Week of October 28-November 7

For these past two weeks I have been spending a lot of time cracking down on getting my portfolio together for College Applications. I want to include many different types of work I have done: Game code, 3D and 2D art, Animation, Design Documentation, traditional art, and concept art. In order to put everything together, I first need to clean everything up and make it look good. First I started with my 3D work, and then I moved to some of my 2D artwork. The two 3D pieces that I will be including in my portfolio are a couple of houses and a bird model and animation. The bird has its own concept art so I will be working on cleaning that up as well.

For the bird, I first needed to get the shading to look good so when I rendered the colors would not loo flat. Then I looked over the frames and made sure that the animation would not be too fast or too slow in the final product. Next, I repositoned the camera and rendered the animation. Finally, I put together the frames and made a video. I did these same steps with the second animation of the bird I had made. For the concept art, I needed to reposition my drawing on the canvas to reduce the amount of negative space I had.

The houses needed some work too. The 3D model that I had made over the summer had come to be a precious peice of mine, but there as still more work to do. For the houses, I wanted to add materials. This came with its own set of issues. I have never looked into normals before, which I see now was a major mistake. But not one that couldn't be fixed. I flipped the normals on a few faces got back to work. Not for long though. My next issue that I ran into was understanding the UV's of my project. Without this my materials would be stretched, squished, or distorted, definitly not something i want in my portfolio. I looked into UVs and remapped my work using a grid material to make sure nothing was distorted. Now the materials worked, I just needed to pick colors and change variables. To pull it all together, I wanted to use a program that would let people look at all angles of the project. Luckily, Marmoset had a free trial and I was able to take advantage of it. Once again though, this did not come without its complications and I will be working on this over the weekend.

Mathematics-

Geometry (2D and 3D geometrical relationships)

Triangulate

When I moved my 3D project into Marmoset, I realized that my faces were not triangulated correctly because I used boolean to make them. This meant that the fave was not divided into small enough peices to not interfere with the interior of the window. I did this manually for a bit and eventually decided to remake the houses because I was unhappy with my original geometry.

UV's

A UV map is the unraveled verion of the faces that are on a mesh. These faces need to be proportionate in order for any material that is laid on them to look right. in order to fix this, on each face where I had a different material, I used a smart UV mapping process embedded into blender in order to have all of the faces with the same material have the same size UV grid.

Number and Quantity(Vectors)

Negative Space

Positive space is the area on a piece of art which the subject occupies, while negative space is the area around the subject. In an art piece, if the ratio is off, it can divert the eye off of the art.

Normals

A normal to a surface is an object (vector) that is perpendicular to another object's surface at a given point. These are used in 3d modeling to distinguish the front and back sides of a face in a model. The problem I came across when putting materials on my model was because some

 of my normals were inverted, therefore making the materials show up on the wrong side of a face. In order to fix this, I used the normal mapping view in Blender and inverted the faces that were flipped. When I did this, the material showed up as it was supposed to.