My Business Cards have Arrived

They actually didn't take that long to get here i was worried i wouldn't have them for hand in and would have to print them out on normal A4 paper!

I paid for 250 there could be 180 there is not way in hell im going to count them all! They do seem smaller than i first thought!

Business Card

I think this is the final design that i am going to settle on for my Business card well for the moment anyway , ill post up the development just its taking a while because its all on paper se need to take a few photos of it.

Live Project Information

         For my live project I will be going to a studio in Newcastle with a few other people, while I’m there I will be working on screen printing learning the steps and techniques involved in this process. I’m really looking forward to doing this because for the most part I mainly work in 3D and practically all the work that I have produced has been 3D so I never really get anything physical from the work I do. What I mean by that is everything is digital I can look at it but I would have to go on my computer and for someone who really loves 3D I do like to have physical art my room is covered in many different peoples artwork that I have collected over the ears, it would be nice to add some of my own work to it.

            As well as this I have always been interested in screen printing and what you can do with it unlike printing which is boring in my opinion just sending something to a printer and not being involved at any point. Its nice to get hand on with it and feel like you had a large part in producing the finished product I guess people may say you could get the job done faster with a printer so why wouldn’t you but I like the idea of being directly involved in the process for example using screen printing makes you directly responsible for how good or bad a print comes out if you don’t get everything correctly from the placement of the paper to the techniques you have with spreading the ink. I don’t have any experience with screen-printing beyond me just knowing that it is a type of printing. But ill try and list a few things that I believe give screen-printing a much bigger appeal over normal printing.

·      You can print onto more than just paper, I can print onto practically any surface that I desire as long as it will actually take paint, materials like wood, cardboard, plastics, rubber, metals some of these may have to be treated first for the paint to actually adhere properly.

·      As well as different solid materials that are for the most part stick you can also screen print onto clothing of practically any type of material and it gives you a much nicer look than that horrible iron on rubbish that is like wearing plastics on your clothes.

·      You have to know what your doing, getting all the little things correct is very important from how long you expose the screen to light when you are doing a exposed image, how to spread the paint correctly and re flooding the screen so that paint doesn’t go dry ruining your next print and many others.

·      There is a certain look to screen- printing that I cant really explain but you can just tell that it has been screen printed and not just printed off a laser jet its almost like the paint is richer and has more depth without sounding to much like a nonce.

·      Feeling of being involved with the process beyond clicking a few buttons and then watching a printer spit out multiple sheets of identical images.

·      That little one brings me to another point, although screen printing can be very quick and once you get everything down can produce almost perfect prints all the time you will get some variation and this opens up to development and ideas you may never of thought of before maybe its where the paint didn’t pass through enough or its moved and doubles over but it looks interesting. That is something you will never get from a printer the only difference you will get is when you run out of ink and it starts to fade!

·      Because its harder to print using the screen method when you do actually get a one right and it doesn’t have anything wrong with it in your own eyes which will probably be the most critical you really feel a sense of achievement and it makes that print even more special. So if you were to sell it you would be happy about it and would have more of a story to tell about that print telling the potential buyer how much trouble you had to get it perfect this will make the customer feel like they are getting something which took a great deal of effort and wasn’t just printed out of a printer.

·      There are some effects like mixing colours in the rig to be spread of the screen that you just couldn’t get from the choosing a colour on the computer unless you had a image of what you wanted.

Artist Research

I have only looked at a few people and not really in any great depth because I already had a idea in my head of what I wanted to do for this live brief, well the style of work anyway. But ill talk about a few artists who work really shows what the screen printer can do.

Mcbess this artist I became aware of last year while at pictoplasma and I loved his work then but I didn’t really know much about the technique but now that I do I appreciate his work even more. The amount of detail in his prints and fine lines that he creates for hair and beard texture must be a huge paint to try and get perfect prints of! But it the detail and amount of different things that he puts in his work that really impresses me how he can fit all those different things into it but still have them all in amazing detail is crazy. Someone else who went to pictoplasma got a sketchbook with one of his busiest artworks on it and we must have spent 20 minutes looking at it picking out different things that you don’t really notice until you start looking closely.

He also puts a lot of things that make you laugh into his work while we were looking through we saw so pretty strange pieces of art work some which were just really weird but other really fit with the whole fell of the piece and you could tell why he had put that there.

These are just a few example of his work and you can already see where I am coming from if it was me designing and laying this out I would get so lost in it all I wouldn’t know where to put the next thing or how to keep the flow right so that I could keep adding things but knowing that there would be enough room. I know there would be some planning involved and he probably draws many things separate and sees how they could fit together in one piece but I don’t know this for sure more of a guess. Either way it just goes to show what is possible with screen prints and how much detail you really can get out of them! Its not like you may believe if someone told you that screen-printing involved a piece of material stretched over a frame which you squeegee paint through, you would probably get the impression that you could only do the most basic of shapes.

Printing onto other materials is another thing that is great about screen printing your not just locked into paper which a traditional printer will.

My Experience.

Went in to do some screen printing today in Newcastle first time in the studio, it was a really nice space with everything you could possibly need for screen printing and many other things but I needed a printer and unfortunately the one in the studio was broken so I couldn’t screen print any of my work today because they were originally going to have us make images that would be first printed out on the vinyl cutter then have those places onto the screen to run the ink over but the designs that two of us made had to may fine details that the vinyl cutter just wouldn’t be able to cope with even though it is a really good one that has cut out some really detailed stuff as we were shown.

