Starting ideas and organisation

After a long time of thinking on potential topics for my COP3 project I decided to go down the route of 3D sculpting. 

Now the topic is very VERY extensive as it can be used for environment and characters for pretty much film, illustration and recently games. 

So narrowing it down I decided to go only for Game Characters as my interest of focus. The leading software for this is without doubt Pixologic's Zbrush therefore I decided to collect as many tutorials as possible to be able to master this software. 

At the end I ended up with a ridiculous amount of tutorials for this (over 35GB). Opening the software was pretty intimidating as the interface is completely different from the ones I use most (Maya and Photoshop) so hopefully it wont be long until I get the hang of it and until I can freely swap between this applications. 

Also having a good digital tablet with a decent sensitivity will be of great help, therefore I had to borrow a wacom intuous from Uni as my bamboo wont be as good. 

This image below is my proposal submitted with the main ideas and some basic research. 

Straight after I decided to not risk marks by my lack of writing skills and time management; so I decided to create a schedule with dates that will hopefully spread the workflow and finish the work on time. It's was hard to balance the practical and written work but hopefully it will be done in time.
Also there are a few bumps in the way that I didn't consider, like projects that came along the way that will be part of PPP but hopefully it won't affect my time schedule.

Summer time

It was certainly a long summer. It is always tempting to just sit and do nothing after the final hand in from 2nd year, but I put myself in the mindset of being productive and get something done.

Social/Network: 

I kept in contact with some people I met at the Game Republic's showreel to the point where we became friends and even started doing some pet projects, like a horror game in which I'll be doing the animations and some props. 

Also, it's thanks to them that I manage to get into Game Republic's team and now I've been attending to their gatherings and others like TIGA and GaMaYo; something that keeps me in contacts with other people, get's me to spread some business cards around and get some feedback of my portfolio. 

I also got invited by a friend I met in LinkedIn to join an unofficial art jam that him and a bunch of his friends do constantly just to keep themselves practising under certain rules and time limits.

This is one of the illustration I made for one of the art jams. 

Competitions: 

So far I only manage to participate on the VG Remix in Polycount working on a low poly video game diorama. My game of choice was DarkStalkers from Capcom. It was a lot of fun to make and difficult because everything from polygons and textures where incredibly limited in size. The ultimate goal was to keep a WIP blog and submit the final piece on Sketchfab. Towards the end and when I had everything done, I had some problems with my account where transparencies wouldnt work. At the end I didn't submit on time, but at least I managed to get the work done. 

DarkStalkers Pocket from clover_lawn on Sketchfab.

Profesional: 

Due to many reasons, I'm desperate for a job!... The main reason still being the fact that I want to stop working for the food industry and join the game one. Therefore I've been applying to different companies in the proximities that would potentially let me join their team and at the same time finish what's left of my studies. Obviously that's not as easy as it sounds, but I still gave it a chance.
From the many applications I've sent,  T&T in Manchester (responsable for LEGO games) put me and many other applicants a trial task. The challenge was to make an original Lego figure (not done by them before), model under some poly count restrictions, UV map and texture within a week. If this phase was successful then they would call you for an interview.
My choice was the character Hellboy; I've always love this character, looks and on the plus side, it's already part of Warner Brothers.
The modelling certainly was the biggest  challenge as Lego figures turn out to be ridiculously hard to model under a limited amount of triangles. At the end you endup looking for a balance between what's necesary, and what's visible. The UV mapping part I thought I had it dominated, but now I'm thinking that my arrangement might not be a industry standard. The texturing part was definately the easiest part and more enjoyable; Lego figures are quite restricted on where textures can be place, therefore it becomes a challenge to give the character the right personality.
This is the final texture and some model renders:

Unfortunately just this week I got an email from them saying that it was a really competitive position; many applicants where doing the same project and I wasn't selected due to still being a student (I'm sure my model wasn't up to standards, but they where nice enough not to say it). It's good to at least start getting an idea of what the industry is looking therefore I will be more prepare for the next time I try applying. So far it was fun to work on it and it kept me practising on softwares like Illustrator.

