Bodies | A2 | DMS1 Blog

A2 | Bodies

The Process

It was time for me to hone in on an idea, the initial idea was to utilize rigging as a tool to create worlds that felt "alive". The idea in mind is CORIN Vexations in which we had a quick look at during one of our black box sessions. Coming from a 3D background, this was really appealing to me. I wanted to also tap into a strong conceptual idea. At this point in time, I wanted to connect the idea of humans being interconnected with their land, being one with the land. Or one with the Earth. It almost feels like we forget our place on earth and we forget that we are part of this land, we forget that it's our home.

I presented my initial ideas to Brendan during class and we discussed key components to research and work on. At first I set my preferred software to Unity3D, but after researching tutorials and messing around with it on Unity, it didn't feel intuitive enough. After maybe 30 minutes of trying and trying to find a solution or a helpful tutorial, I ended up searching "rigging maya" and the first tutorial I clicked on was the one I needed.

I found Maya a lot more user-friendly when it comes to rigging. This is what I'll be using for the time being. Learning Maya will be beneficial for me to continue with.

1. Familiarizing myself with the physics system. This will come in handy later on

Feedback Reflection

Looking back at the feedback, there are a lot of aspects I want to incorporate with the build going forward. The Keith Haring tribute idea is something I think I was going for in the beginning, but this has confirmed it. I have detailed and explained what will be inside the mirror for proper context. Each zone of the mirror has a meaning, I think the biggest challenge here would be representing that meaning visually as to set it a part from another other castle, or town. I think it needs to have some sort of subtle thematic theme.

19/04/23 - Problem

One of the biggest issues that I faced in the assignment process, was the fact that the mirror itself was not of a straight nature which made the UV mapping process difficult for me to wrap my head around. The issue here was that my model had a lot of geometrical errors, so the edges were wack, it made no sense at all, which made the UV mapping make no sense at all.

- My options here were to simply the model, redo the model and change it's complexity, so that the UV map was simplified for the process.

Different zones of the mirror

- The Castle of Creativity

The intentional placement of creativity inside a castle, is to protect it, to value it in the highest praise, to give respect and loyalty to it, because I believe it's one of the most, if not, the most important aspect of my life, not only has creativity allowed me to express my ideas and opinions that I was so afraid to let out because of judgment, but to help me reach a level of authenticity that has affected every other aspect of my life. Creativity is an ode to my younger self, the playful, careless child who's innocence is as pure as the drawings, as the buildings, the creatures, the imaginary maps, the planes and spaceships. Creativity is the gift you give as an adult version of yourself to child version of yourself.

- The Garden of Lost Hope

When you think of a garden, you think of growth and prosperity, yet the title suggests that there is something wrong with it, that there is lost hope, or the feeling of defeat. I wanted to introduce this contradictory concept because I believe that growth and the feeling of unworthiness can co-exist,

- The Town of Melancholy /

This town is the representation of how I feel when in a crowded place. The feeling of being isolated and truly lonely, despite being surrounded by people around you, even the ones you love. The feeling of being misunderstood.

- Shrine/Lake of the Wounded Healer

This represents the overcoming of suffering, the stage of one's life dedicated to ending the cycle of hurt, to instead provide a sanctuary of healing and safeness to others that might be in need of it.

Very nice work, as always. This is a really compelling idea — assuming I’ve got your vision correct — and as per usual it’s great to see you put so much additional thought into the concept. From what I can tell, your idea is to have the mirror be a kind of portal into a more detailed 3D scene, inspired by the epic religious paintings that you’ve included as reference, similar to the Keith Haring tribute example from earlier in the semester. If so, I think it’s a great idea, even if at this stage there’s a bit of confusion as to the content of the mirror, and how detailed it will be. On your blog, you state that you’ll be including a kind of inner fantasy world, but on the asset sheet, you say it will contain all the lost memories and moments from the past. Obviously you want to nail this down before we get to Assignment 2, so you can start building out this scene, but it’s good to see you at least thinking ahead a bit at this point. As you say, the more detail the mirror scene contains, the better I think, so give yourself plenty of time to plan out and model these elements. Maybe even plan out a few versions of the scene, with varying levels of detail, just in case things take longer than you expect and you need to cut back. On a technical level, you’ve made good progress, and the model looks much cleaner. It’ll make texturing much easier, and you can always add edge loops back in later if you find that you’ve removed too much (some edges are necessary to maintain the structure of the model, for instance).

Your art style references and commentary is great, and the only thing that’s missing is a side view in your orthographic images, which would have been much more useful that the back view, which is near-identical to the front. Still, an excellent starting point! Well done!