Silhouettes into Vehicles
To kick things off we had to grab a book containing images that we liked and some sort of an object, I chose James Gurney's Color and Light and a desk tidy wheelie bin, we then had to create silhouettes from both the book and the bin.
Using these silhouettes we then had to design some sort of vehicle. It then hit me that a wheelie bin was a difficult choice, it's mostly square, the only 2 interesting features are the lid and wheels and I'm using the word interesting lightly here. I spent a large amount of time just staring at the bin and my silhouettes and the only thing I could see was the bin, eventually I reach my boredom limit and grabbed a pen and some paper,then I began tracing/scribbling over some of the silhouettes to try and get something rolling.
Once I put pen to paper ideas began to flow, the frustration vanished and I really began to have fun with it. I wasn't concerned with how ridiculous the idea was at the moment, which is why I put things down like the police zapper, a potential new anti-riot vehicle? It probably would have been a good idea to produce another 2-3 more sheets like this, just dumping anything my brain was thinking out on paper, any number of great ideas could be hiding in there! After a few hours I did have a few things there were grabbing my attention, so I pushed forward with them and made more refined sketches of them.
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| Refined sketches |
Wheelie Bin to Aircraft
My mind was made up after doing these sketches, the monolithic, almost foreboding shape of the aircraft on the right had captivated me. I wish I had shown more love to the other designs too though, I think the middle 2 especially could have been really interesting with a little bit more design thought behind them, the irony of a wheelie bin being used for a street cleaner vehicle design was also pretty awesome!
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| The tiny, middle doodle had sealed the idea for me |
Try & Try Again
This is where everything for me took a wrong turn. I started to work out the design of the ship and how it all would operate but I simply didn't do enough of it, the deadline for the final was looming and I knew how slow I was at digital painting so maybe that's why I rushed through this stage. On another note I found it odd how a simple doodle can really make an impact, on the upper page, the right, center doodle was all it took for me to know that the thing I was designing was actually cool looking, which is why that pose has been repeated for other drawings. Overall though at this stage, I knew the aircraft design was missing something.
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| Aircraft Final: Version 1 |
That missing feeling carried over to the final and despite having help with the digital painting I was still lost. Looking back I can clearly see what went wrong, for starters where are my thumbs for this? I should have done a few dozen quick thumbnails to get a feeling for the piece, make sure everything was were I wanted it to be, instead of realizing mistakes half way in. This was a massive lesson for me and I wasn't going to end this with me being unhappy with it.
Everything was handed in on time, but I had to redo this piece for my own sanity, I knew I could do better. I hit the internet for inspiration and help, not just with the painting but for the design of the craft too. This should have been done from the start so that's another lesson learnt! I had redesigned the aircraft to my liking and had also produced a few quick sketches to get an idea for the final composition, I simply enlarged my favourite one and worked straight from that.
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When the good examples from that week were shown, the focus was not on the fanciest of visual or finals but mostly how well the vehicle was explained and presented. I know I can figure out how things work pretty well and I can also present my work to a high standard so that's exactly what I did this time around. The final visual I think is also a massive improvement over the previous one.
Now Build It
The next Visual Design class after the Workshops gave us the task to build our design out of what ever we wanted. I wanted at first to do card with paper mache but I found some card with really good thickness, probably too good as it was a pain to fold how I wanted so I dropped the paper mache idea.
I spent an hour trying to figure out how to create a decent net, because I wanted my model to be fairly accurate with some interesting details. My paper was beginning to wear thin from all the rubbing out... then it struck me to use 3DS Max to make the net.
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| Final net of the body |
Making the net in Max worked well, I forgot to take into account the folding thickness of the card so when it came to sticking it all together some places were off but for the overall complexity of the model it worked wonders. I even managed to add in a few moving parts, using a few split pins. I'll post a few development and final shots at the end of this post.
The Visual Design Intensive week really showed me how hard concepting can be, but also how rewarding it can be too. I was really surprised how much I learned over that week. Additionally it showed me how much extra work I need to do to even have a chance at being employed in the industry, not with just my drawing skills but with my design process too, thankfully I've still got a few more years to improve both aspects!
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| I kept everything open until the end to make sure I had easy access if I needed it |
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| The side thrusters attached with split pins |
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| Most of the extra parts cut out and glued, just need to attach them |
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| The back wings added a lot of weight, making it tip over. You can just about see the stack of pennies I added to the front for balance |