3rd and Final year

So after a long summer we finally came back for our final year at uni.
It certainly fills me up with excitement for having exciting and more challenging projects, for the idea of finally finishing a degree and being able to integrate to the industry. On the other side, I can't help feeling like it will be full of hard hard work as the extended piece of writing along with its practical part (dissertation basically) sound like the biggest challenge so far.

We were briefed for this module before we broke for summer holidays and after a serious though process I came to the idea that I wanted to work around the subject of 3D sculpting. It's an area that I haven't explore in the past but that every time I see someone else's work it makes me want to give it a go. After a little bit of research it turns out that it's very frequently used in the game industry, and specially with the new console generations coming out.
This image below if the proposal form I filled explaining the way that I want to take for this project.

Straight after this I started looking for as much information, books, and articles as I could and because I'm planning to use Pixologic's Zbrush I needed a good bunch of tutorials that I've been watching over the summer. Certainly one of the most difficult things about Zbrush is getting used to the interface; after working years and years on Photoshop and then adapting to Maya, I feel like I lack of a lot of intuition to use this 3D/2.5D  software. Hopefully it wont be long until I get the hang of it as there are quite a lot of things I need to do.

Also this is the PowerPoint presentation I made trying to illustrate the direction that I will take this project with some examples from the industry.
So this is the final year. Here we go!

Final line - end of year presentation

So it's nearly the end of the year... it went incredibly fast!

While doing the final presentation of the Learning Journey it made me start thinking a lot about what I've done so far and what I need to improve over the summer.
For the presentation I decided to use Prezi; an online presentation maker that allows to float around empty spaces and use zooming in and out as the main 'moving' tool. I think it breaks out the Power Point presentation styles and at the same time is incredibly quick unlike editing a video with moving text/images in after effects. I decided to gave it a go after downloading the app on my ipad.

Some of the reflections involve me doing a decent work at putting myself out there: website, social media appearance and even business cards, but the problem I noticed after applying to a few companies is that I have a really weak portfolio.
Definitely it's something I need to work over the summer and also I'll work into my dissertation topic: 3D sculpting.
Looking forward to start new projects and potentially get involved in the Zbrush community. 

(At the point where I posted this, the presentation wasn't complete, but I assume it'll update automatically when I do finish it)  

Final renders - Vivus town house

So despite the fact that I didn't finish what I expected to do at the beginning, I'm pretty happy of how the final renders look:

 

It looks quite different after you render it up. This is just me playing with a beauty and occlussion pass so I'll definately finish the scene just as a practice. Details that I notice when wrong is the texture in the sign; I'm guessing is the flare deformation that could have altered because it look fine in previous rendering test. I could have also add some deformation to the roof to avoid making it look so asian-like. 

Final details

So at the end I managed to get a basic house together; I realised until I started doing some test renderings that probably I went in too much details with some of the textures while the ones that I left at the end are a bit sketchy. This is a final group of the house without any deformation. Not sure if being a bit less than 14000 Tris is good or bad for a game environment, but probably I could have done with less, specially on the windows (take in count that there are windows on all four sides of the house).

Also had some troubles with the roof: the main roof tilling is at different scale as the one for the sticking-out windows. I guess I should have done some testing before going through all the trouble of specular and normal maps.
There are some of the textures that were made:

Unfortunately there I ended up making more assets that I could even use like the square's fountain, road sign, chimneys, stairs and even grass. Some are textured but I couldn't put them in context for the render so I decided to let them out. Just for the sake of portfolio I'm planning to finish this scene during the summer.

Above are the unused props, the working texture for the tiles of the town square's floor and the fountain textures. This last one was the first texture I made as a test of the quality I wanted. Spent more time on it that I should have. Also I'm aware that I wasn't as efficient as I should have been; it was until the final crit that I was suggested to reduce the number of textures/shaders in the whole house, like having one or two for the whole thing. At that moment it was quite late as I was already half way through most of them. 

