Run Hero!

Over the Spring Semester I volunteered on a game project called Run Hero! It was a collaborative effort between fellow students from my school, San Jose State University, and from University of California, Santa Cruz.

For part I worked on the user interface of the game. Initially the game leads wanted me to explore different looks before settling on a flat look for the icons. Here are a few samples of the initial exploration.

Here are the final icons of the first draft.

After receiving some feedback from their professors, the game leads decided they wanted a "jeweled" look for the icons. Here are some of my explorations for the jeweled look.

Besides the jeweled look, they also wanted to have special icons, which are icons that greater effects than the regular icons. Here are the final icons for the game.

Besides designing the icons, I also designed other aspects of the user interface, including the bars where the player interacts with the icons, the health bars, and menu screens. Below are explorations of  all those aspects.

My ANI 115 Portfolio

Here is my portfolio for my ANI 115 class. This is the same class in which I created my short film "A Special Treat." In the portfolio are model sheets, character poses and other goodies for the short film. There are also drawings I have done throughout the semester. Enjoy!

End of Semester Art work

Huzzah! I survived another semester at San Jose State University! And I am so proud of what I created. Here are the final illustrations that I created for my Illustration class. They are all story moments from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. I hope you enjoy them!

As a little twist at the end, we had to take one of our story moments and stylize it. We picked a style or styles that we were inspired by and admired and try to recreate it using the composition of our story moment. For my stylization, I was inspired by John Singer Sargent and Vincent van Gogh.

And these are the paintings I was primarily inspired by.

Sargent

Van Gogh

A Special Treat

Here it is! The final short for my animation class! It was a semester long project that is finally finished. I worked on everything from story to character design to layout. And I did the animation of course. It was quite the long project, but I feel so proud of the end result. I hope you enjoy A Special Treat.

My Second Stop Motion Animation

Wow! I can’t believe I managed to pull this off. This is my second stop motion animation! From coming up with the idea to submitting the final export to my professor, this animation was completely in a day and an evening! All while having a fever and coughing my brains out. I probably should’ve done something a little less ambitious since I was sick, but I was really inspired to create this animation, and I had to run with it. All in all, I am very proud for what I was able to accomplish. Enjoy!

If you are interested to know how this stop motion was created, you can check out my Physics of Animation blog, the class that this assignment was for, in the link below.

http://taramuellerphys123.blogspot.com/2015/11/character-animation.html

Monolith at the Griffith Observatory

So, I recently finished my first true illustrations of the semester. Woohoo! The assignment was to paint a monolith in three different images and convey three different emotions. I used a combination of photos and painting to create my images. The setting is the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, CA.

Can you guess what the emotions are? If so then, yay! If not, then I guess I need to keep working at it. Enjoy!

The emotions I was going for: 1. Happy; 2. Somber; 3. Dramatic

Semester Update

So I am half way through the fall semester! I can't believe how fast it has been going. But to mark the occasion I thought it was only appropriate to post some stuff I've been up to for these past few weeks.

I'll starting with my first painting of the semester.

This was an assignment based off of the Basic Rendering Series from Matt Kohr's Ctrlpaint.com. If you are a digital painter and haven't visited this website yet, I highly recommend that you do!
This assignment was a rendering challenge where we had to paint an object based off of a given photograph and line drawing. I was pleased with how it came out, but I was looking forward to getting even better.

A couple paintings later and this is where I ended up. I used reference to get the texture right. The drawing is based off of a still life, which I altered more to my liking. I was extremely happy with how much I improved with painting textures.

So I realize that I haven't posted any sketches since my mid program portfolio sketchbook, well it is time to change that. Here are some sketches of bunnies that I have done during the semester.

Well, That is all for now. I will post more stuff soon.