Wednesday, August 30, 2006

3D character : Update 2 (Shoe)

Finally! After 3 days of pulling hairs and eye-burning sessions, I finally came up with something interesting and to an extent satisfying result. Lack of experience in complex 3d and lack of original drawings costed me more time than I had presumed. After I attached shoe to body of character 3dsmax took more resourses and now it was almost impossible to get smoothed result with iteration set to 4.

Here is a render of shoe I am going to use for my character. I have already added partial details for socks. I am planning to add good textures and add more details to shoes. It is certainly going to be challenging experience while adding texture for both shoes and socks.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Everthing is constructed from basic elements

There always exist some primitive elements that construct complex object. Any object can be drawn from basic shapes like, circle, rectangle etc. It's also similar to sculpting, we start from a lump of egg and then cut it and give wanted shape. And also add other primitive egg lump to previous one and join them to form new lump.

Similarly if I want to make a head I will start with egg shaped circle*. Then I can join another big egg to create body and similarly other objects for other body parts. This same construction rule can be applied to create any complex drawing. It also applies to human/animal figure drawing ( which I will post in future posts). Below are some of my drawing for similar exercise. Even if it was so simple, I felt like being child again, and it was fun :)

*in drawing and animation circle will have any shape :-) No math rules, it can be even sqashed!

3D character : Update 1

I could not finish the features I wanted to in last weekend. But I was able to complete leg, ear and started with shoe. Right now I am working on shoe and when I am done with it I will duplicate the leg and ear and will have fairly finished character. I will add details to face and eyes and mouth.

For the update I have right now his hands, which was fun working with. But due to my lack of experience with it i had a bit trouble modelling it, in terms of adding details.

after I worked on leg and arms

Saturday, August 26, 2006

A fun drawing

I saw a picture in the newspaper and I liked the facial features of character. So I took inspiration from the picture and modified some features to my like and here is the result. A quick sketch of an old fella. I wanted to have more comic type of look, and I was glad to somewhat achieve that.

Very basic drawing practice

I was given the basic exercise of drawing as part of my animation course. It was for freeing my hand to draw smooth and fast. It was really helpful as i had not done drawing in past month.

I had to draw horizontal and vertical lines mostly by moving my elbow to get wide range or distance. Then I had to draw uniform circles of same size and this would use my wrist as well as my grip. Now grip is important on a longer run, so it's good to experiment few different methods of holding a pencil. Holding a pencil away from lead helps you get more radius for curves (very helpful when drawing on a large canvas). Hold your pencil loose when you want to draw construction lines. When you want to add fine details you can hold it close to the end to gain control over short distance. It's not must to have specific grip style, but technically if you practice some of these will help greatly.

Here is a snap of my basic drawing practice. I still do this sometimes when I am getting bored, that way I can utilize my time.

Friday, August 25, 2006

My first 3D character : modelling

3D has always intrigued me from the day I came to know about it. And I love 3D films for it's own style and test. As a part of learning 3D animation I started modelling a character in 3dsmax. I was planning to start with definite character, but I want to do more experiment in sculpting. So I started with some idea of what I want my character to look like. And this is what I have got till now. I will be posting more updates after this weekend.


Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Start of Beginning

After a long duration of waiting and thinking once in a while, I have finally started my blog. I want to share my learning experience with other people in hope that it will be useful to some of them. Also I wish to get comments and critiques for my work to improve my skills. So that is all I have to say in the beginning of my journey.

And for a good start I am posting my drawing that I did a long time back. I hope you enjoy your stay :)