Next post I'll post some quick final renders. 

Magic and Transmedia

From an idea that started back in 1990 while waiting for a delayed train from Manchester to London to over 450 million copies sold across 67 languages, 7 film and game adaptations and over 15 billion dollars-worth merchandise; I'm talking about the magical world of Harry Potter.
The famous wizard and his world has surely been one my all time favourite stories and not long ago the author J.K. Rowling decided to expand this universe even more: Pottermore.


In the past, Rowling refused to publish the saga as e-books fearing piracy but it is now that she decided to distribute a digital edition along with an online experience that involves a point of meeting for fans all over the world, games, an official encyclopaedia  competitions and even readings by Steven Fry. This dream land for the fans explores over 18,000 words that the Rowling wrote describing characters, locations, objects and magic in detail.
The website can be considered as an MMO experience that revolves around the most important element of a transmedia success: the unification of a huge community in direct interaction with the author of the universe.

I remember trying it for a bit when it was first launched and it was quite a nice to go back to the beginning of the story and see all the special features while surfing around the beautiful artwork done by the New Castle-based-company Atomhawk.

FlipNote Studio 3D - good animation practice

I remember hearing about FlipNote studio for the Nintendo DSXL ages ago but never took interest on it. Recently I heard that they're updating it to FlipNote Studio 3D adding a lot of features to the software from the obvious 3D feature, to layered workflow and even a social network to share and comment of people's animation all over the world.
Since I got a 3DS XL not long ago I'm pretty happy to give it a go, and maybe have a potential tool to quickly sketch animations or animatic since it has the possibility of exporting to other editing softwares.



This is an example of the capabilities of the previous FlipNote studio; it was made for an online competition celebrating the 25th anniversary of  Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda.

A little help from a stranger...

This time I want to talk a bit about something that has been happening recently, that has happen in the past and that probably happens to many people involved in the creative industry: Art-fear. 

It starts as a simple 'I'm not inspired at the moment' and it can go on for a long time while every single attempt of work seems meaningless, horrible and with incredible low standards. Comparing yourself with others' work and wasting time in the most incredible way (internet) is just a common practice while being stuck in this kind of phases. 

I was just recently going though all this and more and then, while actually comparing and admiring his work I came across his blog:

This is the profile picture of Nicholas Kole, an american illustrator and recently employee of EA who's work I don't even want to go to describe as it's like my holy grail of inspiration, but something that really got me was his way of speaking. I was incredibly surprise when I read this particular blog post in which he goes on about his art block, but more interesting, the way he deals with it.
The idea of him being talented and successful but at the same time going through the same sort of situation as I was made me realise that how much of a waste of time it can become.
In my case, I feel like I wasted time while deciding my career, so at my 24 years I have the feeling of catching up with the time I didn't practice and manage somehow to reach the level of talent as some younger people who realised their path earlier than me.
There's no time to get stuck, there's no time to worry about your work. You need to be drawing, you need to keep experimenting. This blog is my bible for when I start getting dark clouds above me and I wanted to share not only his amazing work but also his talent to cheer me up even when we've never met. I sent him a message on twitter trying to express my gratitude  and it could have been the 140 word limit or my lack of expressing in a writing way, but I'm sure he doesn't know how helpful he was to me.
Any way, the least I can do is to share his profile and hope you find his blog or work as inspiring as I do:

Portfolio    -    Twitter      -     Tumblr

SAI

It's been nearly two years since I started using an extra software as a tool for many of my illustrations. So far I can say that I got used to many of it's features that now I struggle when I don't have them in Photoshop; I'm talking about the originally Japanese software Easy Paint Tool SAI or better know as just SAI (ペイントツールSAI).

