After doing environments and characters we got a brief on objects/props. Our task was to make six objects that could be found in a game set in ancient Egyptian temple. A pretty open brief, and much easier than the previous one in my opinion. After doing some initial sketching I decided to draw a sword, a cat statue, a staff, a brazier, a jewelry box and a ring. There was a lot of reference images available for the cat statue, the sword, Egyptian jewelry and the jewelry box. The staff and the brazier was a bit more imagination but I feel they could have been found in a temple.
I have uploaded images of the four items I have worked most with so far. They all need polishing, but I think I will choose one or two of them to really finish and turn in for the final submission. Which one do you prefer?

For these items I started out with a linedrawing, then shaded in greyscale to get some basic lighting, then put the colors on another layer set to overlay. I find it to be an easy workflow and I think it works really well, at least for these kind of quick unpolished pictures. 
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Concept art work in progress from task 3, which actually finished a couple of weeks ago.

After the Simbad task, where the focus was on environments, we moved on to a character task. I found the character task much harder than the environment one.

We were to make one regular human accompanied by a demon and an angel. I had an idea about a rugged, tired old angel. I started out with pencil on paper, as I still find I get my ideas out faster in that medium. I have not yet scanned my sketches and I doubt I will. Anyways, the character evolved into a hippie-type laid back angel. The idea is that the angel would be a nice, easygoing, relaxed, laidback bum of a guy while the devil will be an uptight, strick, nicely dressed pretty lady. With fiery hair. The regular human was supposed to be as regular as possible, which actually made kind of a challenge. Too much time is spent drawing warriors, pirates, aliens, etc, and drawing a regular "boring" person is easily forgotten. I made him as a businessman but I'm absolutely not happy with the design.

For this task I tried a technique where you start by drawing silhouettes in black until you get a cool shape, and keep going from there. Feng Zhu have some tutorials on the technique (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yKxY0KKrak).
I found it kind of hard to use this technique for this task as my characters were supposed to have pretty human like forms but it was a good exercise anyway.

The character still needs a lot of work to get to a respectable level. I will wait with uploading the other characters as they are still pretty crappy.

Here is the Angel character:
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HippieAngel
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More life drawing from the last couple of weeks.
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Finally finished one of the Simbad concepts today. I could have continued painting on it for so many more hours, but some time you have to say stop. The only thing I might change is simbad and the raft, because I think they stand out a bit too much. Overall I'm pretty happy with it.


Click for bigger image.

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Demon speedculpt 12/02/2011
 
Did a quick speedsculpt in Mudbox last night just to freshen up the sculpting skills. I had forgot how much fun it is to doodle in Mudbox. I used around two hours for this one. No concept or reference, but I had the word demon in my head when I started. Not quite happy with the back of the head and the cheeks, but I decided not to use too much time on it, as I have more important school assignments to do :)

Here's the result..
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Life Drawing 11/19/2011
 
Every monday and tuesday we have lifedrawing here at Teesside Uni. I had only done real life drawing once before I came here, and I think it's really exiting. I really struggled at first, but it's getting easier each time. We get some great feedback from the tutors, and there are some really inspiring techniques going on from some of the students. I would really recommend taking a couple of life drawing classes to everyone who is interested in getting better at drawing, or if you simply enjoy drawing.

Here is some of my sketches from the first couple of weeks of drawing. Some of them are 2-5 minutes sketches and some of them are 15-20 minutes.
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I have a module called Advanced Games Development where you basically just make a game. It counts for 20 credits (out of 120) so it's not a big module, but it's proving to be one of the funniest and most time consuming. It is of course a group project, and on our group we are now 11 people. We are one game designer, 1 level designer, 2 programmers and the rest of us are artists. Seems like all the other groups is making 2D sidescrollers of some sort, but we wanted to do something different. We decided on making a racing game with a twist. I won't spoil our idea quite yet, you will have to wait and see. We are currently in the concept process, and there has been alot of diffrent opinions so far. Per Viggo Bergsvik is actually the main character concept artist, but I wanted to make a concept aswell, mixing his initial ideas with what I felt it should look like. It's not quite there yet, but I'll probobally work a bit more with it. By the way, if you have seen the beautiful character concepts from Brink you might recognize the pose on the bottom picture.

