I am Ollie Elliott. I studied BA Computer Games Design and got a 2.1 with honours at Newport University. I'm from sunny Somerset. This is my blog. It's about different things. Go away.
Just a quick run-through of some of the stuff I've been up to recently...
1st is a tattoo design for one of my mates at work:
2nd is a business card design for Lanny (both sides are combined to make this image):
3rd is my first ever published piece of work! My advert for the Camera Centre, where I now work (www.cameracentreuk.com/). I've done a few bits of design at work including posters, web banners etc:
That's all for now. Quorn is fucking disgusting. Bye
It's been a quite a while since my last post. I've got a job now and have been working on stuff in the rest of my free time so that's why! But here I am again with a big update specifically about my work on Project Steel, which has since become 'The Seeker'.
So yeah this post is going to be a recap on where I was up to in the design process of the character Spillins last time and, from there, cover his progression into a 3D model in-engine. There will be some ground I've covered before but hopefully enough new stuff to be interesting. Aww here it goes...
Character Design
With a pair of sketches of Spillins that Pete drew last year as a starting point I began work on the character design concept drawing. Using reference points such as famous historical explorers, american mountain men, and Yoda, the drawing took shape and finally ended up as the image you can see above.
While designing Spillins I made a conscious effort to make him as recognisable from a distance as possible. As he is such a mysterious character and will occasionally appear at long distances unannounced it is important that his design catches the player's eye so that they don't miss him. The two main factors I took into account were his silhouette and his colour palette.
Giving him a large rucksack, bulky figure, and bald head combined with a red coat with white fur (based on an image of the aforementioned mountain men I found) will hopefully mean he stands out against both the white mountains and the dark green forest settings of the game.
Orthographic Drawing
With the concept drawing complete the next step was to create an orthographic drawing of the character to aid the transition into a 3D model.
I suffer from the problem of not being able to draw the same thing twice so, as you can imagine, I'm not a massive fan of this type of drawing. Luckily however I knew before I started that I would be modelling Spillins so I didn't have to go into a serious amount of detail as I could visualise the missing pieces in my head, having come up with the character's design myself. Had I had to pass the drawing on to someone else for modelling (or if this is the case in the future) I would have gone into a lot more detail to make sure they understood exactly how he is meant to look.
Having said all that, the orthographics were fairly painless to draw and I had a good image in my head of how Spillins was going to look as a 3D model.
3D Modelling
I was so glad to get into the task of modelling Spillins. As much as I'm satisfied by finishing a drawing, it doesn't come close to modelling, which I find constantly rewarding.
There's little to say about modelling the main bulk of the character's body, arms, and legs as it was so trouble-free and quickly finished. The video below shows the body at an almost finished stage with a placeholder head:
Once the main body was finished I moved on to Spillins' hands, which turned out to be the most frustrating but ultimately rewarding part of the model. Although the topology isn't great I'm incredibly happy with the shaping of the hand:
Next was probably the most important part of the model, the head... The following image shows the head throughout the process growing from a random bunch of polygons into something more recognisable:
And here's the head at this point on a partially accessorised body (rendered in Maya):
After quite a few hours of developing and tweaking the head is complete. Following that more accessories are added and the model is complete and reading for engine testing:
And again with the wireframe visible (don't forget to view the pictures in full size!):
I'm pretty pleased with the model's poly count (weighing in at just under 4000 faces) but obviously still have much to learn when it comes to low-poly game modelling (and modelling in general of course). Since finishing the model I've found some great topology pictures of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood characters which have insanely low poly counts and which I will be using very closely as reference points for future character modelling.
To wrap up this part of the development of Spillins I give you him in-engine (UDK) with a rather jazzy sandstone texture (unfortunately not two-sided as his bag strap is invisible):
I hope you agree that he's looking good and hope that this post offers a bit more insight than usual haha! Next time I will hopefully have the model textured and possibly rigged, but that's all for now.
After the tidal wave of posts in May I've been relatively quiet this month. I have done some stuff though and here it is...
I've started working on the orthographic drawings for the Project Steel characters and this is the first completed one, Spillins. Normally I'd tidy up the drawing with clean lines before signing them off but we've decided that I will be modelling him so there's no real need as I have a good enough picture of what he looks like:
At the very end of last month I also released episode 2 of my lego-style minecraft instruction videos so here it is:
Finally I have set up a DeviantArt page (http://enormousblogodile.deviantart.com/) to post and promote stuff. You can get to it via the other sites/contact list on the right of the blog.
Finally finished the character concept drawings I've been working on for the past few weeks. They are for Project Steel, a game I am working on with a few friends. So yeah, I'll let them do the talking:
Captain Hawk
Adam Adams (First Mate)
Gunner (waiting for a name)
Rascal (Quartermaster)
Twin Deckhands (waiting for names as well)
Spillins (Mystery Man!)
Very pleased with how these have come out. The recent drawing practise has paid off I think.
After the reveal trailer for Black Ops 2 I played through the original again. It's great in some ways and appalling in others. Here's some more warm-up art, this time it's of Weaver, one of the support characters in Black Ops. He's one of my favourite characters even though he doesn't really do much of note but yeah here he is (Pete's gonna bust my balls for not doing the character art yet haha):
I don't like the fact that it looks like it took a lot less time to make than it did but I do like that it looks messy and slightly unfinished and the fact that it was done in Photoshop shows through. Anyways now for some proper work.
Also new Minecraft video coming next week.
BYE
More drawing warm-up. Today I drew MCA from the Beastie Boys who died yesterday. I'm not really a superfan but I've listened to and loved the Beastie Boys since school when I got The Sounds of Science so thought MCA deserved a tribute drawing. It's not as good as I would have liked but I have a lot more drawing to do as I said yesterday so couldn't spend too long on it (it looks better in full screen so click on it):
And here's Rhymin' & Stealin', a classic BB track:
I have the DVD of 'Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!' which, if you like music at all, you have to watch.
The concept art I'm doing is coming along nicely so will hopefully be posting some finished art soon.
BYE
Just a quick drawing to warm up for the massive amount of drawing I have to do over the next week. As it's May the 4th I decided to do a Star Wars-themed picture so here's Darth Maul (probably the best thing about The Phantom Menace). Might do one every year!
Also my amazing girlfriend bought me a Lego Boba Fett clock (click the Star Wars label at the bottom of this post to see my other Star Wars stuff including a sketch of Boba!):
More stuff coming soon byyyyyyyyeeeeeee and may the force be with you.