This is a lightweight raster graphics editor and painting software built for only for Windows by Systemax software. It has been around the market since 2004, but only as a free beta test and it was until 2008 that it was released as an official version. I remember trying a Japanese version ages ago, but it was definitely confusing not being used to the language as I was with the commands in Photoshop   

In my opinion it's one of the simplest drawing softwares there is out there as it shows only the important tools need to make a digital painting or drawing and the customization of tools get as simple as a double click. It is not to say that it substitutes Photoshop over all; the post production process and tweaking needed at the end of any piece is definitely impossible to make in SAI so unfortunately you're forced to open Photoshop and add the final touches, of just to add any text. 

Photoshop is without doubt the most solid and complex software for photoediting without a doubt but this feature can backfire and make things more complicated if you don't know the software entirely. 

Naming the pros and cons of SAI from my point of view: 

Cons: 

• Can't make modifications of colour, light, sharpness and others as easy as Photoshop. 
• Limited space for customised brushes. 
• There are resources for the software but obviously not as many as in Photoshop. 
• The amount of formats that its compatible is not extensive, but at least the most used digital ones are there. 
• No text tool whatsoever.

Pros:

• Very light program; there's no need of a super computer to make it run smoothly even when you creat pieces that are rather large. 
• It's said that it's a very unstable software that crashes a lot, but I've actually never had it crash on me...
• Better selection tools than Photoshop.
• Really intuitive and simple tools. 
• Has a Lineart layer that works with vectors that are really easy to modify and change line thickness. 
• Has a stabilizer features perfect when you need for the making of straight hand drawn lines (I wish Photoshop had this feature).

Over all, I've found this as an incredible useful tool, and I tend to integrate it to my work flow more often than I realize. The ability of being able to save in a Photoshop format makes it so easy to jump back and forth between the two softwares. I anyone has the chance to give it a go I highly suggest you do, even just out of curiosity. 

Beyond: cinematic gaming

Playing Heavy Rain on my PS3 not long ago was incredibly surprising, different and (despite getting the bad ending) it kept me on the edge of my seat for the entire game.

I was really impressed how they merged such a cinematic entry with a lot of gameplay in between. Now I've heard a lot of discontent when it comes to games that involve long cinematic cut scenes and some of the main reasons are the lack of realism in the performance and, of course, the fact that its a game, not a film. 

In the case of Heavy Rain, I believe the genre fits the concept of a cinematic adventure plus I felt like I couldn't put down the control at any moment because of the interaction being so spontaneous. 

For the essay I wrote for my Context of Practice 2 I came across a very interesting topic related to the possibles narrative mistakes that takes place when videogames try to be created and delivered with the same par ouch as the cinema does; the fact that it works on camera doesn't mean it works on a game, as it somehow defeats the point of it. Now this topic is much more extensive than this, but the point the I'm trying to defend is that in the time of transition for videogames to be considered as a piece of art on its own we get the chance to experience entries that keep expanding a possible new genre in the game industry.

Beyond: two souls is the newest entry if Quantic Dream to be delivered in October 2013 featuring no one less than Juno's actress Ellen Page, among other top Hollywood cast.

Using the new engine tested on the clip Kora, the studio plans to deliver the most cinematic game yet, an adventure featuring Jodie Holmes and her adventure around her supernatural powers.

Most reviews and previews of the games look incredibly stunning and despite the fact they this represented a massive challenge for the actress, the job of doing motion capture for a 2000 page long scriptcertainly looks promising.

     

The game is not only building expectations among the game community but it also had an appearance at New York's Tribeca Film Festival featuring a recording of the first 35 min of the game.

I'm certainly looking forward to play this game as I'm a big fan of both Quantic Dreams' work and Ellen, I just wish it came out either before or after as Pokemon X and Y is having its world realise around the same date...I'm so sad...

Release Date: October 2013

16 for Ages 16 and up:

Genre: Adventure

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developer: Quantic Dream

Game developing - Chinese Browsing Game design

While doing my research for my previous blog that was more of a short review of the iOS app Clash of Clans I came across several times with the term 'whale' user. 

Now despite the fact that I dislike whales, I couldn't help to want to know more about this concept. It turns out that is a recurrent phenomenon that spins around social gaming where this users determined as 'whale' users are the ones that significantly spend a lot of money, and when I say a lot it means that for some free-to-play games only the top 10 users are the ones that represent a 50% profit for the company, just to put an example. 

