Andrew Dowell

Understanding composition is one of the most important things you can learn as an artist.  Arranging the elements in the scene for a visually pleasing and balanced result will not only dramatically improve your work but it also guides the viewer through the image to what's important. Correct visual communication is everything. The 3 stages of Composition: 1. The focal element The image needs an element which helps to draws the viewer in immediately, this is the main thing the view should be looking at. Having too many focus points is as equally bad. This rendering from the Artist Sparth is an excellent example of Saturation and contrast. Other examples can include objects in motion, faces, and figures, guiding lines, framing, vignette and geometric shapes. 2. Structure The organization and arrangement of objects in the scene based upon a set of rules providing order and balance. a. The Rule of thirds is easy to use and any focus objects should be placed around one of the four cir...

Welcome, we made it to 2018. Well done everyone! It's been a roller coaster of a year but it's important to keep pushing and learning. Every day is a school day. Our big project continues to roll on with extensions and the internal-external pressure to do better keeps us on our toes. This week I learnt some great techniques for UE4. First a simple yet satisfying pulse directional material.  This material is designed to be used as an instance. You can pulse any two colours, broken into segments with a positive or negative speed direction. The emissive power will control the brightness and you can copy the black and white texture box below. A great time saver. (black and white texture box) And, finally how to bake complicated materials back down into a simple texture. Ever had that feeling of jaw-dropping disappointment when you open a new material to discover a spaghetti mess of textures and nodes like the one below? Fear no more, it's p...

Welcome readers, it's been a turbulent year but we made it! As the year reaches an end, it has been a stressful and busy time as we need to get a working prototype finished in just four weeks. Not an easy task, but I've had the privilege of being appointed Creative Director for the project. I'm learning a lot about people management and creative control in a short time with very little room for error. So far, it's going great and we have some excellent people working in our five-man team! Looking forward to testing this gun out on some zombie raptors! All aboard the cross-desert submarine armoured train! An 8-week deadline is insane. I just hope we can finish it all in time! Anyway, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas and a few self inflicted gifts have arrived early. A good strategy boardgame is always welcome and this one is a beast. Looking forward to playing this one! Thank you Asia Airmiles, I knew your points eventually wo...

So, we have been trying to get a new project off the ground. It's taking a while because of a number of issues outside of our control but the most important thing is planning. Some things to think about are: What are you creating? Build a working foundation. The scale of project and timescale implications. 1. The idea. - What do you want to create? A creative idea won't just magically appear just because you are at work or in a creative zone. They will happen anytime, any place. Just learn to recognize that all these things are connected, and subconsciously you are thinking about the project. Anything can become a game environment. make sure you record all of your ideas. I use 'google keep' on my phone. Here are some examples of inspiration. Movies Photographs Architecture Travel History Concept Art Stories Books Comics TV shows The internet. Pinterest is amazing for gathering ideas. Life Experiences 2. Purpose and Features - Why do you want t...

Within a 360 environment, it's difficult to get everything looking aesthetically balanced and often when using player guidance such as text it can get lost. This quick blog is to show you how to make the blueprint to avoid this. The text needs to be yellow, but so does the floor. When looking around it's not a problem but if a player is looking down the texts will mostly be unreadable. This is unacceptable so you can simply create an alternate colour for the overlap. Make sure Surface and Translucent are selected. And that you've disabled depth test. Or this will happen. The blueprint below shows how to set it up. The outline colour (red) lerps between the two base colour pre-sets (orange and white). The lerp alpha is masked with R and G channels and then clamped. Hope this helps and thank you again to Zoe Yu!

As part of a project, we wanted to have control over the skydome colour. Using a mixture of shades and textures, I created a single material with parameters to instance. The scene starts black but I left this parameter at zero to have more control later when I want to switch back up through the colour range. Plug in 'Enable Input' and 'Get player controller' to 'Event beginplay'. Next, create a timeline with two float tracks. These will control your fade in and out. These are connected to 'Set Scalar Parameter Value on Materials' nodes, with the target object mesh and parameter name. The two float tracks will act as a crossfade between the two materials. I want the material to change at the correct point in the game, so using a delay or timeline won't be suitable. Instead, I can use Custom events, I've renamed them to match the storyboard so we know exactly when to call them Finally, testing my material works exactly like I need it to. Using a s...

Just a quick post about my wargaming scenery collection. By day I'm usually painting in Substance painter or modeling in Maya, but night I'm getting my hands dirty, covered in glue, spray paint and grass flocking. In an effort to really think about the things I enjoy doing, and how I can build this into a career, I've been going back to my roots. Drawing, painting, model making and scenery. I've been building this scenery for a few weeks but actually don't have a game to play it with. I can probably use it with 'Dust' and at some point pick up the new Games Workshop 40k. Foam core buildings with broken cork pieces: Fimo polymer clay sand bags: Foam core small building generators: Small wooden pallets: Fence soft cover: Modular tower units: Cardboard and foam core Cargo crates: Foam core, fimo polymer clay bunker: Landing platform: Wooden balsa wood crates: Ancient monument: It's been great fun building these and hopefully will add some more in t...