Jack_VFX

Well i finally got there, My final design is finished and has successfully handed in. I am so proud of this character board as this is only second time that i have created one, additionally this was the first time this year that i got to get back into my traditional drawing techniques. i was quite fortunate to not have many problems when creating my design, yes...it took a little longer than i wanted it to, but it was a continues and flawless journey from start to finish. Furthermore, throughout this project, i think that i developed a new style for me to work in, i love the cartoon style that presented itself when adding in the highlights and darker shades. The style itself reminds me of the cell shading effect that you can apply to your 3D models within Cinema 4D. Overall,  i'm over the moon with how my character and i cant wait to create more of these characters within future projects. I will try continue developing this style as time goes on, now that my project work is finishe...

Hi guys Im back! Sorry for the long delay but I was trying to buckle down and finish the first scene of my animation and I ma happy to report that I did. Unfortunately I cannot show the animated version as it is not rendered as of right now. However I can present you with a still of my scene. Adding the debris into the scene was a very easy process, it was a simple case of repositioning the debris in appropriate areas of the scene and adding some small animations among them for diversity using the basic key framing techniques. At this point in my brief I have moved onto creating the other scenes within my animation. I am currently working on both the opening shot and the establishing shot. I want my animation to have a build up to the lonely astronaut therefore I plan on creating a few establishing shots before the big reveal. Below, I will show you the finished Astronaut shot and give you all a small teaser of the new shots before I reveal them next week. I hope you all enjoy them and...

The Final Design: After a few more iterations, I and the client narrowed it down to the design you can see below. In the previous post, we decided to enlarge the main symbol and replace the cube that was originally in its place. Additionally, you can see that we added in the name of the song, I couldn't show the name in the last pose as his single hadn't been released, however now that it's out I can reveal the name. As I showed the new design there was only one change, a big change that the client wanted to make, he wanted the purple to be changed to an 'electric blue.' I admire the change that he suggested as it added to the design so much. It makes the entire album cover pop a lot more. There's not much more to say about the album cover as I have given my opinions on it in the past, the last thing I'll say is that I am really happy with the way it came out. Additionally, I loved the back and forth discussions about the design work and how we worked toge...

At this point, I have already handed in my work, I wanted to keep my workflow up to a high standard and I didn't want the blog to get in the way of that so as I said in my previous blog, I've been working ahead of time, however all posts will still be written in the present to save confusion. I'm now on the last strip of my design work, and I'm loving the way it is coming out, I have now designed all the poses for the main character, I have finalised the linework, coloured it, and then added highlights and shadows, and I love the styles that have emerged from the additions to the illustrations. All that needs to be finished  is his bird companion, however, like I said previously, this design is not as detailed as the main character, so its not taking as long, however, that's not to say I'm not happy with the design, I love the personality behind this illustration, the goofy, and confused look within his action pose is amazing, and I'm very proud of how it ...

IMPORTANT NOTE: At this point I am ahead of time, as I grow closer to my deadline I needed to focus more on my work, however, these posts will still consist in order, but you guys will be a little behind. I will still be writing these posts as if they are in the present, to save confusion in future posts. Ok! I finally got there after working from the second image you see below, I finally managed to get a design I like (third image). As you can see I made the design look a lot older, I wanted my robot soldier to be a veteran rather than an active soldier. This also gives the design a lot more character, you can see that he has an oil spill that creates his dominant eyebrows, shotgun shells as his moustache, he wears a bandana to aid that said oil spill and finally, he uses a robot leg as a walking stick. There's a lot of features like this within the design, however, I won't mention them all as ill let you guys find some yourself. Overall I am really happy with this desig...

This is a brief update as I'm currently working on his work right now, so after texturing the design (IMAGE BELOW) he had the idea of replacing the cube in the scene with his band logo and I thought this was a great idea. I was quite happy with the way teh current version came out though and ill keep that for myself, maybe for a portfolio entry, I'm not sure yet, but anyway sorry for the quick update, I'm working on his work right now and I'm on a deadline. I will update you guys with any more progress when I get there!

So here they are, everything went to plan...surprisingly! I'm on track for my final designs. I tried not to work from the colour tests as I did not want to limit myself. I prefer these designs a lot more to the colour tests as there is a lot more detail and generally look a lot more toward what my final design may look like, so this helps me visualise my options a lot more. If I'm being completely honest, I love all these designs, so it was hard to pick one out. However I got a second opinion from my tutor to narrow the designs down a lot more, now we have the choices down to the blue camo, or the medic colour scheme. This making it a lot easier for me to choose, and after comparing them both, I'm leaning towards the medic scheme. I'm getting very close to start designing my final character, all I need to do now is narrow down the final details of my design work. Below you can see the texture tests and the robot design that I'm working from to create my final design...

So now that I have a vague idea of what my robot design is going to look like I wanted to create some colour tests to see which theme worked best, now the design that you see in the tests isnt the final design, its just a basic sketch so that I could see the majority of the colour. Although I haven't decided which colour I am going to use yet, however, I am leaning towards either the blue or the default grey. however I do plan on doing some texture tests to, so this may help me see what I want. The designs themselves weren't hard at all I simply started with one colour then dragged them into photoshop to change the hue and saturation to quickly add more colours. I didn't want to make to many as if there's too many options...ill probably just get confused, if all goes well, the next post should be the texture tests.

