MDU115.2 Creative Brief

Pre-production;
The pre-production phase consists of the storyboard for the chest and the image on what the chest looks like. For the storyboard we were already given it as part of the creative assets folder, instead of having to make it ourselves (as shown in the image below).

Pirate gold animation (n.d.).

The chest however was given free choice on what kind we were allowed to make, this allowed other students a larger range of freedom and ability to make chests. I decided to choose a bit of a strange chest to make which is not round in nature but instead quite angled with many of its faces as shown in the image below.

Vintage Caribbean Pirate Chest (n.d.).

 Modeling;

The initial work started in week four of our trimester, due to trying to find a chest that I liked and several times 3dsmax at home corrupted my save files. This phase was probably in my own opinion the most fun and kind of slightly annoying, in regards of accidentally sabotaging myself in trying to make the chest as clear as the model shown above, where there is no metal supporting part of the wooden faces on the lid section of the chest itself. I also forgot how to add a face to the inside of the chest, thus resulting in well quite a few problems that I have no idea on how to fix. I have edited the chest several times in making it more and more to it's reference image, alas I was keeping the bolts and lock out of it thinking it would be easy to texture in. The following images are the initial screenshots taken at the end stage of modeling the chest.

Front view (n.d.).

 Top left looking down view (n.d.).

 

UV Mapping;

Strangely enough I thought I would end up hating UV mapping, however turns out I don't actually have doing a UV Unwrap on the model, it's just very time consuming. The reason why I say it's time consuming is because a quick UV Unwrap done by the program itself is not always the best, nor is clicking the button for flat face objects the best either, I ended up having to stitch several faces together on the inside of the chest to make sure that the checkered UV overlay was looking nicely.

I've added several images to show UV Unwrapping on and of the model, shown below.

Bottom UV Unwrap (n.d.).

UV Unwrap bottom parts (n.d.).

UV Unwrap lid pieces (n.d.).

Relaxing top of the lid (n.d.).

Finished combined UV Unwrap (n.d.).

In the second last image you can see an example of a material wrap around of the top of the lid part of the chest, and that I had to end up clicking relax several times, to get it to have that shape. Time consuming part was finding each vertex and then straightening them making them perfectly straight, in the end however I ended up breaking off all the side faces on all the metal parts of the chest and putting them back together in the UV Unwrap trying to take advantage of the space as seen in the last image of the screenshots of the UV Unwraps.

Texturing;
The texturing phase was a very frustrating and time consuming phase for me, in essence that the assignment was based on making sure the chest fits the cartoon like aspects of the cartoon board game + assets that are provided to make the animation. The problem I ran into the most and that I have been unable to fix for I do not know how it is caused, is the metal colour bleeding (going onto) the wooden areas of the chest. Another problem was using photo graphs of wood and trying to blend them in and using filters or various tools in Photoshop trying to make them blend in or giving them a artistic and giving a cartoon like style/ feeling to them. I have tried several different wood textures, only to find that once I load them onto my model they look very stretched and strange hues appearing on the wood (I do believe this was due to using the sharpen tool and film grain tool in Photoshop). Eventually I found a wood texture that was big enough, and quickly applied it to the normal wood layer by changing the photo wood layer to Multiply, after that I decided to try and apply a water colour filter to the wood, and I have to say it gives it more drawn/ artistic style to it, and I am happy with the way that has come out, sadly I do not have a texture for the metal itself.

I have attempted to make the bolts on the chest myself by drawing them, but due to Photoshop working differently compared to Paint Tool Sai (SAI) and Manga Studio 5.0 (MS5 or CSP) I have not been able to make a drawn like metallic shading or drawn bolts/ rivets on the chest. The end result of having it done in Photoshop and then looking at it in 3dsmax was that... it looked like viewing objects in games in the lowest setting possible (absolute lack of detail), hence I got rid of that.

Several images have been provided to show the chest in its current state before I ran out of time completely and had to focus on the last assignment.

seamless dark wood texture (n.d.).

Photoshop texture beginning (n.d.).

Chest partially textured (n.d.).

In the end the chest doesn't look exactly the same compared to the reference image, especially when you take in the texture colours and the reason behind that was that the metal and the wood on the reference image is the exact same colour, and that would end up being hard to distinguish between, so I settled for a more lighter grey metal and light brown.

Sadly I have to skip all of the other phases of the creative pipeline such as; Rigging, Animation, Scene Assembly, Lighting, Render, Composition and Video editing. The reasons why is because I simply didn't get far enough for these stages, due to being plague with computer memory problems which causes my 3dsmax to freeze with every click (also crashing and corrupting files) and due to medication changes and adjustments during the worst time possible assignments wise.

