First Month Down...

So I finished my first month working at Ubisoft and living in France. It has been good, I think acclimatising to the heat will be slow and difficult, the language has also been a tough thing to sort out.

Art-wise I've been working on marketing art for Valiant Hearts whether that be gifs for journalists to use or perfecting screenshots. I'm nots sure what I'll be working on from now on but the launch party was last week and although I only worked on it for a month I went along and met some new people in the company. As Valiant Hearts is all painted and drawn by one artist its been difficult to meet other artists so far. Also Valiant Hearts has an awesome story and I really recommend it, if you haven't seen the trailer prepare yourself.

Aside from that I've been trying to finish off the Cart project but unfortunately I really don't like where it has gone, it simply looks poor and messy, so I think I'm going to go more towards a small turntable idea with a hatch on the floor and some wires and cables dragging around the floor but the cart will be central and focused. Making these changes will allow me to learn more and spend my time better, I'm going to rig and animate the cart, make particle effects for the thrusters, work on materials especially the forcefield and I'm going to try and use matinee to record it a turntable. Below are some images of how its looking at the moment and as you can see its not really working even though its early days, so I think I'm going to try and make more of a turntable for it.

Alongside this I am also working on some of the planning stages for my summer project, I chose the title Ruins to work on and have decided to create an environment based off Turner's "Caligula's Palace and Bridge" painting. The idea is to create the environment so that the spawn position is framing the environment in the same way as Turner's painting. The reason for this is so that I can use this project as a test for an idea I have for my Final Major Project that I'm not sure about. I want to create a gallery space where you can enter into famous/master's paintings. With Turner and constable style paintings I feel that the visual style shouldn't be too far off realism however I am uncertain about certain things such as lighting and fog.

"Caligula's Palace and Bridge" by J M W Turner

An engraving based on Turner's painting by Edward Goodwill. Found here

As you can see Turner's painting is very foggy and interesting, this will be pretty tough to replicate and I will update soon as I have started to play about with this idea. Fortunately for me some other artists used Turner's paintings for some more refined pieces allowing me to use them as reference for the architecture.

Lastly, working hard is difficult here for some reason I don't know why but in Leicester I could work all day at uni and then carry on. Here I'm finding that mentality pretty difficult to find. Lets hope I can get it back because I NEED to get better and I NEED to improve my portfolio and I NEED to make the most of working for the likes of Ubisoft...