Beauty Render

Last week was bootcamp at Stafford University, it is a time where, once a year, a group of lecturers and students gather out of their free will to make a group collaboration project and attempt to complete the development in a week.

If I've learned anything in bootcamp, is that my skill have DEFINITELY rusted up from being a full time carer, while my modelling isn't slow by any means, now I actually have to think about it, it fell out from being second nature to me, and my painting skills have decreased, everything I learned in the previous bootcamp is gone, what I did for this year is more like pixel art, not good pixel art at that!

Lily flower - bootcamp 2012 

Not sure if its due to not drawing/painting by hand in the last year, or a placebo effect where I just lost confidence in my skill due to my responsibilities, regardless of the circumstance, there is one thing that is very clear now, I MUST REGAIN MY FORMER GLORY! This has to be a daily thing or I'll lose it all over again by next year, and with the launch of my business around the corner, I need to be my absolute best now more than ever before.

To do this, I went back to the "presentation" part of my R&D, so recently I've been browsing the net, looking and comparing how people present their work, etc, and there are a lot of ways to do it! Polycount forums have been an instrumental resource for gathering this information, thanks to the countless of users who cares about the presentation standard of their work, I think I figured out how to best present my own work while giving all necessary information for the contents of the image, yet not intrusive to distract you from the image focal point, which if your work, but not so small or invisible that the viewer finds it hard to find or read the information, and this is what I came up with:

Until I have the rest of my stuff sorted, some things remain undecided, such as adding Illustrator to the roster of software on the bottom right, or renaming the the software under titles, such as texturing to 2D software, and re-arranging the order so that 3D modelling can be directly to the left of rendering should I chose to not render using the 3 software I listed, etc. But aside from these nit-picks, I am happy with the progression of this case study of professional presentation style.

And then there is the logo, that has evolved a lot in the past year since I first launched Playing with Polygon on Facebook back in August 2012, looking at it's evolution, I feel...kind of proud, it's strange how much work and thought goes into it, yet in the end, the less I did for it, the better it looked, proving the old saying that "less is more" to be true

The starting point for me, a smiling face.

I liked the idea of a smiling face that I tried to keep it, while fitting the original Facebook Banner

Then I thought "lets give this a real go!" and came up with this...

I can't believe at one point, I thought this was "cool", look at it! it is too noisy, and the reflection of the text causes it to be confusing, a logo needs to be simple and concise! and this logo does not send any message of who it is across, so back to the drawing board I went.

So I made something really simple, at the same time I came across an article about colour study for logo at Social Media Today, to my surprise, my original colour scheme for the logo name was that of trust and creativity, total fluke, but an awesome coincidence!

In the end, I wasn't happy with it due to being TOO simple and the colours not having enough emotion. so I revised it and worked out a way to "direct" the viewers gaze when reading the logo by further separating the 2 "P" and set them closer to the "W", so you have  better chance of reading it as "PWP" instead of "PPW" or "WPP". I also put a box silhouette frame so it resembles that of a cube, to most, the first 3D object they ever created in a 3D program, right before you start playing with polygon ;p

This just shows, you can't force evolution an idea, but when it finally evolve, you will be proud of it.

From all this, I learned I have a new favourite image file format, .PNG! It's soo much better than .TGA, especially for rendering from 3DS Max, before I use to have to save out as .TGA at 32 bit so it has an alpha channel that then I can later use to delete the areas which is not part of the object, but with .PNG, it does that automatically! so it's like .GIF, but with no artefact noise! making it the best translucent image based file format ever!!!

To close this rant, I will make a list of stuff to do by the end of the month, if I'm lucky, I'll actually achieve it since I have a tendency to over achieve without realising, it might sound like boasting, but it's really not! its like being a perfectionist or OCD, it's a hindrance to your life! so here it is, what I consider realistic goals to achieve by the end of the month:

• Learn digital painting and concepting
• Learn more Zbrush
• Complete the steam punk chick
• Learn more UDK
• Create a foliage environment
• Learn NDo2
• Learn Ddo
• Produce my first 3D asset which can cover a myriad of platforms, from DX11 to the Nintendo DS 
• Buy/prepare/launch playingwithpolygon.co.uk (COMPLETE!)

All this must be achieved within 25 days while juggling being a:

• Carer
• Lover
• Cook
• Gamer (especially with E3 around next week)
• And maybe an employee soon 

This month will be nothing short of FUN! {sarcasm}

update: My Spouse bought/lent me money to buy a Wacom Cintiq 13HD to help me with my endeavour to master digital painting...just when you think you can't love someone more, they prove that you can :D