A whole days work is finally starting to pay off !

Life is worth living again.

So this week has pretty much been like a reading week seeing as everyone has reviews and we don’t have to go in for lectures or seminars etc. not the best way to tink of it

Buuuuut

Unlike last years ‘week off’ ive been up for 10am eeevvery day (sacrificing my usual 9 hours ) to be up and productive.

Ive made quite a lot of progress with work, the occasional speed paint and blog entry went down a treat, and I finally finished modelling my self-portrait so I could start unwrapping today. I just didn’t realise how frustrating spending my day with UV’s would become !

I literally spent from 10 till 4 trying to find the best method of pelt mapping.

I swear Max kept trying to piss me of. Replacing seems right after I had specifically deleted them, totally resetting UV meshes that I had painstakingly managed to create… I swear pelt mapping is the most complicated thing ever invented, or it just hates me.

Everyone knows the best way to create a mesh for the figure is to pelt map. But for the whole day, no matter what I did, the model always ended up was uvs stretched all over the body in some parts and too tightly packed in others.

It took me a while to figure out why my head wouldn’t unwrap properly. For some reason the stretcher, that goes around the outside of the uv to pull them out evenly, was only attached to the lips. Rather than encompassing the whole of the head.

I tried for ages to find a solution. Eventually I noticed because the lips weren’t attached together, a permanent seem has to be there ? so I extruded the lips inside the mouth and joined them together as kind of hidden geometry. 

And voila ! check it.

The seam disappeared. I re-pelted and it worked ! I actually couldn’t believe it, THIS made my day. I was so close to giving up aswell. Trying different ways of fixing a problem, always ending in failure had taken its toll haha.

I guess if I went to labs there would’ve been someone there to help, but no, im too ill ! Youtube will have to do.

Visual Composition

Composition is basically the layout of the image, deciding what is the most important part and organsising everything else accordingly

I guess its like, when youre taking a picture, you always aim to get ‘everything’ in and generally stand to where would be the most effective viewpoint.

Pieces of work representing good composition use all forms of technique, manipulating the image through use of lines and shape, colour, tone and space.

Using the Rule of Thirds is a good basis in creating good composition. The method involves splitting the canvas into 9 equal parts and dividing the subjects into them. It’s said to create more interest in the elements rather than world itself.

Composition is important, it’s something we have to consider as artists in both the 2d and 3d world. In a painting the artist has to create the layout of the painting from a single fixed viewpoint.

A particular fine art piece I like comes from Joseph Wright of Derby, traditionally a Chiaroscuro artist, painting both landscape and portraits.

The’ Vesuvius from Posillipo’ shows excellent use of compositional elements. Looking at this now I can actually see the rule of thirdsbeing used. The white of the clouds are separated from the red of the volcano, by the moonlight illuminating the night’s sky. This battle is then reflected down into the ocean broken up by landscape eventually leading to the silloheute of the ship.

The balance between light and dark really creates quite a haunting image. I find the use of red in this image interesting, although it is illuminate, it’s almost shielded underneath the dark plooms of smoke contrasted against the true light from the clouds.

Composition in paintings is tough to get right, and it doesn’t normally happen by chance.

However in the three dimensional world, the artist now has to organise the scene from every angle possible so that no matter where the player is standing in the world, the environment is always pleasing on the eye.

Quite a task id imagine.

I think its only from the most recent trash project that I’ve really started thinking about composition. Id always move the camera to a suitable spot and adjust the lighting for renders, but with this project was different due to modelling lots of different assets in one scene. I ultimately decided by creating 10 different trash scenes and picking the one that looked the best.

This method worked fine for a 500 poly trash scene, but it would take faaaaaaaar too much time to do this for a large environment (which is why planning and concepting is so important ! ! haha )

There are ways of getting around this problem. ‘Blocking out’ objects and landscape, adjusting them to get a feel for the scene.

This is particularly useful in creating cityscapes. Well this is what ive been told. Ive never actually done it before so ill think ill do one now to prove my point haha

So this is 20 minutes spontaneous work, but if you have an aim or a theme in mind it’s a good way to get a gist of the layout of the scene with a three dimensional perspective. This ones better than mine.