a few days ago (forgive me for not cleaning it up in photoshop and getting rid of those isometric guide lines). It's basically a concept for part of the set where the FF Sonic short will take place. There's not a whole lot of detail in it just yet, but there will be - well....it's only fair to warn you that only so much is going to be done by pencil and digital drawing....it's much faster for me to do detail actually in Maya than on one medium and then in Maya.


          So here's me going over the Isometric Sketch in Sketchbook Pro (the drawing tools and aids are awesome in this btw). I'm only going to do a small section of it (only the stairs will get the most drawing done, the pillars won't cover all of the stairs drawn). I'll go in afterwards and try my hand at coloring it just to give it some characer (and practice on my end). But that's what i've got as of tonight, tomorrow i'll work on it a little bit and try to finish the new menu for my job.


          Smaller details and 'Sectional' layouts of the pillars and arches will definitely be in the mix (tho mostly just for practice). So i'm trying to keep stuff on here fresh...check back later.

Stroke Of Luck

          So i got my Wacom Intuos 4 (Lg) digital tablet today, as well as the 2010 version of Sketchbook Pro, and was taking it for a spin to get used to using a pen instead of a mouse and all the 'sensetivity' behind it, and the only thing i really got out of it was this sketch dejon did of Cloud as a hedgehog. Now, granted it's not the best work, i was just getting used to changing brush szes, using the opposite end of the pen as an eraser (which i thought was incredibly intuitive), the only part of the picture i like myself is the gloves.

          So since i've got sketchbook pro now, and it allows for extremely acurate arcs and lines and various other aspects of drawing my free had is always void of, i should, though i'm not sure what they'll be of, be able to post some pretty detailed conceptual designs on here from now on (though probably as sporadic as everything else). My classes only really focus on techniques and concepts (like lighting and texture, rigging, and basically anatomy), so i won't really have any 'projects' that i'll be posting stuff done in sketchbook (though the things i do in ZBrush when i get into it will definitely be posted).

          So that's really all i've got for now, i'm off to read Stop Staring, one of the books i got this semester that i think will really o pen up the way i tackle projects and modeling things. So far i'm onyl a few pages into the book and it's already changed the way i think about lip synching and the way most people go about it (with dozens of various blend shapes for each phoneme, each pose of the mouth keyed on a timeline).

          I've got a couple of other books (one focus entirely on particle systems - maya only - that i'm going to attack in the summer if not earlier). So as i get into my books, if anything visually intriguing comes of them, i'll be sure to post it.

A Head On Our Way...

          So since i got kind of board waiting for stuff i'd rather leave up to "professionals", i went ahead and started making some things on my own for the FF/Sonic Mash-Up. One of which is a few facial expressions that a "Hedgehog" character might have (cuz in the Sonic Universe, certain 'species' have different facial feature constuction - like eyes that are connected or eyes that are seperate from one another).






          So I took this "Shadow" (as only he would look so angry by nature) profile picture DJ drew and erased the majority of the arching 'eyebrows'.

          That gave me this picture. I took this image and went over it a couple of times, drawing in the rest of the eyes as they might appear for various expression (much like eyebrows are used.....though evidently Hedgehogs, through some evolutionary marvel, are without eyebrows and have the capacity to camoflouge their mouth when not talking). So after i thought of the most common ones, the ones i'd need to make Blend Shapes for, i put them side-by-side and got this:

          I then started to go over them with pencil to plot out my edgeloops (*wink* Alex *wink*) and how i'd need to deform the default face to get good representations of these expressions. I haven't finished doing that yet, but i'm well on my way. One of the main hurdles is that i haven't plotted edgelopps on the defaul expression.....so i don't really know how which loops would move since i don't know how many and where and what-have-you.

          But to remedy that, i started making a clay head for what Cloud would look like. I only got about an hour and a half on it (a little less after getting situated and figured out what not to do). I only got as far as his 'jaw' and the left half of his eyes (and while i threw a crude ear in the picture....that's no where near what it's going to look like, just to show where on his head it is and how it looks prior to putting in spikes/hair).

          So this is what i got so far. The eye/pupil is just for kicks...i won't need to plot edgeloops on that - so the finished model won't have any iris/pupils. With the exception of the ears and the spikes, the eye/face is probably only every going to get as far as what i've got now, since it's symetrical i only need to model have and just mirror it when i'm finished. I'll model both ears since they'll be helpful in determining where the spikes go on reference pictures.





