This week, myself and many other students visited Disneyland Paris for a couple of days to soak in the spectacular scenery and experience some amazing rides!
So I thought that in this blog post I’d talk about the trip briefly and how the atmosphere in Disneyland was incredibly inspiring!
So after about a 14 hour coach trip followed by 7 hours sleep, myself and my friends decided to begin exploring the parks, starting with the Disneyland park and the Walt Disney Studios park the following day.
In short, the rides were amazing and each section of the parks felt unique in their own way. When I wasn’t on the rides I took in the unbelievable scenery and the close attention to detail Disney had included inside of the park.
From Thunder Mountain to Main Street USA, the environments never failed to impress me and with me being very creative person, the environments Disneyland had to offer for me were inspiring; especially with the unbelievable amount of effort put into the presentation of the parks. But hey, what do you expect from Disney?
Another thing I really found interesting about the parks were the sense of immersion each ride/ area had. For instance the Tower of Terror genuinely creeped me out just by the exterior and interior design alone!
Paintings glaring at you to the wall crumbling to pieces, it was very creepy and unnerving yet at the same time unbelievably clever, cool and creative; to top it off the build up to the ride felt worth it and definitely delivered.
Another good example would be the Rock ‘n’ Rollercoaster, before you entered the ride it felt like you were entering backstage at an Aerosmith concert due to tonnes of music memorabilia and posters being placed all over the place; not to mention the ride was awesome!
The light shows were also another highlight from the Disneyland visit, mainly because of how they were presented: they were presented through high quality, pixel perfect projections and looked amazing. Below is a clip of some footage I recorded of the Star Wars light show I went to on the Thursday evening…
I also thought that the addition of the characters was amazing as well, as I got to see all of my favourite Star Wars characters on stage which was honestly so cool!
Overall the experience that I had gained from Disneyland was absolutely amazing! I have been heavily inspired by my trip to Disneyland from a creative stand point due to the surrounding environments in the parks, not only that but I also got to have a great time and go in some amazing rides!
Around about mid January I made a start on this project; So this blog post, I’m going to be talking about my modelling progress and what I intend to do next in the project. So as I just mentioned, I made a start on modelling the Aku Aku mask from Crash Bandicoot, more specifically the Aku Aku from Crash Bandicoot Wrath of Cortex.
I decided to go with this version of Aku Aku because it had more to offer in terms of detail, such as more feathers and detail. So I gathered a few reference images and started modelling. To start with, since it was the simplest, I modelled Aku Aku’s face without all of his features.
This was because the process of creating his face was as simple as creating a cube and altering the scale until the shape eventually showed, trial and error as it were. Here’s the result…
Next I went on to create his eyes, this was also very simple. I created a basic cylinder, flattened it down and reduced the sub division axis of the cylinder to ten, giving of the eyes a blocky feel just like in the reference.
I then went on to create his eyebrows which again, were very simple to make since the process was very similar to the creation of the face, apart from a few edge loops here and there to adjust the shape.
I also created the bags underneath Aku Aku’s eyes by creating a cube and extruding out which gave me the result shown below…
Once this was done I then went on to creating the feathers that can be located on the top of Aku Aku’s head. When creating these I basically scaled a cube length and width ways, added an edge loop and extruded out from either side of the scaled cube, giving me the result below…
You can see that now Aku Aku is starting to piece together very nicely. Once I had created the eyebrows I then went on to create the nose; this was where it started to get more difficult for me! To start with I created the base shape of the nose and from there I extruded outward, adding a few edge loops where needed, carefully constructing the nose overall it looked pretty good in my opinion, the result is shown below.
Now onto the mouth; again this was where it got awkward and difficult. I started off by creating the upper lip and making my way around from there, slowly creating the lower lip. Once this was done I added a few edge loops for good measure and altered them until I thought the shape looked right. This was the result.
If I’m honest I think I may have to re-create the mouth but for now the shape should be fine. As for Aku Aku’s teeth, I’m thinking about just creating a normal map on his face where his teeth would be, just to give the illusion that they’re there, however if I have to model the teeth then I will do at a later date.
Overall I’m really happy with how this model has turned out so far, I think that my focus when I return to the model is that I’m going to UV the model and take it into Mudbox for adding more finer details such as wood scratches and indentations to make the model look better overall.
Josh CG-Next Gen Blog 