Phew! It’s fair to say 2011 has been an exciting one – not only did I have a great time illustrating A Bear Ate all the Brussels Sprouts for the iPad back in the summer, but I’ve also had the huge privilege of working with the guys at Realmac Software on yet another large scale drawing project…

Click here to read more, and view the artwork in more detail

Earlier in the year, Realmac asked me to illustrate one of seven T-shirt designs for their trip to WWDC in San Francisco… but little did I know they had much bigger plans for me! A few months later, I heard from them again, asking if I was interested in redesigning their full range of company Avatars (online ‘alter-egos’ for all 8 of the Realmac team) – no easy task, considering they’ve had their old characters for the best part of 5 years and all come to love them like part of the family. Oh, and not to mention the fact that they were designed by the increadibly talented Gavin Strange and instantly recognised and loved by thousands of Realmac fans and followers the world over… no pressure there then!

But, of course, I’d have to be insane to turn down an opportunity like this.

The process was understandably a lengthy one – each character needed to work just as well on it’s own as it did as part of the larger group composition – but most importantly, being a tool for self promotion and identification, I wanted to make sure everyone was 100% happy with their own character and felt comfortable with the way it represented them. It took several iterations to really nail each character down, but I couldn’t be happier with the end results. The response I’ve had from the Realmac team and their fans across the internet has been overwhelmingly positive, and I really hope everyone continues to enjoy their new faces!

I was also really pleased to be given the opportunity to chip in and help design the layout and functionality for the Realmac company page, which shows off the artwork along with biographies for each of the team. I particularly love the way the background colour shifts as you click through the characters!

Below are a couple of sketches that show how some of the characters developed through various stages, along with a few examples of the final artwork. Alternatively, you can click here to download a higher resolution wallpaper (1920 x 1200) if you want to take a closer look, or maybe even slap it on you desktop for a while if that’s the way you roll.

And finally, I also produced a set of ‘low-fi’ alternatives that utilised a slightly chunkier and more expressive drawing style. This started out as a bit of a personal exercise with Luke’s amphibian character, experimenting with different brush sizes/dynamics in Photoshop, but I was so pleased with results I couldn’t help but show the team – they liked it too and were up for me producing all 8 characters this way. I’ll be interested to see what uses they can find for them!

Hint: Click the fireplace to extinguish and relight it!

Click here to read on…

The more I dabble with 3D, the more frustrated I become with the huge render times associated with Mental Ray and other similar rendering engines (sometimes upwards of 30-40 mins per frame), particularly when the final image does little to justify the wait. Anything short of a degree in photorealistic rendering techniques or the patience to juggle an endless set of variables and everything tends to come out looking like your everyday household plastic CGI Junk.

As a reaction to this, I’ve found a growing appreciation for the benefits of lowpoly/realtime graphics, typically seen in some of the less demanding video games of the past few year. If you take away all your fancy Parallax Occlusion maps and Realtime Radiosity you’re left with a reminder that style is everything.

Perhaps the defining example of this would be Team Fortress 2 by Valve – a game that, while I’ve never really played in great depth, I’ve always admired from a distance for it’s tasteful restraint. In a time where photorealism was considered the holy grail of realtime rendering, Valve took a step back and created a game that could run on even the most basic of systems and still look absolutely stunning. They were able to do this by utilising what they called ‘Illustrative Rendering’ – a technique that involved mimicking the look and feel of a painted 1950′s cartoon and placing more importance in the texture work and overall art direction than any unnecessary technological gimmicks.

Even the 3D animation crowd has begun to embrace a similar approach, with films such as the spectacular Wood by McBess, and Meet Buck by TeamCerf turning their back on the glossy raytracing ideals of Pixar in favour of a more hand-drawn, diffuse lit treatment.

With all this as inspiration, I wanted to set myself a project – to create a fully realised and self contained ‘game asset’ complete with texture maps (diffuse and specular) that could be rendered in realtime in the Maya viewport, be viewed and lit from all angles while maintaining a strong illustrative style and celebrating the lowpoly aesthetic.

I decided to model my beloved Yamaha APX700 – an Electro-Acoustic guitar I’ve owned and loved for the best part of 5 years. It’s nothing fancy, but it plays like a dream and suits me well.

The first step was to draw up a set of orthographic designs – useful for the next stage of modelling but also my chance to adapt and stylise the shape, colours and overall feel of the guitar. This involved stripping away unnecessary details while exaggerating other aspects to push them away from being too lifelike and give the shapes a ‘chunkier’ cartoon feel.

The next stage involved modelling. I’ve often modelled in Maya, but never with a mind to keep the number of polygons to a bare minimum. I wanted enough detail to describe the shape of the guitar but wasn’t afraid to show a few faceted curves – it all added to the desired look.

I also wanted to be mindful of my mesh flow, making sure to avoid any 5 sided polys and general ugliness. I’m sure I could reduce the number of polygons further, particularly on the front face of the guitar body, but I couldn’t quite work out the ‘correct’ way to do this. Besides, I was too proud of my idea to make the strings from just 2 polygons and a transparency map, that it didn’t really seem to matter!

I’m going to jump ahead a little and forgo describing the process of UV mapping in any detail, except to say it was difficult, boring and I probably could have done a much better job. But for a first attempt I’m pretty happy – I tried to prioritise areas with more detail and relegated any hidden faces to the dark gloomy corners of the map.

Below is the finished Diffuse map – it’s made up of all my hand-painted textures and colours multiplied with a baked ambient occlusion map (OK, so I had to use Mental Ray once, but it’s a necessary evil and reasonably quick). I took a couple of cues from the Team Fortress 2 style guide here – firstly to keep the textures as simple as possible and use a blocky ‘potato stamp’ painting style to weather the surfaces slightly, and secondly to add some subtle highlights along the more prominent edges.

Below the diffuse is the Specular Map – quite simply, the lighter areas will appear more glossy and reflective when viewed at an angle relative to a light source.

The image above is a very simple ‘full bright’ render showing the model with only the diffuse map applied and no lighting of any kind. I was almost tempted to stop at this point and call it a day, but I couldn’t help trying to push things further and play around with some fancy CGFX shaders that claim to be able replicated the ‘Illustrative Rendering’ technique used in Team Fortress 2 right inside the Maya viewport. Anyone familiar with Maya will know it’s less than accommodating when it comes to working in realtime and even with these shaders I had a hard time getting the desired results.

The first shader I tried was the Generic BRDF shader by Brice that, among other things, lets you use a 2-dimensional image map to control the light-to-shade falloff relative to both the light source and the viewing angle – this means you can easily achieve a dramatic hard edge terminator and warmer/cooler colour tints (I also used this to add a slight bounce on the shaded rim of the object). However, it turns out that having an AMD graphics card meant a lot of the more advanced shader effects didn’t work on my computer, and the latest beta versions failed to even load at all. The 1.1 was the most stable, and allowed me to use the BRDF ramp, but little else.

The next and only other shader that gave me any decent results was the lcUberShader by Leocov, but again most effects didn’t work on my AMD card. Fortunately, Leo had created a ‘AMD compromise’ version of his shader several months ago, and even though he’d taken down the link (due to issues with the Normal Mapping) I was still able to find the file through a old google cache… thus confirming my status as fully fledged net-ninja :)

This shader was perfect, except for two things – the aforementioned normal maps (they didn’t work at all) and the lack of the BRDF style shading, the latter of which being the most important feature I was after. So, I decided to get messy and open up both shader files in TextEdit, scour them down to the bare essentials and compare the differences. After several days up to my knees in some of the most intimidating code I’ve ever encountered I was able to successfully transplant the necessary scripts from the first to the second shader and even fix the Normal map issue while I was at it (that might sound pretty impressive, but it took 5 hours to figure out I only needed to change one word).

I would post a download for this new ‘hybrid’ shader, but I fear Brice and Leo might be inclined to turn up at my house, break both my legs and burn their mutant offspring before it does any harm.

Below is a breakdown of each of the shader effects I’m using and how they work together – and finally, beneath that are a few detailed shots of the shader in action and a 360 animated GIF of the model!

So there we have it! I hope this post has been at least vaguely interest for anybody reading it. I’m hoping to try my hand at modelling a few more objects in the coming weeks and even play around with the idea of producing an animation of some kind further down the line.

Thanks for reading!

Below are a few screenshots and process images from my latest project – an interactive children’s book for the iPad. You can download it here, or read on for more details.