But my experience was not spoilt because of this and I still managed to learn a lot of new things about the screen printing process and have a lot of fun in the process we got there at around 3 and left at about 8 so it is a lengthy process but I’m sure everything could be don’t faster that what we managed on our first attempt and we had a few problems along the way the first one being photocopying the design onto a sheet of tracing paper they do this so that the light will not be let though on the actual design so that the screen when washed will reveal the very detailed perfect design that you can then pass ink through to make your print, but the photocopier was acting up be we still got it in the end!

Character Animation Evaluation

This hand in just gone i gave in all my character based work it is by far the best work that i have produced over the whole two years and definitely the work that i am most pleased with mostly because of the simple fact of it looks how i imagined it maybe even a little better but at the time in my head i had no idea how i was going to make that happen. But along the way i have learnt so much ill talk about that later but on a whole all of my skills have been improved throughout this Brief i have done so much better with the written work but more importantly in the area that i wanted to be strongest in by the end of this course and that is 3D i know feel so much more confident with the program now and i can understand almost most things even if i dont know how to do them myself i know i could probably work it out from looking at other work. but ill go more in depth about the things i have learnt and the skills i have gained in a later evaluation maybe a end of year one. But for now ill just list some good and bad points about this brief and som things that i have learnt. 

Pros:

• great understanding of cinema 
• better modelling ability 
• better texture ability
• general Cinema 4D knowledge improved greatly 
• better understanding of polygons and the effects they can have 
• creating something to what i actually envisioned it to be
• better confidence in my work
• a feeling of actually producing something im proud of 
• much better time management even if it could still be improved 
• knowing to allocate more time for render when its something on a large scale 
• improved rigging and weight painting knowledge 
• using the cinema 4D technique to control polygons, what i used to create my characters facila expressions  

Cons:

• Could have put more scenes in an included my character in the scenes if i managed my time better
• finishing my character before hand in for scens 
• remember to make more time for rendering 
• dont sit a watch renders be more productive in this time

I think thats about it really for the cons there possibly is more but at the minute i cant think of any real big ones as on a whole i really enjoyed this Brief even if sometimes i did feel rather overwhelmed with all the work that had to be done but again that was down to my own poor time management and not getting work done at the right time and sometimes putting if off to long.  

 

Hand In!!

Got everything handed in on time it was close but for once not with me have all the work done in time, i actually had everything done and ready it was the render time that was killing me it was taking 18 hours plus to render out one pan across my scene and getting close up shots was even worse i was still rendering up intill the time of hand it but im really happy with the stuff i handed in.

I'll try and put some videos up of the work i handed in but that all depends on what the upload is like on here or youtube.

Evaluation will be coming soon i did a screen recorded on so i may upload that on here but i will see, ill probably still put up a quick written one.

Environment!!

Here are some of the screen grabs i took while developing my scenes te pictures aren't in any particular order but you can probably guess which order they were produced in and ill probably put a quick description of the different ones below the picture. i am really happy with the way my work came out and its probably the first time something has looked pretty much how i planned it looking in my head which i am really happy about.

I tried to make my cinema 4D  mountains into a alpha channel so that i could make it a texture then wrap it around a cilinder so i could have the camera pan around in a completer circle and you would have the mountains in the background the whole time but this didn't work you lost a lot of the quality and considering i really liked the way it  looked and the detail i decided to get around the problem another way.

Here is two shots of the mountains at different times one was supposed to be in the morning when the mist is still low in the mountains but you can see the sun kissing the snow on the mountains and the one above is in full light so you can see all the detail in the house and assets.

Started to mess around with different lighting and sketch and toon because i did want it to have the ere look like a post apocalyptic world. i do really like this lighting and may try and do something similar to this later on if i have time.

Above is all the finished images of the house i am really happy with it even tho i did go rather overboard because he was supposed to have a shack but i did say in the character research that he was going to have skills from being in the wild and relying on him self so he could put this together, maybe!

messing around to see what effect i could get from using different lanscapes and planes with altered transparency i really liked the way it looked i think i gave that look of a iceberg in water but still keeping with that low poly look which i was surprised worked.

Above is some of the earliest work that i did with the mountains i still like them but i was hard to get the water in the right place to make it look natural this one was probably the only one i get to look the way i liked the rest just looked weird.

Getting the mountains to have this snow capped look was actually much harder than you may imagine i tried a number of different things to get them the way i wanted the most obvious probably being set selection but if anyone tries this you will soon realise that it just doesn't work at all well it didn't for me and i did everything correct to my knowledge! it took me that long and that much trial and error that im actually not going to explain how i did it. my secret until the making of guide i guess!

Character Progress

I have been working on my Character a lot recently and wanted to show you my progress in pictures again words are boring and all it would explain was the modelling process which i have gone over so many times it hurts my head to think about. it

One thing i will say is my modelling has improved massively!!

From this very rough sketch.

To this slightly better textured character for the board.

Now follow the pictures to see how it went from paper to 3D in many steps! 

That dreaded Part rigging and walk cycle luckily i have done this a few times and i didn't want to go over it again, oh and before i forget extruding a model after putting it into a pig makes it a pain in the butt to weight paint, also i hate weight painting if it worked better his shirt would have been extruded to but i caused to many problems. 

Facial Expressions!!!!!