Now I'm not very good at talking about strategies when it comes to marketing or any economic related topics, and neither am a person who would spend money on any social or free-to-play games, but while doing some research I came across a talk by Jared Psigoda done for the Game Developers Conference 2012. The session is called "$100,000 Whales - An introduction to Chinese Browser Game Design" and as explanatory as the title can be, this session that lasts for nearly an hour by the CEO of Reality Square Games is so interesting that anyone interested in game developing or design should really watch. 

Now we all now how much of a power nation China is, but when it comes to news for videogames I can only find either American or Japanese products. In this talk you can clearly see, with statistics,  the reason why China it's its own market and when he points out the difference in numbers, not only of users, but on servers and general user behaviour, I couldn't imagine there was such a big difference in the design of a video game. 

I can't come to details as the examples are something I can't come up to pronounce, but it certainly opened my eyes to a whole new conceptualization of a game mechanic, and different approaches that a game company can take. To be honest, I feel now that any game company that releases one game and it's happy about just publishing looks nothing in comparison to the shark companies in China. 

Certainly scary, but worth keeping a notion of this concepts as even as game designers we can contribute to make a game successfully. 

Clash of Clans - review

It was probably around 6 months ago that I started playing Clash on Clans on both my iphone and ipad. At first it was just because of influence of friends who had it that I downloaded it and also because the clay-like models of the barbarians of the cover looked really cool. 

Supercell is the game company responsible for this strategy game for iOS that is recently been on of the top grossing apps in over 122 countries. 

When I first started I found it quite addictive  but since it's a game in which you either wait for things to be build or you invest real money to get things done quicker, I opted for the hard mode way: patience. 

I slowly started to make my way around building my base with as much defence as possible at the same time as gathering resources and raiding other players. 

It was good fun comparing villages with other friends and joining forces in Clans with people all over the world. It took me a couple of months to start losing a bit of interest on it, and it was mainly because things where taking a couple of day to build and every time I logged in my village has been raided by  some high level player, leaving me completely destroyed (and with a 16 hour protection shield, meaning that no one can attack you but you can't attack). I kept saying that I was going to quit the game but I think I was already to immerse in the game to just leave it like that. Still up to date that I wait for even 5 day to get constructions completed but still checking it at least once a day. 

The game itself it's not bad, the problem is when you confront with top players while I consider myself just a casual one. While doing my research about this game I came across a very interesting topic about whale player who spend fortunes on this kind of free-to-play games by buying upgrades and shortcuts. The online magazine Wired wrote an interesting article about this topic and in relation to this game that is worth looking at if you thing you that spending £1.99 is nearly a sin.

The strategy that involve in the game is minimum when you actually think about it and the advertised multiplayer mode is nothing but attacking a computer while the other player is offline (you can't attack other villages while the player is online).

I must admit that I have been tempted to spend money on this and other apps just to make up for my time, but then again I can't help but having this feeling of cheating by doing so, and it also kind of misses the point from my perspective.
If you're looking for an incredibly addictive game, please try Clash of Clans but don't you dare to attack my village.

Stylised textures

So the "attractive" part of my responsive project was meant to be texturing; I had intended to have a simple and low poly environment that could potentially be used in a 2D camera as a sidescrolling with having an extra 3D/free camera angle when it came to exploring and item searching.

The hanging sign is the fist object that I completely finished:

This is just a screen capture, but I worked on the painted texture, a specular map to give it a shiny texture where needed and a normal map for the bumps.

The chains where quite tricky to get them look like actual geometry when they're just two plains, but I thing that by exagerating their normal map it worked out quite well.

For the normal maps I used Quixel's software called nDo2. It works as a plug in for photoshop and it's pretty easy to use. The idea is that once you have a texture you can convert it into normal maps by the click of a button, instead of going all the way of having a low and high poly mesh and bake it. Probably it's not as precise and it does have better results when you work with photographic textures rather than hand painted ones, but it sure makes life a lot easier, specially with features like live 3d preview, live sculpting, presets and a good panel control to adjust all levels of the normal map.

