Ronnie Leah, BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester.

 Now that I had completed the head I decided to revisit the body. I felt that the problem with the original body was that their was too much going on with the top half. It felt overcomplicated and messy. I decided to strip it back to its bare minimum. When it came to the legs I felt that a previous drawing I did would actually go better with the style I drew my head in. I liked the metal on the mask of the new character head an wanted to continue this look further on the rest of the body.  I then spent a long time colouring the character, making sure that I matched the art style done for the head. I started by picking colour I thought would look nice for each part of the outfit, with the intention of experimenting later on. Once I had completed the full drawing, I decided to change the look of the armour to a more basic look. I preferred what this looked like as it fit with the art style of the head more. I also experimented with the character looks, having the hat bigger and ...

Today I continued with designing my characters head. I liked certain elements from the origional design, such as the mask, however wanted to add more personality to the characters face. Its important to the story that the traditional character is seen as human and so I wanted to make this clear by only covering a portion of his face. His eyes are left for the audience to see so that they can see his emotions throughout the animation. I added a scar to display that this is not his first battle and to show weakness in him. He has not modified his body like the cyberpunk world and so can be damaged for taking part in battle.  As I continued to draw I decided that I wanted his eyebrows to look more interesting and so I made them look more extreme. I felt that this balanced out the face more.  After finishing the face I then added the straw hat which is seen in the original image. I then experimented with different looks to see how I felt about the character.  I tried mashing ...

 

 I managed to complete an initial version of my character which will represent the traditional Japanese side. I really like how I managed to translate the slender body type look to this character, which resembles that of the cyberpunk character. My goal was to ensure they looked as if they are apart of the same world, even if they lead very different lives.  I did however feel that there was something off about this drawing. I wasn't sure how I felt about the top half in particular. I decided to start with the head from scratch in order to reimaging the characters look in a more stylized way, starting with the eyes.  I spent a long time focusing on drawing stylised eyes as I feel they are a key aspect to translate the characters emotions to the audience. I wanted to ensure that I had experimented with a variety of different eye colours to see how I could improve upon my initial drawing. 

 Instead of using a sphere, which is hard to UV, I instead took a cube and used the smooth mesh preview to polygon setting in modify (convert) tab. I could now easily UV the shape.  Once this was done I sent the model to Mudbox and began sculpting the basic shape.  Once the basic shape had been sculpted, additional detail was needed for the stalk of the pepper. In order to add this detail the model was sent back to Maya as an updated version. I then circularized the top and bottom faces and extruded out the top to create a stalk shape. Once this was done I had to go back into the UV editor and cut the stalk from the main model.  I could then sent the model back to Mudbox to be sculpted.  I used a variety of different tools in order to make the pepper look more detailed, the main ones being grab, sculpt and smooth. I used a refrence in order to understand the basic shape of a pepper and followed along with my tutor.  I then continued by adding the base colou...

 Now that I had begun developing the world around the mountain, I now wanted to look at the possibilities which could be the traditional side of Japan. I gathered research of all the possibilities which could influence my design.  Once big influence which pushed me to look more at Japanese palaces is a game called Sekiro. Sekiro is set in an alternate reality 17th century Japan and has the player assume the role of Wolf, a shinobi. There is a conflict between the Ashikaga and Tokugawa shogunates and the player must navigate through the battlegrounds in order to carry out their mission of protecting the divine heir.  The architecture used throughout the game is the same sort of look I want for my own animation. It was useful to get a 360 view of all objects and see how they were implemented and interacted with the world. I took some screen shots of gameplay as reference for my work.  This was a quick sketch which I completed in order to get out my initial ideas for th...

 In order to show the conflict between traditional and technology I have to create a world which can convey this effectively.  I have talked about how I want to take a more abstract approach to for the final version of my animation, however for now I wanted to take a look at how this world is structured in order to get a clearer idea of how the two worlds interact.  I completed several thumbnails which show the idea of a mountain surrounded by a overpopulated city.  I completed the drawing below in order to develop my skills at drawing cities buildings in perspective. The idea was not to focus on detail but solely perspective to see how buildings are placed in order to build up a city. The buildings closer are meant to represent buildings which may have been their in a modern day Japan. As the need for buildings had become more of a concern, and with the rapid development of technology, the buildings have become larger and larger.  I noted down ideas which would...

 Now that I had designed the cyberpunk character, I wanted to then design the traditional Samurai. I  researched samurai using art station as seen below in order to influence my work.  I then drew the character in a similar pose to the cyberpunk character in order to make sure they seem as if they are from the same world. Originally I had it so the character was wearing a full mask, however I changed this as I felt it took the human element away from the character. it is important to show a difference between the two characters so that you can see the main conflict of the story, man vs machine. I also struggled to draw the armour in this perspective and so decided to switch perspective to continue on with the drawing idea.  I decided to give the character a wooden arm, showing that he relay's on nature in order to live his life. This idea was inspired heavily by the character Wolf from the game Sekiro. For now I used a very similar arm in order to convey this idea, h...

Todays lesson started with a 15 minute drawing. I took this time to remind myself what I had learnt in the previous lesson about construction lines. Although I wasn't able to get much of the drawing done, I was able to remember the key skills learnt We then moved on to 5 sets of 30 second drawings. As it is only 30 seconds you are forced to draw quickly. By doing this you are able to take note of any habits you may have when drawing. The next drawing was 30 minutes so I was able to get quite a lot of the drawing done. I again wanted to reflect on the skills learnt in the last lesson and so focused on drawing just the head. At first I found the pose hard to draw as the head appeared to be facing down however the nose still looked as if it was straight. I found that the problem wasn't that I drew the drawing in the wrong way, but that I hadn't added the shadows in the appropriate way to display that the head is facing down. After the break we went back to 5 30 second drawing ...

  This was the first sketch of the day as a warmup drawing. I got 2o minutes to focus on the drawing. I found the pose hard to draw at first as its an unnatural angle, however as I got further into the drawing I began to notice how each part of the body worked in order to make the pose.  In todays lesson Roy did a 45 minute demonstration on how to draw a portrait. The key thing I learnt from this demonstration was to not trust the first line that you draw. Instead you should focus on using construction lines to form the shape of the body rather than doing an outline as they are more likely to be accurate to what you are actually seeing. From here you can build up the shadows in order to form the features of the face.  After watching the demonstration I attempted my own version of the portrait, focusing largely on how the shadows interact with the face. The final picture wasn't amazing however I felt that I understood the technique a little better.  I then attempted a...