Client Project: Planning

The Brief:

— You are invited to submit a piece(s) of your creative work which could highlight aspects of what you love about Nottingham? What would you love Nottingham to be celebrated for? Be as creative, unique, experimental and expressive as you like within the categories of your choice based around the theme. The most successful of past winners have not only been creative but they have met the brief and have given us a new way of seeing Nottingham.

       For my client project I have chosen to do 'Nottingham loves... nature and wildlife'

       
       As the target audience I've selected is children and families with young children (the group most likely to want to visit places like city farms and other wildlife and nature parks), I chose to do an animation in a cartoon/ puppetry style as children would find this more visually appealing.The animations will be simple and brightly colored and will appear alongside facts and information about the places around Nottingham you can go to see wildlife and other animals, including family days out etc.Some slides will also have information on how to be more aware of nature in your area and suggest fun projects for children and parents on how to help and protect wildlife in their own backyard.This project is relevant to me because I love nature and love visiting the places mentioned in my project.

       these are the locations that will be included in my project as backgrounds and some of the information will be about them:

—The Arboretum
Sherwood Forest
Wollaton Park
Stonebridge City Farm
The Great Oak
White Post Farm
Attenborough Nature Centre

Research Project: Sources

This is a list of the research sources I have looked at so far or will be looking at as I complete this project. The list may grow as I develop my understanding of the subject matter and expand my hypothesis.


Books:

•Creating Characters with Personality by Tom Bancroft
•Character Mentor By Tom Bancroft
•Creating the Art of the Game by Matthew Omernick 
•The Skillful Huntsman by Scott Robertson•3Ds Max Modelling for Games: Volume II: Insider's Guide to Stylized Modelling: 2 by Andrew Gahan
•2D Artwork and 3D Modelling for Game Artists by Davis Franson
•The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell
•Halo: The Art of Building Worlds
•Half Life 2: Raising the Bar
•The Art of Skyrim
•The Art of Dead Space
•The Art of Oddworld Inhabitants
•Game Design: Secrets of the Sages


Websites:

•http://www.bloopanimation.com/ 
•http://www.cgsociety.org/
•http://ww2.animationstudies.org/ 
•http://characterdesign.blogspot.co.uk/ 
•http://www.polycount.com/forum/



Research Papers:

•Exploring perceptions and attitudes towards teaching and learning manual technical drawing in a digital age Susan V. McLaren (2007)
•The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford
•Modelling Techniques: Movies Vs. Games by James Dargie •Enhancing 3D Graphics on Mobile Devices by Image-Based Rendering by Chun-Fa Chang et al.
•Level of Detail for 3D Graphics by David Luebke et al.
•Game Character: Concept to Product by Danial Rashidi (2009)
•An Introduction to Computer Graphics for Artists -Modelling 1: Polygons by Andrew Paquette (2013)
•3D Modeling Optimization for Multimedia Production by Malta de La Plata, Bruno (2013)
•Optimizing the 3D Character Modeling Process for Game Development by Turppa, Markus; Kuismin, Henri
•Optimization of CG Models by Andrew Paquette

Research Project: Question, Hypothesis and Artifacts

My Research Question:

"How does one preserve the aesthetic of the original concept art throughout the animation/games production workflow?"

In this research I plan to investigate characters progress through initial design phases to 3D models, and determine the importance of decisions such as poly count and texturing choices in creating an accurate 3D representation of the original artwork and technical designs.

My Hypothesis:

I believe that 3D models with a higher poly count will better preserve the details seen in the original artwork, however being higher poly will maximize rendering time and be more difficult to use in games or animations.

I also think that low poly models can also retain a significant amount of data (despite the lack of base model detail) through use of techniques such as bump mapping and texturing.






Artifact 1:

Moving from concept art to 3D models. Examining the workflow as a character or creature progresses from original concept art, through technical designs and eventually translates to the 3D model

My plan for this artifact is to design two creatures, a complex and detailed one and a more rounded simplistic one, creating artwork for each, taking that artwork through to technical drawings, front, side and three quarters etc. Then using the drawings, create the creatures as a 3D models. From this I can assess the process of artwork to model first hand.

Artifact 2:

How does the poly-count of the models and texture/mapping techniques effect how accurate the 3D model is to the original concept designs?

Using the 3D models of the creatures from my first artifact  I will reproduce the character as a low poly structure, and a second iteration with a high poly count, seeing which work best for looking close as possible to the original design while maintaining functionality. I will also compare the use of the polys, from the simplistic to complex models to see if the necessary number of polys changes to maintain the detail of each.

Life Drawing

Some Life Drawings I've done

 

Still Life

Some of my Still Life work