As part of my initial research I created a padlet document to serve as a mood board that would be open for all my team members to contribute any pieces they felt I should be aware of in guiding my future modelling work.
https://padlet.com/tschweizer06202211/cat-kaiju-mood-board-5p0d7cwx6rg8t4aw
The link to the padlet is posted above.
Alongside simply finding pieces of work by others about neofuturism and brutalism I also found design blog posts about XCOM 2’s city design. Since this was one of the inspirations that I was given by the team I figured reading and understanding these design blog posts would help me understand what I was looking for in my work.
https://xcom.com/news/art-of-xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen-abandoned-city-concept-art/
https://xcom.com/news/en-the-environments-of-xcom-2-advent-city-center/
https://xcom.com/news/en-the-environments-of-xcom-2-small-town/
In addition to these blog posts I found two articles that could help me in understanding the design philosophies of the two different architecture styles.
First was “The Aesthetics of Science Fiction. What does SciFi Look Like After Cyberpunk?” written by Rick Liebling posted on Medium. This document goes over several architecture’s connections to sci-fi and our changing vision of the future but does directly speak about Brutalism and it’s representation in the genre giving me more information to base my designs on.
Secondly was A century of Futurist Architecture: From Theory to Reality by Farhan Asim and Venu Shree which directly speaks about neofuturism’s design principles, namely a focus on ‘modern’ inventions in technology for its material such as glass and lightweight aluminum with a focus on abstract design.
I also looked into how to make use of the Shatter function in Maya via its online documentation and youtube tutorials which was simple to understand and should be easy to implement into my design pipeline in future. This youtube video provided me with lots of information and demonstrations.
I also watched a few tutorials on rigging to refresh myself and get my accustomed to rigging an entire skeleton as opposed to just a jaw and face as I had done last semester.
This video provided me a lot of information on rigging and animation and how to set up constraints and controllers so that animations need not be done directly with the joints which would be an issue. As modeling the cat would be my first major foray into organic modeling I looked up some quick tutorials online and this one taught me a lot about subdividing my models after creating basic shapes and extensive use of the crease tool to enhance both my control and the organic look of the model.
I also looked at some quick tutorials on low poly modeling for cats to get an idea how others in my field have done it which I can then use to help me when constructing my own. One such tutorial was this.
Lastly I also created some models this week at the request of my teammates so they could have more to present in an upcoming report they had to give. The models are shown below.
The models still need improvement and in future I think what will give me the most trouble is scaling the models appropriately. As I have not had to make multiple models in separate scenes that in the end need to be next to each other in a separate environment I am not used to having to worry about scale.