A wee update

It feels like its been quite a long time since I posted anything up, shock horror this is a bit of a rare occurance. Anyhow I think the reason for this absense of posting is that most of the work being done on the game at the moment is all concept, and as a result is filling up lots and lots of pages in one of my endless number of sketchbooks. At some point (probably closer to assessment) I will scan lots of the concept drawing out of the sketchbook, or when references are finalised before I start modelling those images will make their way here. Anyway, I have once again digressed, in this post I am going to mainly blab on about 3D work (as just because we are doing concept work doesn't mean I have stopped tinkering with maya). At the moment I have been entering a "montage" state of training myself up for making the characters and environments we are designing, so I've been spending a lot of time practising the character creation pipeline, and trying to hone my topology skills (which takes a LOT of practise). I've been scouring the internet for tutorials, hints, tips and general advice that will eventually make my life much easier when it comes to making the finished game assests. And I've been a bit successful, in terms of tutorials 2 gnomon workshop dvds and a digital tutors dvd have proved useful, the image below is from the early blocking out stage of the character it is helping me make. I have also been finding various books that will help. And at some point in the near future I would like to read though a 900 page book on unreal developement. Things I've learnt, practise is important (very), dont be to clinical a large factor thats slowed my progress a lot is trying to find a definative topology guide for all male or female characters that uses all quads. There are two things wrong here, no character is the same (so no magic topology, you'll just have to adapt as you go) and secondly, I'm making characters for games, in the end the mesh will be completely triangles (hence why quads are gd each quad two triangles) but an excellent piece of advice was, when block and even modelling dont care about triangles (n gons still a no no) just make the shapes you need for the character you can clean up later, this makes you modelling way more free. Anyway I've blabbed on enough, when some of my character practises start looking good I will post some more.