Hair styling in 3D

Trying to get at least the head finished for one of the poster critiques, I started thinking about making the hair. For a ease of mind I did a quick one on Zbrush to avoid looking at a bold head all the time. It was quick and frankly... awful, but at least I had an idea of what I was going for.
I decided to go for a more final fantasy look by making planes with textures and transparency rather than going for geometrical hair. This last one was used in games like kingdom hearts for the main character (Sora ) on game play, but not for the cinematic

Technically speaking I wanted to get an end result like this:

At this point in time the texture still a work in progress as I want to give it requires a lot of attention and I'm currently battling between engines (Unity and UDK).
So far I've created a few simple brushes in photoshop that will help me get hair lock-like strokes

Something that I never really considered much is the fact that my character's got two colours of hair (of course) the top part is blond and the bottom one is dark brown. This reduced my texture space quite significantly but hopefully I'll be able to achieve good quality of with specualr maps.

UV layout

When it came to the part of UV mapping I did the simple shapes like the eye easily in maya; the inside of the mouth was more difficult, but also managed to do it.
It was when I did some attempts of unwrapping the face where I realised that I needed help form a different software.
In the multiple tutorials I looked at, some people mentioned UVLayout as a good tool for unwrapping, so I decided to give it a go. Just like in Zbrush, the interface was pretty unique but luckily for me, a simple 10 min tutorials gave me the basics to start exploring on my own.
Once you get the hang of how to select edges, create seams and flat the UV projections everything else becomes quite intuitive.
One of the main features I really liked about it, is that it not only give you an indication with pattern textures of where the stretching or squashing is happening, but it also gives you an indication colour based where green is good, red is overly stretched and blue is squashed. This becomes really handy for when you want to fix thing manually as you can tell where to move the UVs and if your movement has affected another texture face.
Probably with a bit more of practice I can manage to get the hang of it more efficiently, but for this matter I'm quite happy with the results and highly recommend people to use it :)

Extended Essay update - Poster

As part of the last group update about our process in the extended essay (aka Dissertation) we had to make a poster. I was hoping to have the head completely finished by then, but I never took in consideration the amount of time it would take me to put hair.
Here is my final poster (warning: big file)

I didn't get much feedback about my project or the process it self; mainly they where ideas of how to present future posters (?) and to guide the reader with arrows to establish that it is a pipeline and make it easier to understand which steps follows which.

Clothing design - collaboration with Sarah

From all the ideas I had at first for the character I couldn't come to a finalised design for the clothing. I knew I wanted to get a look a generic RPG which usually implies some sort of fashionable combat outfit. Materials like metal and leather are frequently used, and wanted to keep it simple for potential extra details.
I made some initial ideas, but I wasn't happy with the over all feeling.

Sarah Hatton was kind enough to help me out and she drew 3 outfit options for me. At the end I chose to merge them into one choosing a my favourite features from some of them.

The shape is meant to be simple and light on movement as the character wields twin swords and agility is his main feature. At this point I haven't design those swords but hopefully I'll get down to do them soon. 

Also I'm hoping modelling clothing on zbrush is not overly complicated so that I can add extra details.
This images below are some of the ideas for the fabrics that I had in mind; the idea of having a medieval-like style with leather and baggy areas of cloth.

Also for the legs I couldn't resist to add some features from a series I'm watching called Attack on Titan or Shingeki no Kyojin in Japanese (進撃の巨人). The series itself takes part in an alternative reality where humans are evolving in a different way, and despite having some sort of rudimentary technology it seems force to be stuck in some medieval stage due to Giants attacking all the time. Something they wear to attack this giants is a weapon called 3D gear and it is attached to the body through a series of straps all over the body. I used something similar (in smaller scale) to attach the back compartment of the twin blades. 

Hai Phan - Freelance Character Artist

Hai Phan is an artist I came across when I was looking for tutorials that involved the entire pipeline. It was in CGCircuit that I found his videos and the fact that he wasn't going for a realistic approach but rather a really nice stylised that made it so appealing. 

His tutorials were helpful as he didn't approached a software specific but rather explaining the general concept and industry standards. 

Hella is the character he mainly worked with and it was amazing to see most of the process on the making. 

His portfolio is fascinating and quite extensive (have a look!); the amount of different characters and creatures that he creates varies a lot yet you can still sense a style within. 

Not only his videos were really accessible but it was really easy to get in contact with him and he was kind enough to answer some questions that will be useful as primary research for my dissertation. 

got a job!