          Since it won't really matter unless I got way further than the scope of this 'Short', i figure i might has well post it somewhere...otherwise it'll just be on paper forever.

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          So everyone pretty much knows the elements that compose a Sonic The Hedgehog game right? Robotnik/Some evil force threatens the world in some way and Sonic is seemingly the only who can stop him with his carefree attitude, disregard for personal safety, and a psychopathic desire for the consumtion of Chili Dogs. Early in the Sonic games, it was possible for the player to beat the game without need of the 7 Chaos Emeralds, but not too long ago (i think it might have been Sonic Heroes as the first game to do so) Sega started making it part of the sotryline to collect all 7 Emeralds in order to completely beat the game. If you didn't have them all, you'd get someone of a happy ending, with a little teaser at the end of it.

          And I'll be the first to admit it....Final Fantasy isn't for everyeone or even just anyone. So not too many people might be familiar with the elements that make a Final Fantasy game (although to a certain extent, they're the same as Sonic sans the Emeralds). So rather than generalize it for a Mash Up, DJ and I picked a specific scene that is basically Iconic in the FF Realm - where Sephiroth kills Aeris (and i really don't care what people say.....it's ends in S not TH!)

          So how we're combining the two is by taking the general character designs of Sonic characters and transfering Final Fantasy 7 characters to match the Sonic universe. We're really only going to focus on 3 characters; Cloud (Hedgehog), Aeris (Hedgehog....probably much like Amy), and Sephiroth (Echidna...so as to allow for long 'hair' rather than spikes). We're retelling 2 parts of the FFVII game; where Seph. kills Aeris, and the end where Cloud uses Omnislash. We're also going to encorporate a "Super Sonic" element to allow for the Omnislash (which will be similar to the upgraded version at the end of Advent Children).

          We'll encorporate the Chaos Emeralds too, although they'll basically be like Materia and have powers by themselves (more than Chaos Control too i might add).

          So below i'll go over the concepts for the Emerald/Materia breakdown as far as i took it (and i'm just using stock imagery of gems, actual materia/emeralds might have their own unique look to them - definitely color).

So here we have the Materia of Force. It allows it's user to control Fire based Magic and gives them great physical strength.

Here is the Materia of Agility. Its user can manipulate Lightning based Magic and gains unparalleled speed.

This is the Materia Longevity. User gains limitless Stamina and the power to control Earth based Magic.

This one is the Materia of Mentality. It bestows upon its user the skills of Air based Magic and great Mental Fortitude.

The Materia of Knowledge grants upon its user Water based Magic and unbelieveable Wisdom in every aspect.

This is the Materia of Being. It allows its user to conjur Spirit based Magic and provides Imortality.

This is the rarest of Materia - it might not even truely exist. It is the Materia of Unity. It allows for the manipulation of Time and all Magic and gives its user the ability to assimilate any and all other magic and Materia.

WIP it good.

          So anoter week has gone by and i have made some improvements over my last few posts - though i'm only going to show some of them. I inked and added detail to my storyboards (mostly spacial depth stuff so you get a sense of things), inked and colored the "Front View" of my Red Mage design, inked the Back View, and made sketches for my "Set".

          Page 1: I don't know how well this is going to work out, but i'm gonna try it anyway. Recently they've been showing episodes of Teen Titans on CN and Boomerang, and i love some of the styles they use to show certain things; like when they have a duel or someone running a long distance or something, they'll have the bottome half of the screen be completely black (to illustrate the ground the they're running on and force the subject into the middle of the screen without getting so close). That's what i'm going to try and do in some of the panels/shots of this animation (Spec. Panels 1 & 6-9)




          Page 2: Not much has changed besides the gradients added in Photoshop. Same stuff as the pencil version.









          Page 3: I decided what was going to happen in Panel 7, and it can happen quite a few ways too...though essentially they are all the same. The character can throw is sword "Blade-over-Hilt" and catch it with just a vertical jump before landing/striking downward - or - the character can throw it "Sideways" and catch it with a "jump-and-a-spin" before striking sideways. I would personally like to see the sideways one because the stance/pose he'd be left in would be more dynamic......but the blade over hilt would be easier to animate overall.




          Page 4: So this is essentially what the animation is going to be, though if it looks like it'll be longer than 30 seconds i have ideas of whta actions to cut/simplify/overlap. But either way, after the semester is done, depending on how well i picked up on the 'animating' principles and process, i'm definitely planning to make a longer verson of this idea...with more action and fighting than right before Demi Moore left Bruce for Ashton.





          So the details of the overall scene are somewhat lacking in the storyboards, so i decided to make a preliminary sketch to plot out the key points before i go in to model it (though usually i can sit down with nothing in my head and after a few hours come out with something awesome).

          It might be hard to tell what way the stairs are going and what is a new level and such, but i should have some rought renders and models in a week or two, so don't fret if it's hard to read.

          It's mostly just the basic outline of everything, once i actually go into maya and start modeling, things might change to look more 'organic' or natural....so the set probably won't look like this 100%...but it'll look relatively similar.




          Side Profile of the main room of the 'set'.



          Mostly what all is in this is just basic geometry and lighting elements, trying to say that the lights should only illuminate from tapestry to tapestry....so there will be black patches every so many feet (to try and accomplish a certain effect for the first shot of my storyboard).

Are you Board with my Story?

     So the first week of school is half over, despite starting a week ago, and we're now able to submit our homework for the first week - which are Storyboards for your final animation concept. Mine are below and will go into further explaination later if at all (i think between the "Action" and "Comments" you can get the gesture of what i'm going for. Quite a bit is left out of the storyboards, esp. the environment - but the time it would take me to draw them to the level of detail you could appreciate....i could just as quickly made the actual model and show you from more angles and detail.

     Page 1 of my storyboard details the build up of the first scene - and the frame of the camera isn't going to be showing both feet at the same time, it'll more than likely be position in the middle - as to get the passing of both (i might try two version, one staying with the character, and the other catching up to and potentially passing him).
     Also, i'm going to try and space the lighting to make it seem more intensified, like when a person is riding an elevator and is lit every other second or so from the various floors/shaft lighting.




     What Panel 5 doesn't show is that before it starts tracking along the blade of the sword, i'll actually animate him unsheathing it (as best i can anyway lol) and do some fancy cutting so it doesn't look like it's own scene/shot before the track (FYI: tracking is moving closer or pulling back...not to be confused with "Zoom")







     Panel 7 left blank as i have not yet decided how i want my character to "Take off" towards the other person (whether there's someone what of a shockwave and he literally flies off into the room, or if i want to manipulate the lense angle to give it that 'worm's/fish eye view.







     Panel 10 is the point to which i am setting my semester goal - "Get to at least this point". I have the rest of the whole scene planned out (including things like the main character being thrown across the floor and flailling wildly and being thrown at a wall and doing that cliche 'sword-through-cloth to slow down his fall). So if i get to this point and have way more time than i know what to do with, i'll keep it going (which i intend to during the winter anyway).

So that's that, i'll post the designs for my main character and his "Opponent" when i finish doing all side (front, back, and side) and have designed the finer details of their costumes (which involves drinking paint and adding belts......meh DJ gets it anyway).

Altar Ego...

So i've been working on the design of the altar that i'm going to use for the FF/sonic collaboration between me and DJ this summer (or hopefully this summer....and if not then through the fall semester when i get a whole lot of professional guidence in the art of character modeling). So i wanted to leave it open for my mind to wander - because it obviously has to reflect the Final Fantasy part of it, but having it be a lot larger than the one in VII leaves it open to have random - no excuse being there - objects that adhere to the Sonic world (random rails to grind on, loops. long paths to run along...thins like that).

So i spent a few good hours in Maya last weekend - things started to pick up once i realized I could use "Instances" and save myself some remodeling and duplication time. And then it helped to remember i could reposition the Pivot Point to make rotation and alignment extremely more accurate and easy. So this is what i've got so far, some varied renders and the sketches that i did before hand. Another few good hours (or a good day and it should fairly finished and ready for textureing - depending on whether i feel like modeling the terrain/location it's set in).

So here's part of the sketching i did for the basic idea of the altar (but once i actually started modeling it....certain things needed to be scaled way up for it to be plausible). What it originated as, was a fairly sizable Dais, above which was a free floating Roof. The only place the Roof was connected to the Dais (where the Altar would be located) was by two columns that formed the "front" entryway. The Roof, as it's size is pretty formidable, would be supported by Flying Buttresses (not only because they are really the only way i could think of supporting something like that....without forcing the viewer to 'believe' me - but because i'm always a fan of arches, collunades, and romanesque architecture).