I'm aware that it can make specular , height, diffuse and other maps, but at least in specular maps I think I prefer to work on them on my own. I found this video on youtube that can show you an understanding and importance of a good specular map. It does come a lot harder when you are working with hand painted assets as you have to create everything from scratch. 

I've also been working on other assets like this fountain below. My main problem at the moment is the time put a dedicated amount of time on each asset as it drains a lot of time by doing so. I thought for my submission I could just focus on having as many assets as possible but with good finishing quality rather than having many unfinished. I'll aim to have a house finish, but I can't certainly assure this at this point.

Let's get down to business...

...to defeat the Huns ♫

So in all the commotion about having two deadlines with a space of 24 hours between them, I couldn't stop thinking about the lack of response I've had from the companies I've applied for. I try to think that is part of my weak portfolio or probably just not the time to apply (recession?) .

Either way I couldn't resist to rant my frustrations out to Anabeth and she came up with an extra idea to help my situation: Game Republic's Student Showcase!

Winning the competition for the logo granted me an entrance to the even this 30th of May at College. This only means that I'll have a chance to directly talk to people from the industry and more than offer the to reply to me in person (I won't do that), but the idea of having a chance of shaking some hands and maybe make some contacts does sound like a more mature approach to my situation. 

Also I was suggested something that I have been meaning to do since the beginning of the year but that I have been postponing: Print some business cards. 

I only gave myself a couple of hours to sort this out as I didn't wanted to waste my valuable time for my submission  but because of printing times, I just couldn't leave it any longer. So here's the design: 

Back and front..nothing special, nothing new, but it'll do the job for my first set. Had to had green somewhere and also wanted to add a QR code as a link to my website. I'll probably put more effort on the design for future printings, but for now I just want them to be delivered on time. 

I can feel the professionalism building up...

Defining yourself = stronger portfolio

In my desperation of not losing what I've built so far in my life, on integrating with the professional environment and trying to keep up with the strong suggestions at uni I've been applying myself to build up and image, get a portfolio sorted and applied for job in the area. So far, nothing has come up...

It can be quite stressing feeling "deadlines" coming up and the pressure of achieving things that isn't   necessarily is in your power to change can only lead to desperation.

In this time is when I start judging and analysing my work and my image as an 2d/3d artist and only the same question pops up in my mind: What do I want to focus on? 

Looking over and over to my website/portfolio I can't help to not understand what is it that I'm looking for on the industry; no wonder why I can't find a job. The idea of me being confortable with working on photoshop is only because I've been using it fo quite a few years now, but it doesn't mean I'm any good anyway. My 3D portfolio is incredibly weak at the moment and it's only because most of my work so far is not something I'm proud of. Animation is not something I've had a chance to fully give it a go so that department is even further remote for me to even mention. 

After analysing my self I realise that all this insecurities about myself are the ones that at the moment are stoping myself from promoting my Facebook fanpage, my website and artistic blogs that I've open yet haven't touch. I'm doing my best at the moment to stay on float with things, as luckily I feel like I have the support of the people around me and that only makes me say that after finishing this deadlines I'll do my best to polish my work, find myself a place in the industry or at least manage to set my mind in a more specific direction. 

For this, I'm strongly planning on basing my dissertation on 3D sculpting  a topic that seems very appealing to me as it can work for illustration as well as use it for the most recent videogame industry. Hopefully I'll get my head around Zbrush over the summer and be able to have a decent level to deliver a good final mayor project. 

A Kingdom of Transmedia

Warning:  Yes, this is another blog post about Kingdom Hearts.

People that know me closely know about my massive affection towards the Kingdom Hearts franchise. I has everything I like in one video game  Disney, Final Fantasy, RPG, action, decent storyline, great graphics, amazing game-play  great soundtrack and more. I thought it could be great to talk about the transmedia journey so far, but I'm not talking about the adaptations of the same story line to a manga (comic) way or the countless products of merchandise or even the cross-platform remakes of some it's entries. What I want to talk about is the transmedia done along the story itself. 

