Before I start writing about what I'm doing right now, I want to share what I've done in the previous years of IGAD. This week I'll start with...
Year One at IGAD
If I had to put my experience of year one in one sentence, it would be: Super busy and a lot of learning.
Year one was sort of the crash course on almost every art related thing in the game industry. Which was very good for me because, with almost zero visual art experience (apart from high school drawing/crafting lessons and some personal experience), I had no Idea of how to do anything. It was a super busy year, with no spare time and working days that could sometimes go from 9 am till 4 am the next morning. However, It did allow me to lay a base of experience and try out all of the possible roles as an artist in the games industry.
Block A - Modeling 1
Assignment: Create a 3D model of an Illusion Drawing, make sure the Illusion remains intact.
Among other things, I've learned a lot about modeling in Maya, UV'ing your work and building a scene.
Plans for the 3D models 1
Plans for the 3D models 2
The final 3D model, with UV's done
Block A - Art Theory 1
Assignment: Create 6 screens of an imaginary tablet/mobile game together with another person.
With this course, I learned about the basic Art Fundamentals. How to create an Idea and set-up a Look and Feel brief. The assignment needed to be made by two people. The Game Idea, Look and Feel brief and the final deliverable needed to be made together. The deliverable was a collection of a Start-Up-, Main menu-, Level Selection-, Help-, In-game- and Scoring screen for the imaginary game you thought of. Normally, because you work with two people on this assignment, both of the students have to pick three screens to develop. Since my partner was dropping out, I had to do develop 4 screens on my own. I am proud of the final deliverable but I can see that, at that time, my look and feel brief and the collaboration with the other student could have been better.
Start-Up Screen
Level Selection Screen
Help Screen
In-Game Screen
Block A - Drawing Skills 1
Assignment: Create an Illusion drawing of some Imaginary Architecture.
The drawing skills course focused on drawing things in perspective and drawing things isometric. The course started with doing a lot of exercises. Then I had to create one big drawing of architecture with a certain amount of 'Illusions' in it. The practices of the illusions and the final drawing are shown below.
Preparation for the Drawing 1
Preparation for the Drawing 2
Preparation for the Drawing 3
Preparation for the Drawing 4
Final Drawing
Block B - Animation 1
Assignment: Make 4 Animation Assignments + A rig for a robot.
During the course, I learned a lot about the basics of animation and Rigging. Timing, spacing, weighting, slow-in and slow-out, follow through, animating in Maya. In total, I had to do a bouncing ball animation, Pendulum animation, Ball-with-Tail animation and a Walk cycle. Additionally, I had to create a rig for a pre-modeled robot.
Bouncing Ball
Pendulum Animation
Ball with Tail
Walk Cycle
Screenshot in Maya - Robot Rig
Block B - Texturing 1
Assignment: Texture the illusion model from the modeling course in block A.
In this course, I got my first texturing experiences. How to layout UV's, use shaders and textures. How to use Photoshop to first create a mock-up of your style, then create textures. How to get your textures in Maya ( Normals, Diffuse, Bump). How to use Zbrush to create textures. I already knew from this course that texturing was not the thing I'd like to do, so I tried to do a lot of the texturing with effects in Photoshop 😇. I am not too proud of the way I presented my work in this course. As I was super busy with finishing the last textures, I made the final renders 15 minutes before the deadline.
Back of the building
Front of the building
Block C - Drawing Skills 2
Assignment: Draw a Spaceship inside a real image and draw an Exploded view of a Vehicle.
I learned a lot about drawing in perspective, shading and the creative design process. How to analyze perspective in a photo, create a grid and draw something in the photo. Additionally, I learned how to draw an exploded view of a vehicle.
Assignment 1
Creative Design Process
Creative design process 2
Photo from my street
Analyzing the perspective
Drawing the design in perspective
Matching the photograph
Final Drawing
Assignment 2
Positioning the groups
Drawing the elements
Final Drawing - Without shading
Final Drawing - With Shading
Block C - Art Theory 2
Assignment: Create a Spaceship design and model it.
I learned about creating an Idea/Story/Background; developing the look and feel of an object; using Maya and simple shapes to create a lot of different low-fidelity prototypes; sketching over those prototypes to create more detailed concepts and finally how to build my prototype in Maya and render it in 'KeyShot'. The delivery file included a document of my progress and sketches and three renders of the final product.
Final Render Ship - Front
Final Render Ship - Bottom
Final Render Ship - Top
Block C - Modeling 2
Assignment: Create a Nurbs-Model from a car.
In this course, I learned how to create a model using Nurbs. I had to analyze a car and see how I could mimic the curves and tangency that it had.
My reference car - Front
My reference car - Back
Screenshot from Maya - Final Car Back
Screenshot from Maya - Final Car Side
Screenshot from Maya - Final Car Front
Block D - Rendering
Assignment: Create a shader + Render the car from Block C.
In this course, I learned about shaders and rendering. I already saw that this subject interested me as less as Texturing. For both the shader-assignment and the car-assignment, I made research documents. Below are the final images of the Car assignment. Car Assignment:
Final Car Renders
Block D - Animation 3
Assignment: Create a more difficult animation + Create a more difficult rig.
This course was a follow up on the 'Animation 1' course. I improved my animation and rigging skills and got more in-depth knowledge. At this moment Animation, Rigging, Scripting and were my favorite courses. I liked the motion that Animation offered and I really liked to combine technical work with creative work.
Screenshot in Maya - Final Rig
Block D - Procedural Modeling ( Houdini )
Assignment: Create a procedural model of a temple.
In this course, I got an introduction to procedural modeling, texturing and rendering in Houdini. How to work with the Houdini Node networks to create an object that is flexible and how to create an asset out of that object with a menu and sliders. This was now, together with Rigging and Scripting, my favorite course. I loved creating the assets with menu's and sliders and creating objects that adapted to the sliders I used.
Temple Default State
Round Temple
Block D - Texturing 2
Assignment: Texture (and create) a robot model.
This assignment was a follow-up on the first texturing assignment. A choice was presented, to either take the robot from the 'animation 1' course and texture it. Or to create a robot of your own design and texture it. I picked the robot from 'animation 1' and modified it to fit my own design. I learned new texturing techniques and I learned how to work with 'Mudbox'.
Final Robot Render
Robots Fighting Render
That's all folks!
Apart from some minor courses and some courses that I can't show in this format, those are all the projects I did in my first year of IGAD. It was a very busy year, I learned a lot and got a lot of introductions. That's why I'm happy that I was still able to do my first year in V1.
There were some subjects that I didn't like: Texturing, UV-ing, Rendering, Shaders, Drawing Skills Yuch... Though, I think It's good that I know what they are and what work is required for them. Additionally, I also found courses that I really did like: e.g. Scripting, rigging, animation and procedural modeling! I realized that I got the most joy out of working both creatively and technically.
I also realized that a lot of my research documents were just plain ugly and bad. I didn't realize that before. Though, through comparing my old documents and my recent documents, I can clearly see how much I have improved at documentation.
And finally, something unrelated to Y1, making such a big post and having all those images and different styles in them is really annoying to make in blogger 🙈. Constantly switching between 'Compose' and then hitting a stupid wall, trying to fix it in the chaos that is the 'HTML' mode. Constantly having to change sizes of text because for some reason it doesn't take the right styling that I set up. How I long for some nice CSS. Anyway, maybe I will make future big posts inside HTML completely ( inside sublime or something ) at least then it's a lot more organized. Who knows.
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