References;

Pirate gold [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved from https://moodle-sae-au.axis.navitas.com/pluginfile.php/172571/mod_resource/content/1/MDU115.2_3D_Production_Pipeline_Creative_Brief.pdf

Seamless dark wood texture [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved from https://au.pinterest.com/pin/294774738084261997/

Vintage Caribbean pirate chest [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.wayfair.com/Quickway-Imports-Vintage-Caribbean-Pirate-Chest-QI003078-QWI1140.html

Week 11: Critics, Reviewers & Your Art

In week eleven the lecture covered critics and reviewers regarding your art and understanding how to respond to criticism as well as how it is able to help you. 

To start off we need to understand criticism, so what exactly is criticism and what is good criticism and what is bad criticism? There are two definitions of criticism in the English oxford dictionary, however I will only use one and also state the origin. The oxford dictionary (n.d.) defines criticism as “the analysis and judgement of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work: ‘Alternative methods of criticism supported by well-developed literary theories’”. The word criticism originates from early 17^th century from the word ‘critic’ or Latin ‘criticus’ + -ism.

What sets good criticism apart from bad criticism?

Good criticism is essentially positive personal feedback from people on your work/ artwork as well as outlining areas that require more attention/ knowledge and detail. Examples for good criticism on artworks would be the placement of objects as well as size difference of objects or body parts in the artwork would help making it looks and feel better, basically say a person in it is walking depending on distance if he’s in the background and far away he should appear small, normal size if he’s just in the middle of the background (of course it depends on angle and distance it was all based on), and if the person is at the front in the image he would be foreshadowing meaning he would be bigger, there is also more detail on the person’s clothing/ face, unless they are that close and the artist doesn’t want to focus on them they can instead using digital software blur the foreshadowing part of the drawing. People can point this out nicely giving constructive feedback, which means that it is good criticism, sometimes though bias opinions will get in the way or even a language barrier can leave this a bit muddled.

Bad criticism is essentially when someone is so bias of what they want to see from your artwork, thus they will either try to annoy you as much as possible by insulting you personally, your artwork and in some cases even the people that follow you, of course this also depends if you are drawing a certain genre of art and if you are part of a ‘fandom’ (being a fan of someone/ something). The most bad critique that I have seen are definitely comments of “this is bad” or “what is going on with this?!” there is definitely a lot of that on the website Deviant Art which is heavily known for its negativity, of course there are a lot more bad examples of bad criticism, however all you need to know is that there is basically no explanation they give nor do they point out anything helpful, but if they do, they do so by using excessive swearing.

Of course a lot of these opinions on what good and bad criticism is, is viewed from my own perspective, thus it does end up being bias to a certain degree. I can definitely relate to having to take criticism as it is an important and sometimes annoying part of your career that does end up helping and improving yourself and your artwork.

Now onto responding to criticism, obviously there is the right way and the extremely wrong way to react to criticism.

The correct way to respond to criticism is by obviously being nice to the person and not responding negatively in any way possible, it is of course hard to do that as one negative comment will overshadow a lot of the good comments. Essentially you have to somewhat detach yourself from it all, at least emotionally, you can ask the critic to explain specifically why they pointed out several things in case they have stated their reason for doing so. Another way of dealing with good criticism is going after the problems that have been pointed out (different if you work in restaurants as you also have to ensure satisfaction in case they might come back and also explain factually what caused their discomforts food wise etc.) How can you respond incorrectly to criticism? It’s really simple, run off your emotions, it’s basically you getting extremely worked up and getting angry/ annoyed at the person or people that critique your work, thus referring to attacking them personally verbally, there are many cases of this coming from both the critic and the person being criticised.  

So what exactly happens when you handle criticism the incorrect way?

It’s simple, you end up creating a massively negative view on yourself and will be regarded as someone whom is short tempered and can’t handle criticism, and this will result in people taking a jab at you purely for entertainment purposes or to see how you will handle the situation. Of course, still responding negatively only makes you dig your grave deeper.

In my own opinion it is extremely important on how you handle criticism, especially if it’s bad criticism, as it leads to an extremely bad image and can definitely destroy the good image you have been building up. Good criticism is just as important as bad criticism, purely because with good feedback you are able to focus on the areas where you didn’t add detail or improve yourself on areas where you have failed, for example perspective, background, vegetation, buildings, anatomy, lighting, colours and colour balancing. My only advice is that you should not be afraid to seek advice or criticism as it can definitely help you in both the short and long run.

References:

SAE Creative Industry. (2015). Week 11: Critics, Reviewers & Your Art. Retrieved from https://medium.com/self-directed-practitioners/week-4-critics-reviewers-and-journalists-8bd8666d2f3#.jo38df2f6

Trench, R, C. & Coleridge, H. (1884). Oxford English Dictionary. In Murray. J (Ed.), Oxford English Dictionary Vol. 2 (volume range C). Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Week 3: Social Media & Your Career

In week three we had a lecture on social media and your career, which talked about networking, promoting yourself and using social media to accomplish the two, the lecture also shed some light on how to be a bit more “professional” online.

Using the lecture as source material there are many strategies for promoting yourself online as well as asking yourself several questions. These questions range from what objectives you are trying to fulfil, what your limits on resources are (time and money), what you will post and how you will monitor and measure results. Another important question to ask after answering the previous questions is which social media to use for your networking, will it be YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest or other websites that are blogging websites for example Tumblr? 

You might be asking yourself what exactly are the pros and cons of some of these websites?

Taking LinkedIn as the first example, the pro(s) for it is that it is a professional network designed for industry networking where your contacts indicate your affiliation and connects, where as your profile informs potential clients and employers of your skills, previous and current work. The con(s) of LinkedIn is that it isn’t designed for socialising, and is instead meant to build upon your current and possibly future networking of other industry professionals. In short LinkedIn is actually a very important part of your networking, for an example from statistics a large amount of business service providers and recruiters use LinkedIn as indicated in the diagram below.

What Social Media Platforms Are Best Suited For Your Business, 2014.

The pro(s) and con(s) of Facebook; the pro(s) of Facebook is definitely the heavy socialising as it is intended for that, the con(s) depends on your privacy settings (information people can see) and that it is very easy to pull someone’s name into the dirt (so to speak) by spreading rumors or people finding out about your past and specifically what you post can lead to a severely negative impact/ view point from your peers and employee/ potential employers/ clients.

The pro(s) and con(s) of YouTube; The number one pro of YouTube is that it is a website designed for uploading and sharing videos/ small video clips. The reason why this is a pro is because if you are a person in the creative industry, let’s say an animator or visual effects artist you upload a show reel (short showcase of your best work or previous work), this allows people and employers to view your work and what you are capable of. When it comes to other industry professionals is that they could possibly share the video/ show reel of yours and show other people by uploading it onto their own blog(s) or Facebook, which in turn helps boost your networking and social media. The con of YouTube is that it isn’t exactly community friendly, as in there is a high chance that someone will “troll” you and leave negative comments on your video(s).

Talking about how to be more professional online there is definitely a reason as to why you would want to be professional, and that the view point of other people. You might wonder why it matters what others think of me. It definitely matters, especially if you want to have a career or positive presence online, as this heavily helps you finding employment or clients. You might wonder as to why a negative view would be bad. For the negative I will use an example, and the example is a YouTube video called ‘This Is Phil Fish’ by Innuendo Studios (2014). The video talks about the concept/ image of Phil Fish and not actually personally about Phil Fish, it also talks about why you should not bad mouth other people, to be clear with what you are saying and not to be a narcissi as this impacts you negative, and that once someone becomes famous people will definitely talk (positively or negatively) more about you and react/ over react more especially if you are more famous than you deserve to be.

I myself do have a LinkedIn and the network I have on it is with previous students who have graduated and previous SAE employees, apart from that I do not advertise myself on Facebook, I like to keep that separate, nor do I have anything to show on YouTube. I do however upload artwork to various websites such as Pixiv and Tumblr. A good thing about Tumblr is that networking with other artists there and sharing their work definitely boosts your networking as they will sometimes share your work in return. I will speak from experience, it does feel quite nice to have people enjoy your work, as it fills you with a self-satisfaction and depending on you draw and compare it to other genres you can see which is more popular among other bloggers and people. It definitely helps to get a view on what other people like, essentially its comparing different topics/ genres in the market on what is currently popular before it dies down.

References:

Innuendo Studios. (2014, June 16). This is Phil Fish [Video Files]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w&feature=youtu.be

Patel, N. (2014). Retrieved from https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/09/05/what-social-media-platforms-are-best-suited-for-your-business/

SAE Creative Industry. (2015). Week 3: Social Media & Your Career. Retrieved from https://medium.com/self-directed-practitioners/week-6-social-media-and-your-career-21ec52b2b003#.sa47jp629

 

What Social Media Platforms Are Best Suited For Your Business [Image] (2014). Retrieved from https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/09/05/what-social-media-platforms-are-best-suited-for-your-business/