Mortal Engines film adaptation??

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/3184223/Peter-Jackson-to-adapt-sci-fi-series#share

Oooohhhh

Old, but oh god I really want to hate this game, Squeenix fan-pandering should have stopped working by now, I'm 20 years old jesus christ. I really want to buy this soap opera and complain about everything all the way through but secretly enjoy it. It looks so wonderfully badddddd! Also Sarah looks like one of the worst characters ever and I bet Lightning turns out to be one of those emotionless 'badass' female characters who no one can relate to, although yay female ff hero. I know they'll mess it up but I'll still buy out of curiosity. And maybe for Snow. don't judge meeee

My friend showed me this video last year and I thought it'd be super relevant to post considering the kind of thing that's been discussed lately, time management etc. It's pretty long, but the advice is really useful if you take it on board and have a lot of willpower. The part about how to deal with people who demand loads of your time when you're working was really interesting, though I personally don't feel grown-up enough to relate to things like coworkers and that type of thing, I'll definitely watch this video again before I go into that kind of environment.

Well I saw this lecture for the first time at the start of the summer break last year, and it really motivated me to work on 3d pretty much most days, and only give myself certain rewards like watching tv or playing games in the evening. At uni its been really hard to do that, especially living in a really social place I always feel very awkward about including people into the working schedule, I wouldn't want anyone to have to work around what I'm doing and for me to only talk to them when I'm not working because it feels rude to me and kind of selfish, even though its just self-discipline. There's so much persuasion not to work, so much more than there is at home considering uni is supposed to be a learning environment. Only when a deadline is approaching can I really work, because that's when everyone else is working. Though, I think I've improved a lot from year 1, I'm really motivated to get better at 3d now I have my foot in the door, it doesn't seem so impossible now that I have some clue what I'm doing. Last year I couldn't do anything, using Max isn't as much of a struggle anymore, the only bit I struggle with now is unwrapping, and that's because I have to think of the best way to do it rather than what buttons to press. Its more like certain skills I need to improve on, modelling and texturing individually rather than how to use Max as a whole.

Here's some stuff I made recently.



Bad time management with the self portrait means I haven't finished texturing yet. Took too many trips away from Leicester and wasted a lot of time, though I'm happy with how its progressing. 4th character including the man we made in the first year, I still have many many more shit character models to make before I start to get good!

Also I fixed the cataract eyes on my character, Del showed me how to do a specular properly haha. Eyes aren't really that glassy. Also the normal maps are making a weird seam down the face from some angles bahhh. Diffuse/normals/specular in this render, no lights in the scene.

Posting some of my work from year 2 so far...

My painting seems to be getting less realistic this year. Probably because I'm referencing from photos less and I feel bored of trying to do photo realistic digital painting. Its more fun to play around in Painter/photoshop cos it takes hardly any time at all to make something decent compared to using real paint, so I think you can take more time to experiment with things you usually wouldn't think to do. People can get good at digital painting very fast, just look at us second years. Everyone's really improved! Though I don't think any of this stuff is better or worse than what I did last year, I'm kind of at a loss...Though I do like my sketching better this year. Basically I learned that I want to draw/paint nature, all the time, thank god Chris makes us diversify or I wouldn't draw anything but rocks and figures.

The Masters project was fun. I wanted to do a Jenny Saville study straight away, because she's my favourite contemporary painter as of around 3 years, and my background is pretty much all modern stuff so I tried to teach myself a bit about art history. So, I like Saville's work because the subject matter of beauty/body image speaks to me and she's a little bit controversial. The technique of painting with oil on a large scale interested me because I tried it a couple of years ago, and the perspective of it really messes with your head even though my painting was only a fraction of the size of what she does, so I admire her to be able to do that

