Cristina's Blog

Exploration Vehicle. Thinking how many people would present a normal land or space based vehicle, I was determined to break the mould and do something completely different. Thus my idea was an alien Submersible based upon an insect civilisation and the design was sketched based upon those ideas. The body of the vehicle was all monocoque construction and thus meant lots of extruding of polygons to achieve a satisfactory look. This was very time consuming but was indeed nothing compared to the UV mapping which took a complete weekend and several days to get right. There are several interesting technological aspects here – firstly, the impellors at the rear (of which there are 3) were designed from scratch using an airfoil section similar to NACA 2409 – this was done by taking a very short cylinder and flattening it quite a lot before using the vertex edit to form the trailing edge. Once the desired airfoil section was completed, this was then lengthened to form the...

Digital painting Derelict/overgrown city For this project we had to choose a theme from toxic jungle or overgrown city. I chose the overgrown city, although my choice of plants also verges on toxic jungle. The overgrown city theme was to create a digital painting of an overgrown city set in the future. I started with the idea of a plant on the hill leading into the foreground where the houses could be seen obviously destroyed by the plants and then onto high-rise buildings again plant infested. Finally the background cityscape with a specular sunset. I used Photoshop and a graphics tablet to create the picture.  The plants were done in a toxic green with orange on the leaves and looking to the top left, the plant is just in the process of bringing down an advert panel which is causing the electrical sparking. The windows were all made using gradient fill and transparency layers. Perspective has been altered to give the impression that the plants are actually m...

                                                            VFX Fundamentals We were tasked with providing a vfx action sequence for the robot invasion project. In order to achieve this, we need to know how to control the camera with regards to the brightness of the image and the sharpness of the image as these are fundamental requirements for any production. For example it is no good having a very blurry image which is very nearly black, we need to see something adequately sharp and light enough to be able to see. The factors influencing how bright or dark a particular picture turns out involve the lens aperture (how wide the hole in the lens is, similar to the pupil of an eye), an...