I feel like I can't go around naming characters as potentially someone reading this might not follow just by what I'm saying. If anything, I found this "simplified" version of the story so far. (In case anyone is interested). 

The interesting part in this case is the arrange in which stories/entries have come out and how they are intertwine between each other. This table below shows when the games came out and for which platform they did:

While KH and KHII are considered the main storyline as they're made for consoles, all the other entries that have been made for portable devices have been used as a link. The story has a lot of characters, most of them are linked to each other in complicated ways, and this is where they used game entries to explain reasons how the character got there in the first place and why it behaves the way he/she does. 

On the time line below you can have an idea of how stories are used as links and some even happen at the same time as others. 

This certainly doesn't affect the main storyline; if anything I find it fascinating how they manage to fill those story gaps and even if Square Enix is doing it just for the sake of feeding the fandom or because the story was originally intended to expand this much I just can't help to want to play them all and know everything about it. 

I have to admit that I bought my PS2 quite late, but only for the reason of playing this game. After this I became quite affective to Sony's consoles, and I felt again by buying a 3DS to play KH3D; all I'm trying to say is that even when transmedia it's not intended to capture all the market possible in a greedy way, I have to admit I've been a victim of this commercial strategy. (and I love it!...please give me more) 

Rose Ellen artwork

My daily life involves a substantial dose of tumblr just to keep up on the top 'news' of the people I'm following which are mainly artists. While skipping through my likes I notices that I pretty much have liked every single recent update of Rose Ellen. Now because of my recent idea about working on 3D sculpting for my dissertation, I thought about making a post about her work. There wasn't much information about her on her tumblr page, so I sent her a private message. 

I was surprise to get a quick reply from her, as previously some people haven't done in the past -_-u 

We shared a few emails and it turns out she's a really nice 21-year-old girl that studies college in Detroit, US.

She told me that she's only been using Maya about a year and a half ago, and that's when guiltiness stroked as I think I've been using it for the same amount of time and I'm nowhere near her quality.

The 'Harpy' (work below) was her project for the Creature sculpting assignment that lasted only two weeks. Apparently most people chose to go for ugly monsters, but she wanted to do something to put on her demo reel. Over all, her head sculpts usually take around 10 hours, depending on how realistic she wants to go. 

http://rosecole.tumblr.com/

Not only she's an amazing person, but she's talented; what else could anyone ask? Also very glad to hear that she got an undergraduate program internship at Pixar starting this June! I wish her the best luck and please have a look at her gallery as I only put a small taste of her talent. 

User interface studies

One of the jobs I see more often being advertised is for a UI (User Interface) designer. So far I thought that the idea of creating a UI was more related to a graphic designer and that it didn't have much impact on the game overall.

Astronautsally's character has her health and mana bar in her stocking.

After trying to get my head around some basics I came across several blogs and writings explaining how it has been implemented, how delicate it is and versatile this can become. Understanding this, I understood the massive importance this has in creating a game as it is the direct interaction between the game narrative and the user itself.
Gamasutra has two really good articles about it explaining the types and funtions of the UI interface:
Game UI Discoveries: What players want and The User Interface Continuum: A study of player preference.

We see user interfaces everywhere; we interact daily with them that we probably take them for granted. In this case not only for videogames but it is clear that it can be implemented in many other aspects like film and animation with the mere purpose of defining the aesthetic style, just like they did in Evangelion 3.0.

The understanding of how the UI works it's the easy part I would say; it's relatively easy to adapt the fonts and the look to something that fits the style of interaction. The difficult part comes when it come to the user's respond; how can you make sure that the user will find the interface intuitive, attractive and efficient? -- by understanding your target audience.
This could be a whole blog itself and it's probably too complicated, but I found this youtube video that might help to synthesize the whole topic: