CAMERON ALISTAIR

Hello, my name is Cameron Alistair Craig and I am currently studying Digital Art and Animation at DigiPen Institute of Technology. This blog is a place for me to post all of my artwork and the process for that artwork as a way for me to document my journey and allow others to gain insight into that journey.

[cameronalistair]

Project Character Re-Render - PRJ 350 - Summer 2016

This is yet another re-render of my projects character Mina. This has actually turned out to be a very valuable project for me. When I show people my portfolio this character frequently stands out to people and having her there was very helpful on many occasions. The biggest thing she has that I have yet to repeat is that she’s somewhat appealing and people tend to like her a lot. 

Anyways, this has continued to surprise me but I’m so happy I took the time to finish her to this level. I have more things people have asked me to change so maybe I’ll redo her again eventually. 

Thanks again to Nick Kondo for initially helping me design her: https://vimeo.com/nickkondo 

[cameronalistair]

Summer Semester Recap

Hello, It’s been a while! This is a quick post to recap my Sumer semester (which was a while ago). This was the first summer semester that I stayed in Redmond for and took classes. During that time I took a rigging class, I did a character pipeline workshop, and my projects team and I worked out our ideas.

I’ll cover the classes in other posts cause I just want to talk here about the things I learned over summer.

1. Invest the most time in the most important elements of a project. If there is a key part of a project you want to work on spend the time to get it right. For the character I made I didn't force myself to get the face right and that killed the project.

2. Spend time learning something you are unsure about including in your career. I was contemplating pursuing rigging and in ordered to get a better idea of how I felt about it I took a class in it. I think this was a good decisions and forcing myself to learn it sort of proved to me how much I didn't want to do it full time while also giving me a better perspective on the field and how I build my characters. 

3. Have a plan and when working on a project find the vision ASAP. Projects with no vision will result in a lot of wheel spinning. It is possible to do a project without a single vision or core idea but this will take much longer and may not get a better result. Every change in a vision must push the project forward in some way or you run the risk of going in circles. 

4. Don’t be afraid to drop something if it isn’t working. My team and I had one direction we were going for our game and we decided (very late) to change the vision because we weren’t interested in the current idea. This was a good decision but it should have been made earlier. 

5. I learned a lot about team projects, how team dynamics work and how project development works. There’s too much to really write it all here but the big thing is that vision is important and a cool idea without a vision is useless and in some cases destructive. 

[cameronalistair]

Final Project - Pipeline Workshop - Summer 2016

This is Keya, she was the first character I started working on full time after deciding to do character modeling and she is where I experimented with a lot of the character art pipeline for more realistic characters for the first time.

This character overall I would say was a failure as a product. She isn’t finished enough and comes across a little bland and her facial anatomy is totally wrong which resulted in her looking a bit weird. 

That said I don’t think the project was a waste of time by any means. I learned a TON during this project and I continue to learn from it in retrospect. A couple huge mistakes I made were: not giving her face enough time, not getting feedback from enough people, I didn’t leave enough time for building her props,  and I underestimated how hard realistic characters are. 

Some thing I did right: I scoped pretty well, I chose the bodysuit design to make the character more straight forward and that worked, my pipeline overall was a good one and I was able to tweak it after this process. 

So overall this project was hard and it hurt to not be successful with it in the time I had but I learned some valuable lessons from it that helped me over the next semester. 

There is a lot of process and technical information on how this character was built that I don't have the time or space to put here. I will hopefully do a post on my character pipeline in the future that will cover this. 

Teacher: Jaclyn Lake (http://www.jlynlake.com)

[cameronalistair]

Rigging Final - CG 375 - Summer 2016

This was the final rig for my rigging class over summer. It has IK/FK switching on the arms and legs, the spine can stretch, the hips can be controlled independently from the other joints, the head can be made to follow the shoulders or keep its position, and the shoulders can be made to follow the torso, hips, center of gravity or the world.  

This was a really interesting class. I still don’t know how I feel about rigging as a whole. Overall I don’t feel I am bad at it and I love getting a character to move properly, however I do find the process a bit tedious and it’s more technical than I would like. Overall I don’t think I’d take a rigging job but if rigging were a part of my job I wouldn’t mind too much. However, I’d much prefer to work with someone that builds rigs or an in house auto rig system like the Animation and Rigging Toolset made by Epic.

Class Taught by Doug Magruder: https://vimeo.com/dougmagruder

[cameronalistair]

Character Art

I have finally decided on a focus! I am going to pursue 3D character art for games. I am going to learn as much of the pipeline as I can and ideally I want to be able to do everything up to animation with my primary interest being the concept and sculpting phase. 

This decision was largely influenced by taking a Zbrush class in the spring that I loved and helped me realize how much I really do like character/creature art. My junior projects class was also very influential in this decision because it helped me get a feel for the whole pipeline and getting projects into a game engine. 

The engine side of things is very important to me I am realizing because I love to create something that can be viewed in real time. I also managed to put my animated short and character into VR and being able to see a place and character you’ve built “in person” is really awesome. 

It’s a huge relief to finally have made this decision because now I know what to do to ensure I get the most out of my senior year and I feel like I am really working toward something. 

[cameronalistair]

Finished Junior Year

This post is a little late coming but here it is: I’ve finished my Junior spring semester at Digipen and with that all of my projects over this semester and year. One more year to go! This was a really good year for me at school. I feel like I’ve grown a lot and I am much more relaxed about things than I have been in previous years. It’s interesting cause this was actually a pretty hard year overall but it was probably one of the least stressful just because my mindset seems to have changed so much. 

I think if I had to summarize what I’ve learned this semester it would be that worry is a misuse of the imagination. Learning to worry less has been the single biggest help for me both in how I deal with school, relationships, and my own self esteem. Because of this I have felt more creative, more productive, and just more in tune with things. 

Looking forward I have a year left of school then I move out into the world to find a job and my place in the industry. It’s a bit scary to have it coming up so fast when I’ve just begun to be comfortable with school but I’m also excited for it. 

So here I am working to worry less, work harder, and love what I am doing more.

[cameronalistair]

Spring and Summer 2016 Paintings

These are the main paintings I finished over the spring semester and summer semester. I finished all of them during classes I audited and a summer landscape painting workshop. All of them were done from life except the top one in which the model was painted from life and the background added based on a photo. 

I’ve painted a lot more than I expected over these last two semesters and I’m really happy I did. It’s fun seeing myself progress and identify where I need to focus in the future. 

Teachers:  Doug Parry: https://www.facebook.com/dougparyart/ Ryan Finnerty: http://www.finnertyfinnerty.com

[cameronalistair]

Project Character Re-Render - PRJ 350 - Summer 2016

This s a re-render of my character from my projects class last semester. I was never really happy with my previous turnarounds so I decided to bring it into Unreal and redo it.  In general I am looking at updating some stuff in my portfolio so I wanted to make this more presentable. 

Materials done in Substance painter and substance designer, modeled and rigged in Maya, rendered in Unreal Engine 4.

[cameronalistair]

Final Assignment Render - CG 305 - Spring 2016

This is the final result for my final Zbrush project. This was one of my favorite assignments at school so far. It took a lot of time and work but I really enjoyed the process and I’m fairly happy with the result. It’d be fun to go back in and polish it up some more and maybe use a better renderer.

This was made and rendered entirely in Zbrush. 

Se my post on the concept stage of the project for more backstory and details on the creature and design. (http://cameronalistair.tumblr.com/post/146558372969/final-assignment-concepts-cg-305-spring-2016)

Teacher: Randy Briley (http://www.krop.com/randybriley/#/)

[cameronalistair]

Final Assignment Concepts - CG 305 - Spring 2016

These are my thumbnails and concepts for my final Zbrush assignment. For the project we had to do some kind of character design (human or not) and I wanted to work on a type of symbiotic creature design. 

I had an early sketch I did that inspired the idea and I tried some alternate concepts out (top image) but my initial idea ended up being the one my teacher and I liked the most so I pursued developing the specifics of the design from there (remaining images).

The idea behind the creature is it floats around in caves and captures another creature as a host of sorts. The creature can survive on its own but it and the creature it attaches to are stronger together. In this instance it attached to a woman that was exploring the cave. Part of the idea was sort of taking a weird spin on the Beauty and the Beast idea but making it a little creepier and more intimate with them being attached to each other and needing to learn to live together. 

Teacher: Randy Briley (http://www.krop.com/randybriley/#/)

[cameronalistair]

Sketches - iPad Pro - Spring 2016

At the end of last semester I got and iPad pro and the Apple Pencil and these are some of the sketches I have done on it using the app Procreate. Next to my laptop the iPad has easily been one of the best investments I have made. I use it all of the time and having the freedom to be able to just draw digitally has been wonderful. 

I also got the Astropad app and I have been using that with my iPad anytime I need to draw or sculpt on my laptop. This has made my zBrush class a lot easier and that extra flexibility has been amazing. I never took to drawing tablets like the Intuos’ and the Bamboos. They always felt weird to me and I’ve never been able to get the kind of control I want from them. The iPad has definitely given me that and it’s the closest digital drawing has come to feeling like paper for me. 

I’d definitely say if you are a digital artist to look into getting something like it. I have tried the Surfacebook and the Surface as well and the most recent models are very good as well. 

[cameronalistair]

Sketches - Art 120 - Spring 2016

During this semester I had the opportunity to TA for a new freshman class called art 120. This is essentially a sequel to the drawing fundamentals class in the first semester that builds on the basic principles taught in that class and applies them to more organic shapes like rocks, bones, branches, cloth, and ending with heads, hands, & feet. 

The class ended up being a wonderful opportunity to go back to the fundamentals and also think about how to explain them which in turn helped me understand them even better. 

Teacher: Stephon Moody (http://chameleonperformance.com)

Artwork Property of DigiPen Institute of Technology

[cameronalistair]

Animation Final - Projects 350 - Spring 2016

Here it is, my final submission for my Junior Projects class! This has been a two semester project in which we were all required to complete a 3d animated short on our own from concept to finished animation. 

This was a fantastic learning experience for me. I was able to be a part of the whole pipeline from beginning to end which was wonderful and I learned a lot about the whole process. I also as a bonus rendered my animation in a game engine rather than using Maya as we would normally do. This gave me the opportunity to learn how to use Unreal Engine 4 and the pipeline for getting assets into the engine and utilizing them in an animation.

I am actually quite happy with how the short turned out as well. It was what I wanted it to be and while I missed the mark on polish I am still more than happy with the project as a whole. 

Teacher: Nick Kondo (http://www.yellownecktie.com)

Artwork Property of DigiPen Institute of Technology

[cameronalistair]

Programming & Physics

This semester I took a class on programming and a class on physics. I have never taken physics before so the math side of that class was quite a struggle but I actually enjoyed the theory side of it quite a lot. We learned about how light and other kinds of waves work and what causes things like mirages and stuff like that. 

The programming class was a scripting class for Maya using python. That class was interesting but it also reminded me why I pursued art instead of programming. While I still don’t feel like I’m bad at programming I really don’t enjoy it most of the time especially when it’s at such a granular level. Dealing with syntax and spending so much time trying to figure out what to type to accomplish what I wish to accomplish ends up being very frustrating to me. I was probably spoiled by having started on things like HTML and Excel which hold your hand through much of the process. Still I learned some stuff and I was even able to apply some of it during the semester. 

[cameronalistair]

Bust Sculpt Final - CG 305 - Spring 2016

This is the final submission for my bust sculpture assignment. I learned a lot on this assignment, mostly that I really like ZBrush, sculpting, and character art. After this class I’ve decided I’m going to move forward with pursuing character art in games and over summer I am taking a class that will cover the full character pipeline from concept to finished piece. 

Regarding the piece, I am not especially happy with how it turned out. I may go back in and clean it up but I’m not sure. Overall it was an excellent learning experience and I’m incredibly happy with that aspect it. 

Artwork Property of DigiPen Institute of Technology

[cameronalistair]

Best of - FLM 210 - Spring 2016

This is a collection of my better shots from my photography class this semester. Many of the first few weeks we were given different words and told to shoot stills that illustrated those words, things like Motion, Rhythm, Depth, etc.. 

The final shot was a composite project where we went out and shot a setting and then we did green screen shoots in class and composited a person into the background we shot. During this we learned al to about lighting and color matching when setting up a composite. 

This was a fantastic class and I had a lot of fun with it. It was awesome learning how cameras work and being able to experiment and just figure things out organically. I also helped my teacher with a film shoot for the school music department during finals week which I will post a link to once it is online. 

Instructor: Chris Mosio (http://www.mosiomedia.com)

Artwork Property of DigiPen Institute of Technology

[cameronalistair]

Bust Sculpt WIP - CG 305 - Spring 2016

This is my work in progress for my first project in my Zbrush class. It’s the first time I have used Zbrush and I love it so far. I still have a ton of work to do with this sculpt but I’m fairly happy with how it’s going all things considered. 

My next steps for it are to go over it with another cleanup pass on the sculpt, then I’ll be adding more subtle texture and details, then I will paint the skin, and then I’ll add the hair using Fibermesh.

Artwork Property of DigiPen Institute of Technology