Summer Reflections!

So we have been back for a few weeks now, but I want to track back to the end of the first year. When summer started I had so many ideas for both 2D concepts and 3D in mind and when the tutors said “you won’t touch max for 6 months and come back not remembering anything” I was saying to myself “not me!”… Hah, it’s never feels good being wrong. 

 Although I did do the summer projects Heather set us, I still felt a bit unsure of my 3D skills when second year started all over again.

So as the first few weeks of summer started, I had this idea for the 5000 tri limit character/vehicle brief. One of my favorite cars is the Nissan Silvia S15 which is commonly used for drifting with the typical Skylines, RX7’s, 350z’s and other Japanese imports. I thought modelling and texturing a drift machine would be something different and more of a challenge when compared to an everyday road car. Personally I do want to set my sights on becoming a vehicle artist which I am not 100% sure about yet, but find myself drawn to as this degree progresses. 

Modelling this thing was slightly difficult, I tend to find with all blueprints; nothing really matches perfectly. In other words, if you want an accurate model you WILL need to source some good reference of it in existence. Whilst progressing I also realised that I overly spending tri’s on the body which left little for the interior, I think it was something unfair like 500 tri’s for the interior. I think making these simple mistakes can be healthy so I left the model as it was but now I realise that with vehicles, there should be a balance of some kind. I had trouble with the wheels as each spoke of an alloy should be equal in size to the rest, I was not sure how to recreate this just by tweaking each spoke with nothing but human eyes. I now hear that the ‘array’ feature of max can duplicate forms equally in rotation so I shall be aware for next time.

After I finished modelling and unwrapping I decided it was time to find the perfect decals/livery for the drift machine! Here I did have a choice to make, make up a livery for the car unique to me, or turn it into an already existing S15. I decided to mix It up a little and… do a bit of both. As I was lurking around Google images I found an RC S15 with the ‘Coppermix logo’ and thought ‘that’s the one!’ I threw it into Photoshop, and re made it using the pen tool in my chosen colours, this also helped enlarge the image without pixelating and now I am not at risk for slapping something onto my model straight from the net :D 

Although I never got around to finishing this because of my own loss of interest and typical summer laziness (promise won’t happen next time!! …ahem). As far as I got, I guess I can finish this at some point for that good ol' portfolio :D

 However, In-between shifts of doing nothing at all and going out to do non art stuff (lol), I did manage to cram some doodles of cars in, and I am a big fan of Scott Robertson’s work so I tried to apply his perspective techniques after staring at his books for so long. The outcomes were not pretty but drawing is learning and learning is progress. I now tend to do a lot of these car sketches at lunch times/train journeys so there will be more to come!