Gardens Project 15: Weeks of Dithering.

Gardens Project 15: Weeks of Dithering.

There are eight videos tracing the development of the gardens project so far.

The first shows the introduction of the trees and bushes and ends with the errors around the second church.

The second shows the slide and the difficulties with climbing that made me seek a different solution.

Then there is the solution and some of the adjustments.

Followed by the speed adjustments that I needed for the locomotion to work more reasonably.

Then a run around the area when all that was worked out.

This was followed by a digression into the canopy scene – using one of my apple trees as the backdrop for a model of a branch with flowers.

and a video showing the resolution of that into a working scene.

The final video, necessarily at a lower resolution shows the current run through of the project, starting with the cave of the sibyl and running through the oak leaf, through Glover Street, with the falling toy, and into the canopy before returning to the oak leaf. There are still parts to be added to Glover Street and a few tweaks to be made to the canopy digression.

I also decided it was time I updated the webpage for this project how I remember myself

Drawing

I’ve carried on drawing every day and you can see the July images  here

The drawings are posted to Twitter and Instagram each day.

Lemniscate Explorations

A set of Lemniscate Explorations

I’ve also started a series of collage drawings of lemniscates that can be seen in this gallery Lemniscate Explorations

Gardens Project 14: Continuity

Gardens Project 14: Continuity, what’s the opposite of dilettante?

(That’s not a question btw I know it’s professional)

This is a record of the little that has happened in the last six weeks.

After the last blog post I went back to the drawing board with Chapter One and started to rebuild the Glover Street section. I’ve made four separate videos showing how progress is made. I build the model, test it, notice the mistakes and then rebuild it.

The video shows the rebuilt facade of the long run of houses and how the doors and windows don’t match up. It also shows the new look for the pavements and roadways.. The texture for the asphalt is unsuccessful.

The next day I corrected the facade, doors and windows, but there is a slight gap between pairs of houses, I did some work on the individual house models, notice the issue with the missing lintel above the door, the flashing seen on the second lintel where I’d replaced the face told me that the issue is a flipped normal. The asphalt is still off.

Did some work on textures for the park and for the roads, and also changed the pavement texture for a drawn filter.

From there I corrected the individual houses and copied the blocks inside the Unity model. I still need to close some gaps and bring in walls around the church and school and trees/bushes in and around the park and so on. It goes on step by step.

As a diversion I made an AR business card.

A simple animation based on my logo,

This is how it works on the phone. I’ll put an .apk on here with a link when it’s finished.

Drawing

I’ve carried on drawing every day and you can see the Mayimages  here

Gardens Project 14: Continuity

Studio Drawing

The drawings are posted to Twitter and Instagram each day.

Gardens Project 13: The Tale of the Hapless Amateur

Gardens Project 13: The Tale of the Hapless Amateur

Gardens

This is the kind of back where I was six months ago post, although inevitably I’m in a slightly different place. Work has meant that I was restricted to only a few hours a week and had begun by the end of March to resent it. As I write I have one more day to do before I am retired again.

I’ve got the start of the project to a workable state – there will be a lot of tweaking and tinkering before I declare ‘finished’ – and I think there is something of a story there. I’ve been moving, scaling, positioning, testing and retracting every aspect of the environment over the past couple of months. I’m trying to break the process down into a series of things I’m happy with and things I’m unsure of. The things I absolutely hate (for the moment) I just consign to an unused scene.

The combination of dilettanteism and lack of knowledge is the big drawback to making any project, every step I take with the head set on I see more errors.

My notes for this latest iteration read

‘hands not controllers. Fire out of sync on the torch. Stone texture unconvincing. Leaves too thick generally and difficult to navigate without instruction. Needs an indicator for the portals. There is a long wait for chapter one to load – needs a cut scene. Unsure about the news, not great when falling but OK when fallen? The roads aren’t smooth enough. Lots of the buildings don’t meet the ground very well.

There is too much empty space and aimless movement in the scene – I cut fourminutes out of the video moving between scenes over empty terrain. The main road is a disaster. The water in the boating lake needs to be moving and it needs to appear to be besides the sea. Savick scene is too empty and needs colour removing. Greenway was better in the previous iteration.’

At the moment I’ve decided that what’s missing overall, barring the glaring omissions, is the sense of confinement in each scene so I’m splitting chapter one back into three or four parts and making sure each section is clear and easily navigable. The trick is to limit the possible movements but make it appear as if there are places to go, if only you could get there. I think the aesthetic is going to change as well – it needs to look much more like its been drawn.

The Gardens project posts start here 

Drawing

I’ve carried on drawing every day and you can see the April images here

On May 5th I completed two years of drawing every day.

Gardens Project 13 The Tale of the Hapless Amateur

Coffee cup, drawn on 5th May 2022 two years after starting the daily drawings.

The drawings are posted to Twitter and Instagram each day.

Other Stuff

I’ve updated my Yorkshire Artists website, https://yorkshire.art/directory/artist/ian-latham/

and made a 360 video of the garden. The first part of it I inadvertently inserted the wrong clip so from about 25 seconds in for abour 90 seconds you can manipulate a flat image in space with your mouse button.