Week 4- Texture testing.

Before we started modelling, Dan R, Elisha and myself got a tutorial from Dan C about texturing. Dan is a technical genius, and a really good tutor, seeing as he seems to have tons of patience and goes through everything really clearly and explains WHY he is doing certain things. Elisha had never UV mapped before, I had done it about once ages ago, and Dan R, although fairly confident, hadn't done it since last term, so needed a bit of re-freshing.

The original chalice texture, one we took from Barcelona. Notice Dan R's foot. In all the textures he took in Spain, he managed to include his foot in about 99% of them! Seeing as this was just a test, we decided not to Photoshop it out.

Creating the bump map.

Messing with the Specular lighting.





The finished chalice.

After going through the chalice as a group, I decided to mess around a bit on my own to check that I could actually do what Dan showed us. Dan was still around, so if I got stuck I could ask him any questions :) I borrowed the texture I was practising with, from Dan R.

Wall with low bump map. As our building is going to be very run down and a bit eccentric we wanted the brick to really stick out, and have very defined textures, so I experimented with making a more destinct bump map.

Higher bump map. You can see a big difference here. The above image being wayy too overpowering. This project is tightly packed so I don't want to spend too much time, fussing over minute details that no-one will notice, though at the same time, I want to create something I'm proud of that can go in my portfolio. I think that the lower bump map will be more effective than the higher one.




Wall with high ecentricy. A bit too bright.





Wall with low ecentricy.

The wall!

We talked as a group about how we were going to get the textures on the ruined bits of rock to line up with the walls etc that they would originally have fallen from. We decided that we would texture the buildings as a whole object first of all then take away the ruined bits of rock afterwards, to make the setting more realistic.

Week 4- Final house design

I designed what I believed the house would look like just incase what I had imagined was completely the opposite to what the others saw. Luckily it wasn’t. Hmmm, the house is a mix of about 21 images, so I'm not going to bother to show any I've uploaded before. Tim Burtoney towers, elements from the balcony inspirations, bell tower etc.....

I made a list of things that I am going to have to model. It’s scary! But we are dead on schedule at the moment, so that’s a good thing.

• Piano


• Staircase


• Books


• Crystal ball


• Telescope


• Voodoo Dolls


• Pins and Box


• Records


• Grammar phone


• X-mas tree


• Desk


• Chair


• Lights


• Chanderleer


• Stain glass window


• Chalice


• Knife and fork


• Fireplace


• Picture frame


• Bookcase


• Door


• Candles

It’s important that we model the objects that Dan C needs to animate with ASAP, and not focus on the less important objects located around the room.

Week 4- Further Development

More designs for objects in our house. My favourites are the stone cat gargoyle to guard our house and the shark grammar phone. The stone cat was inspired by two things, a cat we ‘adopted’ in Barcelona that we named Scarlet and some stone pillars we found out there with lions guarding an entrance to a building. I thought it would be fitting to use Scarlet as she is related to Lions, has a personal connection to us and cats are meant to ward off evil. The grammar phone is a person reference to Dan R, who hates sharks and this would hopefully keep him out of my study!

More designs. The most important thing on this page is the three small drawings at the bottom as these show the layout to the study.



Designs of stairs leading from the ballroom to the study.

www.laurenstudioes.com

This image influenced my top design. I particually liked the rails as they were delicate and elegant but a little abstract.

This staircase in Barcelona inspired the two left designs. I particularly liked the bottom left design as it was such a large extravagant entrance to a little study. Me and Dan R debated a while over which steps to use, either the middle left or the bottom left. Dan thought there might not be enough room to add the larger steps. In the end it was decided on the bottom left as it would make the ballroom more grand and extended the ballroom model in our prototype.







The staircase to the right was just me experimenting with changing the angles and sizes of different steps. I realised as I went down that it looks more effective to have the odd strange step placed randomly between normal steps rather than one after the other which can get too much and look too cluttered.

The chanderleer in the top right is a compromise between a design that I did and one Dan R constructed. His design was much posher than mine whilst mine was more weird and wiry. By putting both our designs together we ended up with posh and weird. Yay!


The fireplace is a pretty standard design. I felt that if every single object in the room was ‘weird’ then it might be too overpowering for the audience. I did think that we should each put a symbol representing us on a tile. I wanted a black widow for mine- the coolest female in nature. Male angers her- she eats him! Brilliant. I discussed this with the group and they were all up for it. I liked the candles that are on it too. The candle photo we took in Barcelona, inspired me for that idea. And definately keeping them red, my favourate colour. A bit of brightness against the gloom!



Simple knife and fork design.








