FMP Week 1: Part 2

   Along with the sketches earlier in the week I continued with the white box. As you saw in my previous post, I downsized, based on the recommendation of Craig and Shay. The size and extra stuff I cut out, I am now considering as stretch goals, if I have spare time at thee end. Simple things that I can easily do with the assets and modular building parts I have already made. Expanding the urbanized area, interior rooms, the bottom left area I cut and possibly a small vehicle. Not all will be done if I have time obviously, but they're all an option.
   I'm not much of a digital painter when it comes to concepting, Give me a fine liner and a scrap of paper and I'm happy, but I figured Its worth a shot to paint over my existing block out and expand on it a little with the help of the old wacom. I'm not overly happy with how far I am with digital painting, I do bits now and again but I'd much rather sink my time into the 3D aspect of the course.

Initial layout paint over of  the town WIP.

Another WIP paint over, of the ship location.

   Now for something unrelated to FMP, for me anyway. Blair Armitage came in to give a talk to the character artists. So not necessarily helpful to me, but obviously I went anyway because you never know. She talked about her time in the industry and what sort of things you should and shouldn't have on your portfolio website. Recommending you don't have your blog on there, as it can distract people from your actual work. Along with this she mentioned to make sure to have all your renders labeled with your watermark. As when things get round the internet a bit, they can loose their original location and you might not get the credit you deserve. Finally another important piece of information she shared, was the use of personal work within your portfolio. More importantly, how it shows more to a future employer about what you want to do, rather than what you had to do for university. Overall the talk although primarily for character artists, was definitely worth going to.

   Going back to the architectural stylistic choice we're going for before I finish this post. I noticed that all the reference I gathered and all I could find on the subject, had flat boring roofs. so I tried to mix them up a bit with some more angular shapes.

Rooftop sketches.

   After the brief sketches, I set to work thinking further about the white box. Modularity was in order to set out the level exactly as I wanted it to sit, so when I finished my models I could just import them, replacing my placeholder mesh with ease. Before I could do that I had to build my placeholder modular kit.

Placeholder modular kit.