The Awoken Guardians of Titus memorial tombstone

From previous meetings with fellow Red hawk members, I was tasked with making a memorial in Saltaire. I then went ahead and attempted to create a tombstone which would be the standard headstone you'd see a lot in this environment. However after many days of thinking of ideas and playing around in 3D max, I had none or it was too complicated for me to design. So I went and played a view games looking for some sort of inspiration but again. Found nothing that I'd like. Eventually out of the blue I pictured this idea for one, a tombstone with a floating bit above it that will hover. I quickly sat down to draw it but I struggled to put it down to paper.

After a good half an hour of drawing down many possible ideas, I was satisfied and went to 3D max to begin. I created a cuboid and then converted it to an editable mesh, with the vertex tool I made the top of the cuboid into a triangle but then made it dip down back into the cube - which was my intentions. After that I made another cube and added a triangle at the end with the vertexes.

After making the initial design of the stone, I then added a cylindar underneath it and extruded different parts of it too make it look like steps. I then added a plane with a grass texture and a sphere for the skydome with an apocalyptic sky (intended to make it a dark fiery red but it turned out a bit pinkish) - looks like I still got lots to learn in 3D max. Anyway I added an omni to give it a nice light effect and finally went ahead and rendered. This is what I got:

After I had my desired idea built fully, I went and animated it to how I pictured it. the top part of the tombstone was supposed to hover up and down slightly. Very simple really, I just turned auto key on and made it move down till I was on frame 50, then moved it back to it's original place on frame 100.

Anyway here is the final design of it (with music and all)


www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVcGQ0cZq-4

The Awoken Guardians of Titus team logo designs

These are the designs of the team logos for our trailer - The Awoken: Guardians of Titus, my design is the one on the top left

It took me some time to come up with an idea for my logo. Originally I was going for possibly a lion head and Titus Salt looking at each other, but I couldn't get a background, text and effects that'd go with it. Seeing as many games have portraits of characters or influencial people in their designs I went for something simple but still look cool. I thought of either a fire effect to go with this apocalyptic future we're going for or a smokey effect to represent a mystery behind the this magical stone and the lions coming to life in the story.

I started by doing a radial gradiant, navy blue and black and placed it in the centre of an A4 sized document on Photoshop, with the text "The Awoken Guardians of Title" in the middle. I went through many fonts, originally aiming for a fancy style. Unfortunatly, after attempting to blur the text with motion and gaussian blurs, the text became unreadable, resulting with me having to go with a bigger text. After that I continued with the blurring - It was a success, then I got a smoke brush and carefully brushed around the text. giving it a nice smokey effect.

Other desigsn

The first design I'll discuss is the one on the top left, made by Robert Briggs. This one I like, the red cloud effect gives it a sort of apocalyptic/chaotic feel too it  followed by a lens flare which is faded - representing a dim sun

The second design is made by Adam Thompson at the bottom left corner. I can see what he was intending with the fire and the sand, but unfortunatly since we're going for a sci-fi horror type genre, it doesn't resemble that genre in my oppinion, however I would defiently choose it for maybe a fantasy type genre or possibly a war or adventure type.

I'm going to review both Ivo and Lewis' together since they are pretty much the same design with the lion heads, however their different use of fonts is really nice, given it a fancy style. It's a shame they left it like that because I think it had so much potential if they added some colour and/or effects to it.

Final design

After much discussion, it turned out my design was the chosen one for the project, however after listening to some other ideas, I went on to tweak the original design, many of the ideas were to make the background red instead of a navy blue style and also add a lion head and Titus' head in the background. So here is the final verdict

3D environment

After waiting for a while for it, we finally got to do 3D environments.

I started with making a texture on Photoshop using a cloud render and difference clouds. I then added another layer with a brown colour which I added a difference style to the layer, which surprisingly gave it a brown and blue colour.

Now onto 3D max. I made a plane, 200 x 200 and added some strength to the plane to make the plane look more jagged like a mountain range. I then added the texture to the plane once I was satisfied with the plane.

After that I went back to my texture on Photoshop and added a new layer with a green/yellow colour. I then added noise to it by doing Filter > Noise > Add noise. I selected Gaussian and Monochromatic boxes and clicked ok. After I was satisfied with the layer style, I went to google and looked for a nice rock texture to my current texture. I played around with the layer styles I went and added one more layer with a brown colour, which I added the Overlay style to that.

Back to the environment on 3Ds Max, I added this new texture and added a target camera till I got a view which I liked the look of (The one in this picture above).

To finish things off I added a sphere over the plane. This is my sky box, I cut the bottom half away then flipped the sphere so the inside of it would show the image. I grabbed the image from Chris' iDrive and added the sky image to my sphere, making a sky dome.

Finally I added a volume fog by clicking on render > environments and played around at random until I got what I desired, at first for some reason I am not sure of, the entire environment kept going red, then green then back to red, then finally a foggy landscape, which isn't half bad in my opinion

Hopefully we'll be doing alot more on 3D environments in the future

An introduction to sound

On Tuesday, Chris gave us an introduction the sound studio, he informed us of the rules which we must follow while in the studio. These rules are:-

• No food or drink
• look after your ears (When wearing headphones avoid having sound on a high volume which may damage your ears)
• Bend your knees when you are picking up heavy equipment (So you don't strain your back
• No trip hazards/Don't leave exposed wires hanging on the floor
• ID badges on display at all times

After Chris went through the rules with us, he then introduced us to the mixing deck there were many dials, buttons and levers across the the deck but each column was dedicated to a "channel" each channel had the same dials, buttons and levers and they were:-

• Gain
• High
• Mid
• Low
• Mon
• Digital Effects
• Pan

Hopefully this year with sound will be interesting and I look forward to see what the future will hold

This is my attempt on making a corridor and adding 6 spotlights at the corridor

Spotlight

Today on 3D max I learnt how to use lighting in 3d Max, I used multiple Target Spots on a plane and changed their colours between red, blue, yellow and green, I changed the angle of each light for different directions till they all eventually met in the middle to make a white light. I then added a Teapot model in the middle and placed another spotlight shining directly at the teapot with a shadow added to it to get the effect at the end

Forum signature

I made this late at night on my version of photoshop. What I did was collect some renders from a site called www.planetrenders.net and I got the two pictures of those characters (Ichigo and Ichigo: Final Getusga Tensho) off the Internet. I made a new file, 400pixels by 150 pixels and then added the two pictures together, moving them about with colour, even making a blur copy of the front image to make it look like he has appeared out of nowhere really fast. I used the render (which I modified myself to make it black with red outlines) to be what its called in the anime bleach: reitsu (which is also the appearance of his getusga tensho ability.) The reason I made the second character the same colour as the render is because that is what Ichigo is combined with his getusga which is called Saigo no Getsuga Tensho (which just means Final Getsuga tensho).

For the effects I got a brush tool and lightly brushed along the bottom to make it like a cloud or smoke effect, for some faded lighting around the centre I used a marquee tool and changed the feather to 40px and then dragged the selected and it turned out like that. I had been experimenting with the tools to something of my liking.

For some finishing touches I used the polygonal lasso tool and cut around the edges to make an interesting shape, which then I duplicated the layer and followed a tutorial to make it look crisp. discovering new techniques which I'll use in the future. Finally I finished the whole thing off with making a border around my image with the stroke tool in the blending options along with drop shadow, bevel and inner glow, I then used a font I got from 1001fonts.com and typed my name I use for many things online (like my blog).