Month 3 Final

(Almost done, post here: Beauty in Decay)

(This might be a little strange, but here's what Month 3 looked like back in Month 0)

No, before you ask you are seeing right, this is not a white N64 controller, this is nothing at all like a N64 controller. Somewhere along the way I got it in my head to do an environment instead of a prop again, so I chose this at the last possible second and began work. HO LEE HECK was this a crazy challenge to do in a month for me. In terms of models there are very few, a door, a chair, a weird thing propped against the wall, but the level layout in Unreal gave me no end of problems. Foliage alone would have taken me a month to figure out let alone figure out while getting this thing modeled and put together in time. Had I done this with a blockout like the rest I think it would have looked a lot closer to the reference, but I don't think I did too bad. Enough rambling though, here it is.

You know the drill.

So what are you looking at here, well it's pretty simple actually, just a hallway of a random mental hospital somewhere in the UK. Fun fact I was going to recycle this hallway into the ArtStation challenge that was going on at the time but school + Challenge really don't mix well, especially for someone who doesn't know the ropes that well yet. Lets talk environment workflow.

Build pieces and get idea of placement in Maya
--> Export/Import pieces into UE4
--> Figure out placing, camera, early lighting
--> Tweak the post processing
--> Add lights, particles, etc. for the final look

Lots of ups and downs with an environment in my opinion. I enjoy the process of making and placing everything where it needs to be, learned a lot about UV's for this stuff here, the hard part comes from getting it all to work out together. That being said, it isn't what I spent most of my time on, all of time went to figuring out Foliage and Lighting. (foliage was abandoned as you can see in the photo) The light in the reference is "impossible" to achieve with natural lighting, so I changed it to be natural and added some light rays and particle effects to spice it up. Looking back it might seem like a cheap way to make it look "good" but for a hallway done in a month I didn't really have time for something fancier. If only it got a blockout month, I guess. Walls could use a new material, maybe wood or something?

Month 2 Final

(Again, you can see the pictures and such here: Mateba MTR-8)

(If you forgot what this looked like back in Month 0, look here!)

I like guns, I like guns that are really weird, I like guns that are a pain to model, and would you look at that this one checks off all the boxes. Mateba MTR-8, a sport gun that was made for shooting at stationary targets on a field quickly. You could also use it to shoot at people but you'd probably have a harder time with that, especially if you miss. With 8 shots you have a little bit of leeway though so maybe it's not too bad, has this been used in a game/war though? I doubt it, hell I haven't seen much of this gun at all in the 3D world, just a few projects for early artists like me. Enough rambling though here's some Sketchfab links

Mateba MTR-8 Clean
by Nicolas Riley
on Sketchfab

Now don't tell anyone this, but this was actually the concept for how guns would look in a game I've been mulling over in my head for a while now, and I decided to go for it, but I don't think it worked out too well.

Mateba MTR-8
by Nicolas Riley
on Sketchfab

Anyway, there's a lot to be learned from this project the next time I do a gun, maybe in the material work, maybe in the presentation, maybe in the modeling. Nevertheless this is a cool revolver that I loved to look at, and that I want to come back to later for some rigging and animation work. Here's some pictures from the art station.

Click or RMB+View Image or whatever to see them in their full size.

Here's my workflow for hard surface objects at this time

Maya for base mesh and placement
--> Edge Loops for shape and then smoothing for high poly
--> Substance Painter for baking and texturing

Wow so simple, how was this not done in 2 days? Because I am an idiot and wanted to go an extra mile or two with my modeling, leading to the third shot you see there with everything torn apart. This means that you can pull my model apart piece by piece and render it all out from any angle, something that I decided sort of last minute and then spent a lot of time figuring out. That being said there are a few things missing since it was made for that last shot, not being pulled apart accurately since this is just a prop and would never be pulled apart like that for any reason, it's just pretty to look at.

Zbrush has a new modeling application with r7 I want to say, my friends tell me it would make my hard surface modeling much better but I frankly have very little experience with Zbrush at the moment. I may have to entertain the idea of using Zbrush exclusively for a new gun at some point. Oh, to dream about future projects.

That's about it for this one, there are comment sections and chat programs for any questions there are about this. Let's move on to the last month.

Month 1 Final

(You can find the pictures and such here as well: Leather Camera Bag)

(If you forgot what this looked like back in Month 0, look over here!)