Here are the concepts:
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Per Viggo's Concepts
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My concept
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Concept Art 11/02/2011
 
The first couple of weeks at Teeside Uni has flown away in a hurry, and we are allready super busy. The module that has been giving me the most challenges so far is the one called Concept Art for Games. In week two we started learning about environment concepting.

This is the brief we were given the second week:

The Sixth Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor

Sinbad is shipwrecked yet again, this time quite violently as his ship is dashed to pieces on tall cliffs. There is no food to be had anywhere, and Sinbad's companions die of starvation until only he is left.

He builds a raft and discovers a river running out of a cavern beneath the cliffs. The stream proves to be filled with precious stones and becomes apparent that the island's streams flow with ambergris.

He falls asleep as he journeys through the darkness and awakens in the city of the king of Serendib (Ceylon, Sri Lanka), "diamonds are in its rivers and pearls are in its valleys". (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Your Brief

Use any 2D graphic technique to make full colour concepts of three potential game levels based on:

A shipwreck on tall cliffs (consider ways of escaping the shipwreck)
A raft on a river of gems (how might you acquire and lose the gems?)
The city of Serendib (What challenges do you need to overcome to extract diamonds from rivers and pearls from valleys?)

In the beginning I had a hard time getting a good composition, in all three pictures. But after around 20 pencil sketches, watching some really inspiring Feng Zhu tutorials and a good lecture by my teacher I finally started getting somewhere. I didn't finish the pictures, and I probobally won't finish all three of them, but I might go on and finish up the cave and maybe the city pic. We are turning in a portfolio with around 12 pictures in April, so I have to choose which pictures to really work on.

I'm getting more confident with my Wacom tablet, which has allways been an issue for me, and even though there is still alot of room for improvement I think I'm getting better. It sure doesn't hurt to do life drawing two days a week either! I will upload some of my life drawings as soon as I get myself a camera.

So here is the Simbad pictures, hope you like them.

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1. Shipwreck
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2. Cave
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3. City
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Here is our exam movie from the Noroff Institute second year. We were a group of five, me, Henrik Mowatt Haugland, Per Viggo Bergsvik, Christian Hermansen and Sebastian Dalseidet. Even though it was hell to work with it from time to time, we finished it and turned it in in time and we got the top grade so it was totally worth it. Maybe later I will write a post about my thoughts on the group work and some tips and tricks for other people making their first animated short.

We won the prize for Noroff's best 3D Short Movie in Bergen and Kristiansand which we are very happy with, and we are currently nominated at the Fredrikstad Animasjons Festival in the student film category.
Link: http://www.animationfestival.no/en

Please drop me a comment if you love or hate our movie :)

Link to Vimeo with better quality: http://vimeo.com/26629965
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My blog have been pretty much dead for around six months now. When we started with our exam movie the last months at Noroff I had so much to do that I simply forgot about blogging. During the summer I wasn't very productive, and I only did one project for a friend in Norway. I will upload some pictures of that project later. In september I started my final year at Teesside University in Middlesbrough. So far it is really exiting, very different, and very challenging, in a good way. The modules I'm studying is Advanced Games Production, Concept Art for Games, Comtemporary Studies in Games and Final Year Project, which is mandatory. For my Final Year Project I would really like to do a VFX heavy commercial, but seeing how I don't have any tutoring in VFX it might be hard. All the games modules is not really the direction I planned to go with, and a really, reallly different direction than the animation studies last year. But so far it's really exiting and interesting. The only thing I'm really missing is a VFX module, which Teesside Uni cancelled during the summer :(. Anyways, I am sure I will have some super awesome projects this year, and hopefully I will post some cool results here!

Oh and btw, since I have moved to England I felt that I need to start writing in English :)
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