So here you can kind of see how the "Towers" (though i usually refer to them as 'posts' while sketching for some reason...) are cylindrical in shape (they're not 'square') and have a small domed roof with an area you can freely walk around underneath. They have Paths leading from one Tower to the next, and each tower has an inclined path (with some stairs and handrails - cuz Sonic characters will need something to grind on; walk up all those stairs...Knuckles Please....) that leads from the ground, or nearby rock face, up to the tower. It then has another inclined pathway leading from the Tower to the "Floating" Roof.

So those are the basic plans i started with. Last weekend i got quite a bit done - although i'm trying to do the whole thing in a pipeline style resembling the industry's standard: Concept -> Design/Reference -> Modeling -> Lighting -> Texturing -> Animating (if needed) -> Output. So you shouldn't see anything textured till i'm finished with it as a whole. So here's some of the renders of the "Towers" i spent most of that particular day modeling:



Here's a shot of every detail of the Tower. I had only made a basic design for it - height is easily adjustable. I extruded the pathways just a little bit for easy connection later on.






Here's a reference to how tall the archway/entryways are as well as a look at the railing system (in it's most basic form) - posts and such will be added later.





Here is a look at the underside of the Tower floor's rim - to show how i's supported. I ended up changing this to where the underside of the 'paths' only have the outer support so the buttress/arch can fit between them.





Here's a shot without the roof on; again, to show scale and open space. Once i'm done modeling the "Roof", "Altar", and "Pathways", i will return to add small ornamental details like hanging torches and Oculuses and such.



So there you have the "Tower" portion of the whole scene. What i spent the next bit of time on was forming the pathways between posts, how far apart each post was from each other (as well as the degree of rotation between each: if the middle of the altar is the "Origin" and you have any post, what degree do you rotate a duplicated post to get it to where it's supposed to be). After careful consideration and though, the value for rotation between each Tower is 39.375°.

So once i got as much detail in the Tower as i felt i was going to, i saved it and stared a new scene. I imported the tower (because if i kept working in the Tower file and screwed up beyond repair.....i would have to do some major remodeling and 'starting from scratch'). So i took the Tower, moved it out in 3D space, and crated a "donut", if you will, to represent the size of the roof so i could figure out how far away from it the tower should be. Once i did that, i started to Instance everything. I then connected the pathways (only the floor) between each tower and instanced those as well. This is what i got:

This is a dead on view from the "Front". it shows the basic size of the Roof's floor - of course it might not be so thick in the future. It also has a small platform in the middle of everythihg (on the 'ground') that represents the size the actual Altar is going to be - Manni is in there too if you can make him out. Mostly everything besides the Towers is used for reference...so don't think it's actually going to be so 'bulky'.



Here's a better view of the Altar's size and reference to everything else....although because it's rendered over black it doesn't help that much.





A shot from above and behind to better illustraite the spacing, rotation, and connection of each Tower.

So that's what i got done in the better part of a day ( imagine what i could do with 7 *wink* ) and am going to try and spend the better part of 2 days finishing up the Tower section of the scene, which will unclude roofing, railing, support arches, and making the base of each Tower look like it was cared out of the earth (you can what i mean by looking in the second sketch picture above). Once i've done that, i'm going to move on to the "Roof" section of the scene which will unclide a good sized Collunade, railing, decorative recesses, and if i can find a model of a gargoyle somewhere that isn't insane in poly-count, i might import it to give it some gusto.

Renders to come by Sunday

It's Been Spiked

     So here is what DJ came up with as a preliminary sketch to see how Cloud's spikes would translate to a sonic character's head and such. Front, Side, and Top views for me to import into Maya to make modeling easier (as i can model while using these images as a kind of 'stencil'). and then a perspective one that i started to go over, planning out how each object would be oriented and how the edges and faces would appear (to also make texturing and painting easier). So the only thing left to do is go into Maya and start making a first attempt at modeling the head/spikes/eyes. Once i've done that, we'll see how it renders and if there's anything that should be modified (maybe some more spikes added or moved, or whatever).