My teachers always told me that simple is better, and really this proved it to me. My most popular final by a landslide, here is a small camera bag that I found online:

Sketchfab:

Leather Camera Bag
by Nicolas Riley
on Sketchfab

In terms of the amount of work put in, I guess this might seem like I did the most here with the insides and zippers there, but honestly I think the Mateba was a lot more actual hours. That's why you do simple things, a little work goes a long way with them whereas a more complicated piece will take 5x the hours to look just as good! I'm a believer but I don't listen well, I need to experience it myself. Enough rambling though, here are some pictures.

Make sure to click on these or RMB+View Image or whatever to see them in their full size.

This was simple, and I liked it, and people liked it and yadda yadda yadda. Maybe I should do some more small props like this, could be funner than working hard. I don't really have any thoughts to share on this one, the process was fairly simple so I'll go over it really quick.

This is my general workflow for organics at the moment:
Maya Base Mesh and placement
--> Zbrush the main parts that need it, pushing and pulling it as it needs to be pushed and pulled
--> Back into Maya for remeshing, which is thankfully very easy since I can export the base mesh I made in Maya that has all the Zbrush work done on it
--> Staying in Maya where I remesh anything that needs to be done manually
--> Substance Painter/Designer for the materials

Originally the sewing pattern was done in Zbrush because lolhighpoly but I was advised to do it in Substance Painter instead which worked out a lot better once I got it configured correctly. The sculpting work on this was actually really simple, just a little stressing and masking + pushing and pulling. The majority of the work on this was done in Maya, the base mesh having pretty much everything except a lot of polys. Although the workflow is pretty straight forward, I actually jump back and forth a lot between each step, tweaking and adding things as they come up. Through out all 3 months I always told myself I need to make sure I'm seeing potential problems immediately but sometimes it's impossible when you have a deadline sitting on your back and tunnel vision guiding you along. That's all for this, lets move on to Month 2.

What's been happening and final thoughts on Full Sail U.

(I suppose for once I should make a proper blog post and talk about what's going on with me. This post is most likely pure text, I'll make separate posts for each of my finals from school and what's going on right now.)

Wow, finally taking what I can refer to as a proper break from doing work. I have graduated Full Sail as of July 1st, 2016. It feels okay, not much like a proper graduation though, I still feel like there is so much for me to learn and so much practice I need to do, I'm overwhelmed somewhat and definitely not feeling like I'm ready for a job with where I am. Whether or not that's true is for someone else to decide though, if they think they can use me then I'm ready to go. When Full Sail says that it's a fast-paced course, they are not joking, I got a little whiplash from the end of it and I'm sitting here blinking my eyes trying to figure out what happened and where I'm supposed to go from here. I've never done this kind of thing before but I'm left in an awkward state of wanting to take a proper break, and thinking of what I can do for a project. Speaking of projects lets talk about what projects I'm working on right now.

Canifis Project
I've started and finished up the outside of the bank of the village of Canifis from the game Runescape 2. Right now I'm thinking of sculpting the rocks and such for practicing that workflow. Whether or not I will be doing the entire town, even with how small it is, is yet to be seen.

Izze's Characters
This project really ended up being a nightmare of a project to work on. Handpainting characters is something I was never "taught" to do, so I'm kind of making this up as I go. New problems present themselves every 5 seconds or so and working on a small laptop alone means my reference was only up about half the time it should have been since I preferred to actually see what I was doing at times. That being said I do like her characters and am enjoying it. THAT being said, I am so sorry it's taking me so long.

Project "Train Game"
What the heck happened to this, I made a video about it and everything. Well it turns out I lost my only other partner on the project so the team went down to 1, me. I have since been through school and such so my interest in doing this slowly dwindled since it was half mine and the other half belonged to nobody. Since I felt that way I decided to make a safe call and not make something up, using a proper source to draw from so that I would have a direction to go in. The project was simply to make a game, a focus on gameplay rather than art and story, so I'm going to be utilizing the famous short "The Rats in the Walls" by H.P. Lovecraft. A favorite of mine and a cool setting to boot. More information about that at a later time though.

Sculpting
For someone who graduated in Props and Environments you sure are thinking of characters a lot, I tell myself on a daily basis. Yes, me, I do think about my own characters a lot, more so than an environment or prop at the moment, because I like characters. That being said, I want to learn Zbrush better so I plan on making some stuff that utilizes it a lot more. Starting with that Canifis project I mentioned above, and moving on into whatever looks cool.

So yeah, that's pretty much what's going through my mind in terms of personal ideas right now. I'm a little scatter-brained at the moment but maybe someday I will actually get on the right track.

I'm also looking for jobs at the moment, though it's been hard with how much I've been moving around. Anyway, on to the actual work.