I GOT A JOB!!!!!

as a game artist

that is all

Tutorials, tutorials ... endless tutorials

Knowing that my dissertation is a blend of a tutorial and a case study, I had no option but to learn the pipeline as much as I could in a short period of time. At this point I got Photoshop or any other drawing softwares and techniques tamed for the purpose (maybe not to the standards I want, but they'll do the trick).
Maya as a 'put assets together' software I'm pretty sure I'll manage at my level. The problem was Zbrush; I've tried this software before and the interface scared me away. now that I tried to go back to it I decided to target it from 0. Started looking at tutorials on digital tutors and opted for taking the basic Introduction to Zbrush, a 6 hr tutorial to teach you the basics an also introduce you to some of the useful tools and functions that Zbrush has. After finishing those I started to look at some other such as Pipeline Integration with Maya and Zbrush and Creating Game Characters with Maya and Zbrush but the more I spend looking at this tutorials the less I felt I was practising. Looking at the 169 tutorials that Digital Tutors have ONLY for Zbrush was a bit overwhelming and thinking that I had CGCircuit tutorials to watch as well (recommend this one in particular) and other 13 GB of other random tutorials I found online. I felt for a second there was not enough time to watch them all even if I had double the amount of time to do it!
The amount of tutorials in Magazines and in some dissertations I was reading felt like it was just an endless and even found myself watching tutorials while having dinner :-/
For a while it was all I could think of until I broke down and decided to just crack on with work. I still ended up going back to some tutorials because I knew I could do things I just forgot how. I felt like I didn't target this process the best way; I should have been working along with the tutorials and pause them when needed, but at the time I thought they were going way to fast for me to catch up their speed (specially when they come with an amazing model and say 'I did this 3 months ago'...)
Hopefully this won't affect much of my practical work, but I am proud of managing to stand at least 26 hours of pure tutorials without perishing.

(yes...this is how horrifying it looks....and this are just from ONE website! )

TIGA GameHack 2013

Not long ago I got in contacted by Steve Cusi whose a graduated a generation above mine and who I met on a couple of Game Republic socials. He asked me if I wanted to be part of a team leaded by Nellyvision and support him on TIGA's GameHack.
This game jam was a 24 hour event in which you had to deliver a playable product under certain categories each with different requirements. One member of the team is going to china soon, and because I was the only new member of the team it seamed that they already had a concept in mind; a platform game that aims to teach Chinese. This was certainly not easy as it is a complicated language, but we were determined to not include any English at all. Just like we felt when we where thinking on how to target this subject, we decided to go for a foreign little girl who gets lost in the streets of China. She doesn't understand the language or characters so her imagination is the only thing that will get her around.

An so we arrived on Saturday morning having a small reception followed by the introduction of the different categories. I was surprised of the amount of people that where there! more than 35 teams where just in the same building from 3 to 6 members each, and also this jam was running along at the same time at the Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. It was pretty scary to hear that most teams are quite recurrent to this kind of events and that some previous winners were among the teams.

 (yei with my super blurry pictures)
The official jam started at 11 am finishing at 11 am on Sunday. It felt pretty hardcore, but at the same time I was impressed of how well organized it was; there was more food that you could eat, tea and coffee at all times and even resting areas for those who needed a power nap. At first I didn't know what to expect as this was my first event, so I brought with me heavy clothing, sleeping bag and provisional snacks; my idea was of a big cold warehouse. Lovely surprise to find that Pinewood Studios provided us with a lovely place to work! (it was like a big mansion!)
Nisha Valand, who organised the whole event was there the whole time and incredibly supportive by having everything we needed and cheering people up.

My part on the role of making assets ended up creating and animating Envy, the main character. Pretty shocked to think that the animation had to be hand drawn and that I had to do it as quick as possible to start helping with the rest of the assets. The concept started as a boy, but taking in count that there weren't many girls at the competition we decided to go for a girl. colour scheme and composition might not have been the best but there was a lot of pressure on finishing it quickly.

I had to tile the animation in a way that suited the coders, something I've seen before but never done myself. Another factor was having to work with very specific resolutions all along.

After finishing the character (say it was finished, but it had so much to be polished!) I went to create as many assets as possible. Some of them where important part of the game play, so the had to have a small animation, some others where just used as platforms.

It certainly was a whole different experience to see how much you can do in such a short period of time. The game had some complicated mechanics as it was thought to be used on touch devices, such as drawing chinese characters on the screen on the right order to pass the level. It was far from finishing, but we managed to get something playable for the three minute demostration at the end. 

Seeing the work of everyone else made me realised many  things about where I was standing and what I need to achieve. Certainly something to look in the future and improve in time. There where many great games out there, certainly some that might as well be already a game on it's own. It was probably the lack of sleep that put me in a negative mood by thinking that we weren't cut out for any nominations, but oh! suprice to hear the team's name being awarded for the Most Awesome Game! 

Couldn't believe it! it was awkward to stand in front of people and get a picture and stuff. To this point I can't even remember what we won, but it was sure enough to know that our efforts where so worth it! (a day of motion capture ...somewhere...or something like that).

We came back home straight away and by the time I went to bed it was nearly 40 hours without sleep...certainly not something I would to every weekend, but will definitely make sure to go at least once a year! :D 

The coders wanted to tweak the game a bit more so hopefully I'll have a web version to post soon ;) 

Thanks Nellyvision for the oportunity!!!