Orthoplex

Orthoplex is an underground alternative nightclub in New York. With a sci-fi, cyberpunk aesthetic, alternative dance music and lots of coloured light. Below are some of my whitebox concepts and the start of some of my exploration of emissive-ness. The pillar design is based off the idea outlined in the video at the bottom, the effect of the designs I found incredibly beautiful and definately fitting for this kind of nightclub to be using. The pillar you can see below is textured with a 128x128 32bit texture with the emissive texture in the alpha channel.

Trash... and Building

With the trash project finished and handed in I've started to think about the building project and simply for myself and to get into good habits I'm going to setup a thread on polycount where I will post the process. When I have it set up I will post a link to it on here, in the mean time here is some trash!

The rendering was incredibly tough and I found it very difficult to show the asset off. However using Marmoset I managed to get some renders that I'm pretty happy with. The main thing that I would have done differently had I done the project again would be looking more at the silhouettes of the bin bags as at the moment they're a bit too sharp for my liking. I would also try and create more objects to put into the scene as at the moment I feel I used a great deal of texture space and great deal of the tri limit on a few assets.

Drawing People...

I find that life drawing so far in the new studios is far more comfortable. Less sweltering, less obstruction and shorter more productive sessions.

Week 1 - variety of 1-5 minute sketches

Week 2 - 15 minute each

Abbey Park *WIP*

After a session with Mitch Small talking about getting values right before working on colour I decided that this would be a great technique to start developing. Here's the digital work I've done for this project so far. I'm keen to improve this work so I've been getting as much critique as possible. I may continue to work on this project hence the WIP in the title.

New Year, New Building, New Teachers...

With all the new things this year has come a new Visual Design teacher, Mitch Small. He is a graduate of this course who went on to work for Codemasters as a Concept Artist. His lessons have already taught me some very helpful techniques and have reminded me of some of the key aspects of concept art.

Last year the third years, when critiquing my work, would often talk a lot about getting your values right and how a painting will look very wrong without the values being right. I took away from their crits that I should stay away from full black and full white, which I understood and tried to take into account. However Mitch has taken this and explained it properly and below you can see an explanation of what "getting your values right" means.

I made this explanation sheet during Mitch's class on values and colour. There are 4 balls which have exactly the same grey-scale values. I have simply made a colour layer to colour them the different colours; this is where it is easy to see what happens when you get the grey-scale values wrong in an image. As each colour has a range of values that it will look right in, if you do this and use the same range of values for different colours the colours which don't look right will quickly show themselves. Here you can see green and orange come out very muddy rather than clean like the red and somewhat blue.

Here I have somewhat corrected the values for the green and orange balls in the middle and for comparison the originals are beside them.

EDIT: When I asked Mitch if this explained what he was meaning he said yes but those are horrible colours and you'd never use them. The green square approximately shows where most colours should come from.

We're Back!

Since moving back to Leicester at the beginning of September I have once again become complacent when it comes to this blog. I was planning on writing a design document style post about the double bed I designed and made this summer... that is still being written. turns out you should always start a design document when you start the project otherwise motivation disappears etc.

Fortunately I realised this before I started the trash project and I have started the design document as I started the project so I'm hopeful that I will stay up to speed on it. Anyway here are some of the reference photos I took for the project.

These are the high poly models I've made so far using the cloth modifier and the graphite modelling tools.