This Sunday just passed (June 19th if you are reading from the future!) I was lucky enough to be able to help host two workshops, 'From Pen to Pixel to Plastic and Silk', as part of this year's FabLearn Conference (which you can read more about here!).
The wonderful Bev Bush also hosted it, along with some great help from Charley Matthews and Chloe-Leigh Stott, so thank you! <3 Below are some pictures taken during the conference, which I'll talk through as we go along.
So we started off with a small demonstration from myself on how to use friendly plastic (which if you aren't familiar with are tiny plastic beads that 'melt' and become moldable in hot water). Nice and simple! Now onto the fun part...
Each person taking part in the workshops then made their own creatures out of the friendly plastic. It was so nice to see just how different and unique all of the creations were - not one person came up with the same thing!
With characters created, they then moved onto Bev's part of the workshop - making an actual board for these characters to play on! So everyone designed their own board...
And here's when the magic comes in. Once the boards were done, Bev then took them over to her printer (of the magic variety, of course) and printed them onto silk. So now everyone had their own character(s) and a lovely board to play them on which can then be tied up with a string and taken anywhere. How cool is that?
Here are some photos of the finished 'packages':
I had SO much fun helping out with the workshop and I cannot thank Bev enough for the opportunity (thank you again if you're reading this, Bev!). It was so nice to meet so many creative people from all over the world and to get to hear about all of the great things that they do.
Bev also wrote a blog post about the event which you can read here if you're interested!
I have a bit of a 3D modelling kick at the moment so I've created yet another little guy! I'm going to talk about the process that went into making him as I feel I learned a fair bit, so I apologise in advance if this gets a little bit lengthy!
First of all, here's a turntable of the finished model:
And as always, you can get a closer look at it via the Sketchfab link here!
I had a lot of fun making this little one, though as I said I did learn some things, so let's go through that.
First of all, his design is based on this character concept I created a week ago:
I aim to make my way through all 4 of the characters I designed, but I felt that this little one would be easiest to start with!
Now originally while creating the model I had two parts - one was his body, and the second part was his stem (which I had created with Maya's line & extrude tool combo). This worked okay at first, but after texturing him I noticed a pretty unsightly problem:
The area where I had stitched the two edges together weren't agreeing with one another for whatever reason, and so this very noticeable seam had appeared at their meeting point. His stem also looked darker than his body, despite them being painted the same colour.
Realising that I couldn't fix this without just starting over, I made the decision to remove his stem and just create it straight from the body without having to stitch anything together. This thankfully solved the problem with no further issues caused. :)
With this out of the way I continued to paint our new friend until he was finished and ready to face the world!
Now my next step for this little guy is to check that all is well in UE4, and if so, then I'll begin to animate him. I'm quite excited about that :) and will of course be posting updates as I go along.
Thank you for reading, I hope you have a lovely weekend!
It doesn't really have the same ring to it, but I wanted to keep a sense of uniform between the two posts. ;)
This little guy is the next character I've been working on:
His 3D model is the same size as the slug I showed in my previous blog post, though has different colouring (particularly on his shell) so that it's easier to tell the two apart. Here he is:
And as always, here's a link to the Sketchfab version so that you can get a closer look if that's what you wish to do. :)
The next step after this is to put the two into UE4 and see how they look, so that'll be in the next blog post!
Since my last blog post I've been spending some time working on some storyboards as well as 3D modelling a slug. I have a bunch of ideas for my playable written down but I work much better when I have visuals to reference rather than plain text, so I thought it would be useful to make some storyboards showing my ideas. That way I can look at them and get a visual idea of how it'd work, rather than having to make it up in my head every time I read the text. Here are the storyboards I've made so far:
I also made a grass and sand texture for when it's time to revamp my scene. Here they are (though please note I need to make quite a few more so that they can actually tile in more than one direction... :'D ):
I did do some development for these and so will be making a separate blog post with more details about that soon.
And then finally here is the little guy himself:
You can get a closer look at the model on Sketchfab by following this link. :)