Ok, this is the worst design I have ever created in my life! It is so hideous! In Barcelona there was a really camp statue that we all liked and a creepy little statue on the beach. I was just messing around trying to combine them, maybe make it a bit abstract… when this hideous design was produced! As Dan R is designing the courtyard with the statues inside, I think I’ll just leave him to it!

It occurred to me and the Dans that it was about time we argued out the layout of the ballroom. Using the prototype and where we had planned the stain glass windows to go and the position of the study, there was only limited positions where the door and fireplace could be placed. Using our amazing artistic talents and the latest technology we carefully constructed the above image. From these amazing sets of scribbles we knew exactly were we wanted the key objects in the room to be placed. We also decided from this diagram of wonder that we would have brackets coming from the room with wooden beams crossing over and chandeliers dangling from the crossover points. Because as a group we were also designing our storyboards at the same time, it fitted much better that the table be placed where Dan R had originally wanted it- in the middle of the room.

Brackets from Barcelona that I wanted to include.





The indented pillars inspired my design for the beams.


Inspiration was taken from the following images I took from Barcelona, if not stated otherwise. Basically, I picked out elements from buildings etc that I thought would match the style of our house.


1.



2.


3.


4.


5.
6. Was returning to Dan C's original idea of combining nature.


7.

As a group, everyone unanimously picked balcony 4. The hardest one. Whhhhhyyyyy?!

Week 3- Barcelona

Here we gathered tons of textures (see our main page). We also went to lots of museums. One really good one was a Goudy museum, but unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take in camera or our sketchbooks. We saw in there a model of some bells and we three agreed that we wanted a bell tower to be included in our designs.

Not much else to say on that week really. Just gathered images. When I got home I would sort through them and begin incorporating certain images and elements into my designs.

Week 2- Developing ideas

After the weekend, myself and the Dans showed each other the work we had produced and made criticisms and agreed on stuff etc. We agreed that the house should be much smaller than what we had first imagined, more like my sketch, and pretty weird and abstract to reflect our personalities. I showed the boys the following images I had found to get their opinions.

I liked the neat clutter and the posh brackets on the walls.


The colour scheme from the library image must have made me think of this image. When I showed Dan R, he really liked the gold colouring, and we decided we would try and include a lot of gold in our ballroom.

Dan C showed us some gargoyle designs he had begun to construct, (gargoyle was now being named as Chester) and how he could animate them. I think it was pretty obvious by then that we were starting to fall into different roles. Dan C= lead animator, Dan R= lead texturer, me= head of style.

Although we had a clearer idea of what we wanted our house to look like, we felt that if we messed around in Maya a bit we could maybe get a clearer idea of how the basic structure would appear.

At first we started off pretty basic, just cubes and triangles. Then we started putting in details that we had seen in our research.

The towers get very skinny at the ends, a tribute to Burton style. I really liked the idea of having a front porch- American Hillbilly style with a little banister marking its boundary. Dan C was really getting into adding bridges and Dan R liked the idea of a courtyard and morbidly placed our graves right at the front of the house! I love the lighting! Dan C was messing around with that. Though as you can see, his version of 'messing around' means creating mini masterpieces! (yay). Still, it was only rough, and we knew that for our final piece alot would probably change.

We decided to have the house on a cliff facing out over the town and scrap the idea of it being built into a cliff as it would be too time consuming and not as dramatic as looking over the villagers.

More rough designs, focusing on objects that could be found within our rooms. Thanks to the prototype, I now knew definitely that I was mainly designing the ballroom with an integrated study. Looked at voodoo dolls, and maybe putting our faces into rock, but I scrapped that idea as I thought it would make us seem that we were full of ourselves. We are, but no-one needs to know that!

‘The Simpsons’ Haloween special inspired me to design the chair. I altered the design to make it into a cat as I love cats, which gave me the idea that maybe we should all design our own chairs and place them by a massive dining table in the ballroom. The idea went down well with Dans. I liked the colour of the chair in the original drawing, but maybe a bit of a darker red for my chair to be more dramatic. I didn’t need to worry about colours or textures yet as we decided we would experiment with them at a later stage.

Tim Burton head paper weight, quick sketch of some towers and a very rough layout of where the dining table would be placed in the ballroom. Me and Dan R couldn’t agree on this one. He wanted the table going down the middle of the room and I wanted it at the end. As neither of us could decide one way or another, we decided to come back to it when we had made more designs.

A rocking chair for my American Hillbilly-style porch! Notice the extra ‘rockers’ to make it more fun when you sit on it, and extra padded seat and head rest for comfort! I decided to axe the extra swirley bits on top as for some reason they made the chair look to me a bit like a torture chair!