Goo In The Machine

Here's the final 3D Model with its texture besides.

And a final render to top it all off (I gave it a French New Wave kind of lighting for funsies)

Latest assessment submission! For a 3D Environment I made this gorgeous, futuristic house by Jesse Riggle (and added some detail to the reverse angle).

Blockout:

Checking to see if I had gotten a sense of the proportions and the appeal:

Modelling:

Just chipping away at getting all the polygons I need in there.

Texturing:

UV unwrapping and creating a texture that matches the style.

Rendering:

Finally, added some lights, environment fog and atmospheric lighting and voila!

I decided mine should relate to the trans experience because of, well... everything. Since I was working on a design for a game about transness, this felt like the perfect time to just dive in a bit.

So I went with four origami designs and created them:

Cat ears (my original creation),

A penis and balls (from this video),

A pride heart (from this video), and

A person (from this video)

Then I put them in the Unreal engine (in the game, proper):

Then I made some shaders to replicate different materials and their visual signifiers. In order:

Polished Silver,

Aluminium Foil,

Glass,

Baking Paper,

Toilet Paper,

Neon,

Porcelain,

Wool,

Paper/Card

And finally:

the modelled objects, with materials and colours, running live in the game.

I've put together these little resources to do writing practice in the font style of Catholic School Girl (yes, I know, but as someone who was at a catholic high school and dated my school girl peers at the time, the name really does ring true).

Happy writing!

Here is the breakdown on context: the game, her as a character and her place in the narrative.

The silhouette design tells you quite a lot about where my thinking was at the start and how it changed as I sketched.

Figuring out the head took a fair amount of doing, I started by visiting my sources and sketching them to understand how one heads this sort of undertaking.

I finally settled on this lovely, gummy granny head with her lil' ol' hair bun.

I plucked the colours directly out of photos of Eze, the lovely small town in the south of france which acts as something of a setting inspiration.

Here is the turnaround of the character. This one was done in photoshop from the start and with much too thick a brush, on reflection. She came out like she's meant to be in a children's cartoon: low detail, relying totally on appeal.

By contrast, I drew this version of her on paper, digitised it and painted it and got a COMPLETELY different style again. Something I'll have to figure out, that.

Here's what I'm happy with:

I didn't think I was even vaguely capable of drawing, let alone being able to layer draw on paper, digitise and create a whole-ass, posed character. I'm REALLY impressed with myself,

There's a lot of thoughtfulness in the design, I went to a lot of trouble to think of her accessories, how she would look because of her place in the world...

This was heaps of fun. I tore through paper just getting concepts down and iterating on the character. Once I get started I have such a blast and I've gotten SO much better in such a short span of time? That's awesome

And now some room for improvement:

my colouring is all very basic and flat, she could use highlights and shadows, as well as colour-blending,

I need to decide whether she has thick, visible lines or not and try colouring her one more time from that vantage,

As a character she is supposed to be old and bumped to hecc, so I need to give her more visible wear; scratches, dents, missing bits, ad-hoc fixes (tape, glue gun, cable ties),

Referencing kicked my ass and almost cost a 10% penalty, I need to develop a system to reference more effectively,

Okay, so how do people make moodboards effectively, instead of just a collection of images splattered on a page?

How does one handle referencing a moodboard, ideally?

Are there tips on how to keep references as you go? A software package, a process? Is Pinterest ruining everything?