Five favourite Artists

Since the question was asked at the mock interview I thought I’d have a go and name my five favourites

Frida Kahlo

Absolutely adore her work. I remember basing a few school projects on her. I always loved how she never exaggerated anything about her features in her artwork yet she’d do elaborate backgrounds or clothing. I also loved her she added thought bubbles into her work. I always felt that she really managed to put her feelings across in her work

Michelangelo

One of the most memorable moments in my life is going to the Accademia di Belle Arti and turning a corner just to see at the end of a long corridor David.

Alan Davis

A comic book artist. Though he’s probably not the best one to exist I just love his line art. He uses such thick and confident lining in his work and mixes it with dynamic poses.

Yoshitaka Amano

I just love his colouring, he uses such vibrant colours in his artwork. I also like his detailing that he adds to his work.

Marino Marini

A sculptor who mainly made equestrian statues. His work went from realistic horses to blocks of shapes trying to define how a rider is falling off a horse.

FMP Stuff

For my final major project I created a sweet shop. My assets were made in 3DS Max and my shell as created in the Unreal Editor.

I would make a group of assets, texture them then placed them into Unreal in one batch to give myself variety when working so I wouldn’t be doing the same thing for a large amount of time. Doing it like that meant I would work for longer without using enthusiasm.
Stuff in 3DS Max was made to scale for UDK. Most of my items are made in one single file so I wouldn’t have to go between 3DS Max files.

When it came to Unreal I started with the shell. It got textured with repetitive textures so the textures would be clearer. I created most of the square based assets within Unreal. This gave me a greater idea of layout before anything was imported.

I then began to import everything to see where to place them, then when I found a decent place to put the assets. The texture maps would then be imported and placed onto the assets.
After everything was imported into unreal I started adding effects, I began with adding particle effects. I wanted to add sparkles and shine to my shop to make it seem more magical. I then made the shop front door open using kismet to allow me to get outside the shop.

After I’d done everything I had to write up a design document to finish the project. This was done in Word.

I enjoyed doing the final major project. It gave me more freedom and it allowed me to learn more about unreal then I previously knew.

Films

Over the course of the 3 years we have watched a wide variety of films. I’m to write about a couple of my favourite films and why.

Dark City Dark city was probably one of the films I liked most that was shown over the three years. A great science fiction film that made sense yet no sense at all. It had a great set of characters ranging from crazy scientist to guy with amnesia. The style of the film was great as well. Green was used for a lot to give it a sense of uneasiness and a sense of it being other worldly. This was then contrasted when it came to the end and everywhere was bathed in harsh sun light.

Identity

I loved this film for the suspense and the characters. There was cast of such diverse characters and they all had their own back stories. It’s not until the end of the film when things start to make sense and the actual film makes sense.

Brazil

Picture explains it all: MIND BLOWN!

I Am Cyborg

This was just one quirky as hell film which pretty much describes the minds of some of the greatest Japanese people in the world. It was so bright and vibrant yet complete insane at the same time.

And a couple of films I didn’t like so much:

War Of The Worlds

http://http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqvwxvCOSH4
As cool as the alien ships looked I didn’t like the film. The acting was a little over the top especially from the son. I also grew up listening to the Jeff Wayne’s War of The Wold and quite frankly the film didn’t do that or the book justice.

Night of the hunter

It just didn’t interest me. The filming techniques were brilliant but the film just didn’t interest me in the slightest.

I'm still waiting for Pokémon The Movie.

LINK

My FMP blog that I have been updating for the past few months.

Yeoldesweetshop.blogspot.com

Inpsiration

Many people have a wide range of inspirations. I personally have quite a few but one of my favourite things that inspire me is nebulae. A nebula is a cloud of dust and ionized gases. It is also the place where unicorns come from.

Nebula are often come in a large array of colour and come in many different shapes and sizes. It is this that makes them a large interest for me.

Take this nebula, the Omega Nebula. It has such a large array of different colours, textures and shapes. It has the blue which has a different texture to the golden clouds in the front. It also has the stars coming through adding sharpness to the picture. It looks as though it could have been painted rather than photographed through a telescope.I lost inspiration when working on my final major project and spent a few hours looking up nebulae. I then decided to digipaint a set of 3 and then incorporated them at a later date into a set of 3 paintings to go on the wall of the shop. After spending the few hours venting and throwing colour all over the place I felt motivated enough to go back to my Final Major Project.

Rooftop project

Probably one of the hardest projects I’ve had to do to date. Firstly because I couldn’t find motivation, secondly because I found unreal so hard to use.

When I first started work on the project it looked as though it was going to become a factory rooftop. It had been poorly imported into unreal, the texture was poor since I’d used a 1024x1024 map for the rooftop base.

As I came close to finishing the rooftop I was unhappy with it and I found I didn’t like it as much as I should have so I decided to redo it through the Christmas holidays.

As soon as the holidays started I began looking for tutorials on anything unreal based just from creating a simple bsp to adding water volume to a level. This was the clicking point for unreal I needed and then I began working on my new base.

I actually found it easier to work more in unreal then working in 3DS Max and spent most of my time on that making a base, adding extras, editing lighting and so on.

I changed my rooftop because I felt it didn’t work as a level and when I’d finish remaking my base I had created a larger level. The textures were a lot clearer, I’d created a slight surrounding to the level as well. I feel my new rooftop is better than my old rooftop.

Unreal

And so after 2 years of the program I think I can finally say that I enjoy using it.
I spent most of the summer holidays learning a lot of things about it. One day was just me going through a lot of tutorials and finally after watching a few the penny dropped and I can finally understand how to use the program.

When I originally tried making BSP’s in Unreal I was continually using additive blocks to create a base, I found this hard to do and very time consuming. After going through one tutorial I found that rather than looking at as building blocks I was to look at it like a block of rock and I have a hammer and chisel, so I started subtracting from my base instead of adding. This allowed me to create a more “detailed” shape.

I also looked at materials and lighting. I found out that not only did I have to edit lighting by right-clicking the light in the level; I could also edit my environment settings to edit certain effects of the lighting. I was struggling with making convincing sunlight, so I looked at a few settings on previous unreal levels and changed my settings accordingly.
Particle effects were another thing I struggled on. I couldn’t find a tutorial for it on blackboard and so I turned to youtube to try and find a decent tutorial on it. After searching through countless videos I found one explaining how to apply your own texture to a particle effect and found out that they work with emissive textures.

I did plan to do more to my level. Recently I’ve been trying to add sound to it to make it more immersive. After multiple tries at trying to import sound nothing would import. I still can’t work out why it hasn’t worked since they should be the correct file names and types.

I found that redoing part of my rooftop project in the Christmas holidays really helped me learn the unreal editor. I’m more confident with using it and it has made me realise that I really want to use it for making my Final Major Project.