So recently I have been creating an album cover for a friend of mine, is music type is rock and heavy metal and I have had quite a lot of fun listening to the samples he has sent me for a few days now. He didn't really want to give me any specs to go on, he wanted me to create a vision for him, I already knew this was gonna be a lot of fun as I knew I would be able to use 3D within this project. I have created album covers for him before, but nothing this advanced. I knew I wanted it to be symmetrical so I created a landscape within cinema 4D and used octane as my primary renderer. I'm not going to go into much detail of how I created them as there are many iterations of this album cover and I don't want to spam you guys with tons of posts, each with pages of detail. I thought I would go for a sci-fi look at first, you can see this is in the third image below, I hadn't shown him this yet as I wanted to add some textures first so he could get the full idea, but I think I...

This mech was a blast to build! I had so much fun building it and designing it, at the time I was playing a lot of titanfall, so this was the inspiration for this design. Creating the design wasn't too hard to build, I essentially box modelled most of the design, this essentially means I started with simple cubes and morphed then adjusted the shapes to how I wanted them and I did this for each limb of the design. This is how I tend to approach most of my mechanical designs within Maya, I find it to be the most comfortable approach for me personally. Admittedly, rigging the design was the hardest part of this design, I had to use IK rigs before, however, for some reason, this rigging method just refused to work within the limbs of my design. However, after some time researching and tweaking, I finally got it to work. This was one of my favourite projects to do this year as I just got to let loose on design work and have fun with it, and I think that's really importing to do when...

Back when I was studying at Teesside University, I had many opportunities to work on various projects, however, there was only a few that I was actually proud of. Just before I left the university I had the opportunity to work in a group project to create an opening title sequence for a movie. We were allowed to choose any title sequence for any movie. We as a group chose to create a title sequence for Pirates of the Carribean, in which we would all have specific roles in which to create this animation. I was placed as a senior concept and storyboard artist, meaning that I would visualise most of the scenes. At first, I was asked to create a storyboard, but I held myself to a better standard than at and honestly... I wanted to impress my team so I created an animatic. Using Procreate on the Ipad Pro and premiere I was able to draw out some frames and compile them all into a small sequence. Like I said previously, I was very proud of this animatic so I thought I would take ethis opportu...

My apologies this will be a brief post as I am working on some client work today but I will still try to keep detail, where it is needed. Like I previously mentioned, my character design brief is practically just started now, however, I still want to keep you updated on what is going on. This is my second batch of sketches that I did for the robot designs, I was a lot happier with these variants than the first batch, and I think it will be these designs that I progress with. [IMAGE BELOW].

My apologies this is going to a very brief post as I made this 3D model a very long time ago, and if I'm completely honest, I don't remember the steps in which I stook to make it. I can safely say that I box modelled this design, I don't think I did anything too special. The textures are simple textures that are included in the Renderman library so again, nothing too crazy. At the time of making this model, I was obsessed with a game called 'Osiris New Dawn,' which is all about surviving the harsh weathers of mars, and the space rover is the main tool of safety, so this immediately put me in the mood to build one. I do like the design that I went with, however, I made this a while ago, so I know I could build it better now and maybe sometime in the future, I will. Again, sorry for the short post, but I still wanted to post this piece of work because even though I know I could do better now, I am still and always be proud of this design as its a symbol to how much I ...

So a few months ago and I began researching into ways that I could create a VR scene, and I actually succeeded with this method. So, first of all, I built a Mech in Maya 2018, (I will show more of the mech in a later post) the build wasn't too challenging and before I textured the robot, I wanted to test the VR first, so I began by placing a camera into my already posed robots hand and set the camera type to 360 degrees, from here, I needed to render the 360 view image and then import it in after effects. Within after effects I also set a VR camera and placed it in the middle of my image, so that I could look around the scene, and in all honesty, for my first test, it came out pretty good. I know I didn't go into much detail of how I did it, but I'm going to be completely honest with you guys... I forgot. I will make another in the future and when the time comes I will write up a full tutorial. Anyway here are the results below, (I added some scenery into the scene to make ...

I wanted to take a minute to discuss how much I appreciate the site, 'HDRI Haven.' As ot says in the title, this is a site created by Greg Zaal, and he has created hundreds of HDRI's for anyone to use. Recently he has made all of these free, which is a great undertaking on his part. HDRI'S are environment maps that are able to light your 3D scene more realistically, and I can't count how many times I have relied on HDRI haven to gather some references for a project. Additionally, although i haven't used any yet, this site also provides textures for your work, and all these textures include all the correct attributes for it to work such as displacement, roughness, specular ext, which can all be downloaded separately. HDRI Haven is a godsend for any 3D artist and I cannot recommend it more, it is a great site to utilise. I have posted the link below if you want to browse yourself: https://hdrihaven.com/