While trying to reproduce the painting 'Plan' I noticed that even though her work has a hyper-real look, the large brush strokes still only suggest detail rather than explicitly paint every skin pore and vein etc. It didn't take that long to do a relatively accurate reproduction in painter using a pastel brush, as it responds better to large strokes than oil which lags terribly. I really dislike Painter sometimes for that reason and I always go into Photoshop at the end.
So after looking what everyone else had done, I thought I hadn't really understood the task because Jenny Saville still uses a modern technique even though her work has a classical look. I wanted to paint a male nude so I was looking for a good subject and found a Neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David who's painted a scene of Hector's death from the Iliad. It reminded me of this scene where Hector's family see his body after Priam gets it back from Achilles and he still looks all fresh and beautiful and alive even though his body's been desecrated. I liked how Hector was basically one of the manliest and heroic characters but in this painting he kind of looks boyish and like he was a vulnerable person when living, so I imagine this is the kind of image the Gods gave his body at funeral. This painting took many more hours to reproduce than my other attempt, using the same tools in Painter. The skin has a glowing quality which is made by layering paint over and over getting lighter. There's no quick way to get the effect. When you zoom in mine looks so crude in comparison to the original even though I spent a lot of time on it. Digital painting seems totally contradictory to the old techniques because its so fast, and correcting mistakes is so easy. When painting this I started to paint over mistakes rather than erase them to get in the right frame of mind. Just building up the colours on the arm to show the muscle was a slow and tedious process and takes a lot of time to get the reward where yours starts to look a bit like the original painting. Whereas doing the Jenny Saville started to take shape within the first 10 minutes. It was really interesting to see how the work of the old masters can be replicated relatively quickly in a digital medium, these are techniques I want to apply in figurative art, in life drawing or painting texture.

For 3d work, I feel like I can actually make what I want in 3d though its still a struggle every time. Last year I couldn't do anything, but I practised over summer and made a character and vehicle which was really fun. Probably because I was making something I'd designed which I'm interested in, i.e. fashion and kitschy stuff like gypsy caravans. My aim over summer was to feel comfortable in Max by the end of it and start using zbrush/surface detail maps which I also did. By the end of year 2 I want to know what to specialize in, so I guess I should just make everything and see what I'm best at. Mortal Engines projects are really fun, but I'm rushing them because I'm so slow which makes it not as enjoyable because I don't have time to do what I want. Making the environment of the natural history museum was fun at first because it was something I'd chosen, but when I realised the scale of it, it wasn't as fun anymore and got really frustrating...Still need to finish it. The vehicle is harder because I've no real reference for it, but I wanted to see if I could make something purely from imagination and a few basic references. Have no idea if it will look good or not.

Mameshiba~

Oh god so cute I almost had a heart attack. I love this Bean Dog. Watch Mameshiba 10 for Lol Engrish and casual Japanese racism.

Generic 3d female body

Made a mannequin-esque female, so I can use it as a guide for part of my summer project. At first it ended up too mannequin-like, so I made the thighs and waist a little weightier so they looked less stupid.



3972 tris including head. Is...This semi-decent? Its like 95% quads, a couple of triangles here and there. I think the shoulders/upper arms are the most problematic. Any crit would be treasured forever, as usual.

Blogs – Did slightly worse than I thought, I need to update regularly to improve my grade, I think. Need to improve self-discipline and time management, I’m terrible at this.
Game production – Happy with my result, but want it to be on a similar level to VD by end of next year. I’ve learnt a lot in the last few months, I don’t feel as desperately helpless as before whenever I open Max, but my 3d stuff has zero finesse. I’m still learning to build things.
VD – Happy with it, but needs much much more drawing. Should I upload work here still, or does it get tiresome to see it?


Got to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy this Saturday with only an hour to see everything before the gallery shut~ I thought we could rush round, but it was so good we were pretty much escorted out of the Weston room by gallery staff. I think the theme was ‘making space’ this year – loved Anselm Kiefer’s Tryptique, it’s beautiful. I never get tired of natural materials.

Reminded me of this from the Turner Prize a few years ago, [bad photo of it] my favourite but it didn’t win. Shed Boat Shed did, lol. Also, one of Georg Baselitz’s amazing upside down paintings was there, but didn't have time to take photos. Lots of good typography stuff too, loved Michael Craig Martin ‘DESIRE’, though I can’t find a pic of that one he’s done things for the DLR, wow!

Also, this Liz Collini drawing amused me with all the little mathematical annotations.

The architecture room was interesting, but had to run round it to get a look at everything. Loved the miniature landscape designs and models, it reminded me of the 3d work at art college which I was always pretty envious of. I can’t build anything more graceful than oxo boxes tacked together.

Did not get chance to see the video room, which I believe is a new thing for this show. I feel bad, I always leave video/performance ‘til last/low priority, though the last piece I saw were a set of documentary-style things by Darren Almond which set me and everyone else off bawwwing in the middle of the Tate.
The show was lots of fun, but impossible to do in one afternoon, let alone an hour. Next year I want to go to the Biennale~