Week 3

There's not that much to report on this week as I've focused primarily on the completion of my assets for the room project. I managed to finalise the albedo maps for the assets I've been assigned to thus far; I would have already began with PBR for these maps, but as the group have finished the assets to form the basic structure of our scene (the walls, bar, doors), the secondary assets have been distributed in order to give life to the scene; objects such as bottles, posters, coasters. I managed to model, unwrap and create the albedo maps for all assets so far, which means I basically haven't been able to leave my computer all week.

As far as I know all that's left to finish on my assets is creating some PBR maps, I will be using bitmap2material for this process, which I must admit seems a little daunting to me as I'm not greatly informed at the texturing side of the creation process.

I have been able to fit some other work in this week; I've been trying to ease myself back into drawing after a regrettable summer hiatus, it's a story which I've heard happened to a few students in which I kept telling myself that I couldn't find the time, but in all honesty I'm going to put it down to laziness and procrastination. I plan to fix this issue by drawing whenever I can, I'm obviously quite rusty so I've decided to ease myself in slowly and start with the basics and work my way from there. Luckily for me an art friend of mine recently posted a list of talented artists on his blog (https://jakehattsite.wordpress.com/2015/10/14/a-handful-of-youtubers-all-artists-should-subscribe-to-right-now/), each of which offer an extensive library of tutorials, starting from beginner techniques to more of a professional understanding. I've wanted to improve my understanding of anatomy for a while, so I'm currently watching Proko tutorials on YouTube hosted by Stan Prokopenko (an artist who primarily focuses on anatomy), an exercise I've found useful this week is the bean method, this has been helping me to understand gesture within the human form, and has furthered my knowledge of the stretching and folds relating to skin and muscle; the process consists of simplifying the torso and pelvis into a bean shape, and forming it into poses which resembles how the body would react to certain positions.

Something else we learnt this week was how to create basic lighting in an unreal environment, it surprised me how straightforward this was, I've always gone be the understanding that even the simplest of lighting was ridiculously convoluted.