Week 9 - Village Blacksmith House & Life Drawing

Village House - Blacksmith

Following my aim from last week, I managed fit within the set traingle count. My blacksmith house model used 4,471 triangles, out of the 5,000 triangles allowed.

Close-up of details

Close-up of details

Eventually I tried to export my model of the house to Unreal Engine. I immediately encountered problems which I wasn’t sure of how to fix, since this was my first time working in Unreal Engine. I eventually managed to figure some of them out. One problem being that, I needed to rebuild the lighting in the scene after I imported my house, as it wasn’t rendered correctly. 

Additionally I unknowingly managed to flip certain polygon faces on my model, what made it partly see-through so I went back to 3DS MAX, to flip them back. I hope to work faster on the next project, this way I’ll have more time left over for fixing the errors in my model.

After sorting out all the problems and correcting any remaining issues with the model; I was able to capture a few renders, to see how my house looks like in the village, in engine.

Life Drawing

During this week's life drawing, we were doing something slightly different. We were asked to draw our subject's outline in the first 2 drawings, to focus on her outer shape/space. The following 2 sketches focused more on  trying to fill in her bodies shape, to draw her as a silhouette. This process has really helped me look at the life drawing model differently, as I was now trying to perceive the whole body as a flat shape, instead of a three-dimensional object.  

As a preparation for the following task, we needed to draw the surroundings/scene around the model. It only needed to be a quick drawing. I tried to keep my perspective as accurate as possible, to make sure my drawing had enough depth to it. It specifically needed to be a landscape drawing as well.

The following exercise took this idea further, as I then needed to cut out the silhouette of the model. It was very tricky as normally my paper would be mounted or attached to n easel, but this time I had to hold it in my hand, while I cut out the silhouette using scissors in the other hand. I managed to roughly cut out the shape I saw, but I think I could have  done better if I was more careful when cutting. A few times I cut too deeply and removed too much paper from the silhouette. There was no way of reverting these mistakes and I think that was the point here; To make myself think about what areas I cut and plan my actions ahead. The last thing to do was to stick our silhouettes down on the landscape drawing to see how well we managed to make them fit in with the surroundings. The key here was to get the body size correctly.