This latest project has been tough but enjoyable – faced with the seemingly impossible task of fitting over a months worth of work into just two weeks, I didn’t have much choice but to pull out all the stops, put the kettle on and wave goodbye to my bed (on a side note, it’s interesting to discover how little sleep I need to get by, and that drawing for 24 hours straight can do strange things to my brain). Fortunately, I don’t remember the last time I’ve been so completely in love with a project that wasn’t self directed – it’s easy to put in the extra hours when you’re given the freedom to develop a personal connection with the work and produce something you can feel truly proud of. Of course, having a deadline with high stakes helps too!

I was approached by writer & producer Charles Kriel with a tantalisingly simple brief – to illustrate and animate an interactive children’s book for the iPad entitled ‘A Bear Ate All The Brussels Sprouts’. If I wasn’t already sold on the prospects of working on the iPad, then Charles’ succinctly charming story about a boy and his overactive imagination (let’s just say it wasn’t difficult for me to identify with the lead protagonist) as well as the freedom to take the artwork in my own direction was just too great an opportunity to miss.

Later on in the project I also had the chance to get to grips with the development environment and help work on some of the scripting and interactions, which after weeks of drawing was a welcome change of pace.

Over all it was an incredibly fun project, and I really felt like Charles and I made a good team – I’m hoping to work with him again in the near future.

The app is now live in the App Store, and will be presented by Charles at the Children’s Media Conference in Sheffield on Thursday the 7th July. We’re also hoping to push a 1.1 update in the coming weeks, which will add extra interactions, smoother transitions as well as a few hidden surprises! If you own an iPad, even if you don’t have any kids, you should definitely download it now! Oh, and for a limited time…it’s completely free!

Check out some screenshots below:

Also, below is some of my working process – the video is a demonstration of the underlying 3D reference model I created to help inform the perspective and lighting, allowing me to quickly draw the scene from any angle and keep things consistent.

This was the final selected design:

All seven Tees, freshly screenprinted – check out Realmac’s blog post to see them in more detail.

This was a second design that wasn’t included in the set (after seeing the other designs that stick closely to the silhouette of the logo I can understand why):

Watch the SD video below, or watch the full HD video on Vimeo by clicking here (highly recommended).

A little more info:
I’d recently bought myself a Canon 60D, mainly to replace my ageing 350D, but also with the intention of getting to grips with the HD video features. I’d heard a lot about the potential of DSLRs for video, but I really wasn’t prepared for just how amazing they can be! After all, by using an SLR you immediately have access to some of the highest quality and most affordable lenses around, and the ability to swap them out at a moments notice is a real benefit.

So this project was really born out of the process of learning to use the camera, but it naturally ended up developing into a more fully formed narrative as we went along. I hadn’t really thought of doing anything too fancy or cinematic, after all I only had a tripod and a couple of lenses – but I was keen to spend time making the most out of them. The fixed 50mm f/1.8 only costs £90, but delivers so much more than you would expect for that price. By stopping it all the way up and finding the right angles you can really emphasise the depth of field, adding that classic cinematic touch. For wide angle shots, I used the 18-135mm kit lens, which also became a really valuable asset due to the built in image stabilisation – without it, I just couldn’t have included any of the handheld or panning shots.

The final piece of kit that was a lot of fun to use was the time-lapse shutter – I spent more mornings that I care to remember trying to catch the perfect sunrise! But where better to do it than the Spanish countryside?

Anyway, a big thank you to my brother and Pete, who allowed me to endlessly film them on their days off, and for putting up with my rather inexperienced directorial approach (which including turning up for the first days filming with only 20% battery life remaining).

And finally, a huge amount of credit is also due to Ben Howard for the soundtrack, without which the film just wouldn’t have worked – it made editing the film into such a fluid and exciting process. Ben is an up and coming musician from Devon here in the UK – I remember once seeing him performing in the high street in Totnes (my Mum’s hometown – shout out!), so it’s great to see him gaining so much success. My brothers and I are all huge fans of his music and I hope this video helps to spread the word – if you like what you hear, his music is available on iTunes – download it now!

We also worked together on a new website for Digital Outreach, a scheme that delivers information campaigns to marginalised or potentially vulnerable people across the UK: