More Environments for Drone

Another rough matte painting that will later be refined for my short film! I feel like I am making progress with lighting and composition, and I enjoyed working with the bright colours very much.

Environment Painting

First draft of a matt painting for a scene in Drone. This is a fairly quickly painted image, and will stand in for the final thing in our current animatic to show to lecturers. I references many photographs of desert landscapes as well as other artists, and hope to have learnt more about environment painting and lighting through his piece.

Some pieces of work completed for a client. These illustrations are accompanying his project Strange Nations; a resource book for table-top games detailing many different fictional races and cultures. You can find it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/825176040/strange-nations

I was given a fair amount of artistic freedom with these drawings in terms of the character design, with a few real cultures to draw inspiration from. 

Fantasy Creature Design

Start of a series of horror inspired designs based on various familiar fantasy creatures. These were done in pencil and then the colour added in photoshop. The skeletal elements were very fun to add, and somewhat different to what I usually draw. I will continue this series we more designs to help flesh out my character/creature design portfolio.

Drone Colour Keys

Here is a small selection of the colour keys for Drone. I found it a definite challenge to work quickly and roughly to get the lighting across without spending too much time on small details, but I feel that it has helped me improve my rendering of lighting and getting information across to my technical team.

Fantasy sketches and portraits

Similar to the last post, only more sketchy this time.

RPG Character Designs

Aside from University related work, I have also been working on illustrations in my spare time to go along with a current Dungeons and Dragons campaign I am playing with friends. I used this as an opportunity to practise dynamic poses and human anatomy, which is something I gloss over rather too much, focussing on creature design much of the time. I feel like I am making progress in the area, particularly with hands. However, I still want to practise further to get more dynamic energy into the poses and make them seem less lifeless.

Animation tests

Now that the models are getting towards being finshed and rigged, I have started to test them, to make sure they work and perform as they need to in order to work well in the film. The following clips were made in Autodesk Maya 2016, with our bird model thatw as modelled and rigged by Chris Lewin. The first video was made using a model that still had some slight deformaties, wheras the second used a fixed rig.

Drone animatic work

After many additions and changes to the story, Drone felt like it was becoming rather muddled and muddied. I was owrrie dit had somewhat lost direction and the mood and feeling I wanted to convey, which was similar to that of classic sci-fi films such as 2001: A Space Odyssy (1968), and Silent Running (1972).

After a lengthly meeting with Luis Cook, the story was stripped right back to its roots.  The following drawins are frames from the animatic/storyboard after this shift in story. I feel that there is still something lacking in the empathy of the main character, but I hope to fix this over christmas.

Drone character design progress...

And so, with my film green-lit for production a few months ago, work has begun in turning my designs and sketches into fully working models! As we've been working on story and the practicality of getting this project to work, many designs have slowly changed over the ast few months. Hambot himself has gone through several itterations:

The top designs are the earlier versions. We decided after a while that flowly fabric would be rather to difficult to render with our currect equipment/experience, so we opted for a more simple design. The backpack with the tubs and wires has also been removed, as it bore no significance in terms of narrative and would make the animation more difficult for our less experienced animators.

As for the creatures and landscape of the alien planet, much of this will remain similar to my orginal designs. The Behemoth (the large, vaguely saurpod-like creature) will undergo some changes however to make it look a little less familiar and more alien.

Character/Creature design work

A small selection of character/creature designs I have been working on this term. The first image is a developed design for the monstrous behemoth creatures that will feature in the short film that I am directing. However, it was decided amongst the crew that the design was a little too intimadating and would result in the audience being unable to empathise with the creature, thus I will be working into making the design more appealing over the next few weeks.

More Palaeoart

This illustrations were all completed in the last few months. There's a big spread of species here, with a made-up fake therapod for fun too! I feel like I am making good prgress with this shading technique, and also am getting to grips with blending the colouring in photoshop with the traditionally drawn pencil marks. The Glyptodon was drawn to accompany an article in my University's natural history magazine. I have found studying these ancint animals to be fascinating, and also informative for designing creatures that look alien and strange compared to the fauna with which we are familiar, whilst still being believable.