Digital Painting - Environment Art

Having finished my group project (see previous post) early, I had a free day today in Uni and decided to spend this time developing my skill in an area that I haven't had much experience in: Digital Environment Art.

By the end of the day I've managed to produce a painting using my Wacom tablet and Photoshop. This has been a productive day because environment art (especially digital) is one of my weaker skills. The picture isn't quite finished and I plan to return to it and finish it off next week.

Samurai - Uni Work

I'm now approaching the end of my first year as a Games Design student at UCLan and have been set a final group project for each of the two modules. For one of these projects, my group and I have been designing a game based around Japanese Samurais in the style of the company Team Ico (producers of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus).

This of course means that we've all been drawing a hell of a lot of Samurais over the last couple of weeks. This has given me an opportunity to develop my drawings skills and move out of my comfort zone; I have been drawing full-body characters and movements/action poses.

I have also recently found a half-full sketchbook from last year, before I even started Uni! Looking back over the pictures in this sketchbook has opened my eyes to just how much I have developed in less than a year. I plan on making a more indepth post about this later on.

Meanwhile, here are a few of the pictures that I've produced during the current Samurai project.

 

 

I've still got quite a way to go, but I'm quite happy with how I'm progressing.

Drawing Practice: Faces

I've recently been doing quite a bit of practice drawing faces and character design, trying to develop my skills at getting scales right and use of shading amongst other things. Below are two quick drawings that I've produced recently.

Independent 3D Modelling - TV

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I've only recently started using Maya to create 3D models. As practice makes perfect, and I had some free time on my hands during class, today I decided to try my hand at some 3D modelling - aside from what I had to do for University projects.

I decided to try out something quite simple: a TV.

I modeled it in Maya, using chamfered edges and multiple extrusions to create an interesting but low-poly shape, before UV Mapping it and important it into Photoshop to create the texture. The final product was simple but it's all good practice.

I plan on doing more 3D modelling outside of Uni projects in the future.

Making a Corner Scene - Uni Work!

I am now at the end of the second semester of my first year as a Game Design student at UCLan and thought this would be a good time to get a blog up and running.

My most recent University project was the creation of a corner scene using the Unreal engine, from scratch, using Maya to model items, Photoshop to texture, and the UDK engine to present my assets in.

I decided early on that I would theme my corner as a prison/wine cellar style room as this would allow me to create some simple items, such as crates and bottles, that wouldn't be too difficult for me to model, as I only have a couple of months of experience with Maya. The scene's setting would also mean that I could make use of the lighting and use a contrast of dark and light areas in my scene.

After drawing up some preliminary sketches of what I wanted to achieve with this scene, I opened up Maya and modeled some items. I then UV mapped them and created the textures in Photoshop before important it all into UDK and fiddling with the lighting to get it looking how I wanted it to look. From beginning to end, this project took a total of about 10-12 hours over the course of two weeks.

The picture below is the presentation picture of the final project.

Making Stuff

Welcome to the first post of my blog!

My name is Theo Clarke, I'm a 19 year old first year Games Design student at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). I enjoy creating things and have decided to create a blog as a means to document and showcase my creative projects. This blog will mostly consist of my work from my time studying Games Design, including Uni project and independent work, but I'm also hoping to make some music, videos, and so on, so hopefully this blog will also come to include projects from a variety of areas of media, hence the use of the word "stuff" in the title: anything goes.

Stay tuned to see me make some stuff! :)