Holidays with the Hoodlums

It's been an extremely busy Holiday break for me.I've gotten a lot of things done but I'm not quite at the place where I can show all of it yet. I have gotten 2 projects just about finished up and ready for my portfolio out of the original seven that I hoped to get through. 

I'm just about done with 3 more, although I've put down my robot with all the gears and I won't be touching it until I'm done with the other two. I spent far too much time on it this week trying to get the materials working right and the lighting/rendering done. I haven't been too successful and I have decided to just walk away for now before I get too frustrated with it. Hopefully I can pick it back up refreshed and ready to try again in a little bit.

I'm hoping to finish up King today, even though there is so much more I want to do with him. My problem is that I am such a perfectionist that I have a hard time ever calling something "done." It's a blessing and a curse. But I have decided that for now I need to put my nit-picking tendencies aside and call it.  I finished up his textures yesterday by fixing up his pants and adding dirt and stains to his shoes, scarf, and hat. Ideally I'd like to add more to his jacket and some dirt to his pants, but I think that if I kept trying for my ideal vision of him I'd never put the project down.

I love the way his shoes turned out, although you don't really get to see them in the full image.

My hope for today is to get his renders redone with the new textures and a turn table going. I have a second computer set up to handle my renders so I can hopefully finish up the textures for my piano, but I may have to do some of my class assignments for school today instead. Either way I'll be continuing to get stuff done.

Holiday Post

Well there's only 42 minutes of Christmas left, but since it still technically IS Christmas I figured I'd just make this a holiday post or something.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

I'm going to do a quick post of a drawing I just finished. It's something I did for fun since I don't get to do too much 2D these days. The first time I've used a pen to draw in about a year too.  Took me roughly 2 hours to do.

Again, just something I made up for fun so I hope you enjoy it.


(scanner is on the fritz so I had to take a photo, I'll try to upload a better quality image when I can)

I Heart Textures

I'm back again, and so soon too! I couldn't stay away really. I kept telling myself I didn't have enough to post yet, but that's really not true at all. I've been working almost all week on my portfolio pieces and I gotta say I really do love 3D.  It's hard for me sometimes because I struggle with it much more than I do with 2D. Most of which can be attributed to inexperience, but I also know that I sometimes struggle to grasp the more technical side of the 3D world. I know I can handle the technical aspects, but I do tend to have to put more time and effort into learning and understanding them. But once I understand something it becomes second nature and the more this happens the more confident I become and the more I enjoy and look forward to working.

Anyways, enough of all that! Since I'm saving all my rendering until next week, I decided to move on from my robot/oracle, and start working on the next thing. While I really want to keep working on King, I realized it would be better to get my smaller projects out of the way first. It would be bad if I spent my entire Christmas break working on him and ended up with only one thing for my portfolio. So some debate over what to work on I decided it was high time I revisited my piano.

I originally modeled this piano for my  3D Enivornmental Design class. It was for a group project in which we had to recreate an entire room. The hardest part was that all the models also had to be to scale, which was something I had never had to do before. So this piano is based on an actual physical piano that I got to sit there and measure with a ruler and a tape measure.

The original version of the model is high poly and the textures were done procedurely (this was before I really knew much about procedural shaders) in Maya.

 Here's a picture of what the actual piano looked like.

Since modeling it I have reduced it to a low poly version, which is what I have been working on this week. I started by first re-laying the UVs so that they would take up the majority of the UV space.

And currently I am working on retexturing the whole thing. I have been using a mixture of photographs as well as hand drawn elements to not only give the piano my own unique touch but also to help enhance it's realism. My favorite thing about texturing is that it really allows me to draw on my fine art expertise. I absolutely love drawing and creating my own textures by hand.

Right now I am focusing on adding in damgage and the kind of details that will give the piano a worn out look. I am not trying to copy the appearance of the original piano that I photographed and measured since that was only a requirement when I was using it for my class assignment. I'm maybe half way there with the textures. It's taking me longer since I am working at home and don't have access to a wacom cintiq. As much as I desperately want a cintiq they're too expensive for me to be able to afford on my own. It's unfortunate because I know that I could do everything in about a third that amount of time if I had one.

Anyways, even though I'm not done, here's a quick render of what the textures look like on the model so far. I'm only focusing on the color at the moment so ignore things like reflection and specularity as I have yet to get to them. Also remember this is the low poly version of the model so it doesn't look exactly like the one above.

Heavy Metal

It's holiday break for RIT which means I'm nice and comfy back at home in Maryland. Of course, just because I'm 6 hours away from college doesn't mean I'm 6 hours away from work.

This Christmas break I've been diligently working on my portfolio. I have about 8 projects I need to fix up and make shine before they are ready to be called "portfolio pieces." Overall, most of them are about 85-90% of the way there, they just need that last bit of polish before they are good to go. One or two of them are already in my portfolio but need turn tables or new renders and so on.

I spent a good amount of time last year putting my portfolio together for the Game Developer's Conference. I got a ton of great feedback from the people there, but haven't had a chance until now to actually start putting it to use and making changes. Plus I have a lot of new and far better work now (it has been a whole year afterall) that I want to add in.

I took the first  few days of my holiday break to relax so I don't have too much(at least in comparison to how much I have to do overall) done yet.

Today I just finished UVing and texturing a piece (left) I did earlier this school year for my High Poly Class.  Since it was a modeling class, we had to focus on modeling and nothing else and weren't allowed to texture any of our work except for the final assignment.

I started out laying out some of the UVs, not everything needed them, but some of the larger pieces
needed it. Once I got the UVs, I started making some metalic textures for it procedurely.

I thought I had done pretty well at first, because when I rendered close ups of the different materials it looked pretty good, but then I rendered the whole thing and quickly        
                                                                 changed my mind.

I'll be honest... it looked pretty bad (to put it lightly), haha. The colors were all wrong and the materials barely looked like metal. It was pretty clear that I had a lot more work to do if I wanted to make the materials procedurely.

I've had a lot of experience making my materials by hand in photo shop and painting the different maps and so on, but I have yet to fully master procedural shaders. I could've gone my usual route and done it all by hand, but that requires the UVs for everything to be laid out. And since this was a model for a high poly class my geometry was such that
UVing while not impossible, would be difficult.

I took a break from working and came back refreshed and ready to work. I managed to use the shaders I had in the image above, as bad as they were, as a starting point and kept building from there. For the most part I had things right, I just needed to tweak the values and some of the colors.  And once I got the hang of it with one of the materials I was able to easily adjust the others. Even though it took me longer than I planned, I still saved myself a few hours of work had I tried to UV everything and do it the way I usually like to.

After some playing around I ended up with this:

Overall it was a major improvement. Looking at this I honestly don't know how I got what I had the first time I tried. Maybe I just really needed to take that break and get away so I could refresh my thought process. I'm very happy with how the shaders turned out, especially since I haven't had too much practice with doing shaders entirely in Maya. I tried to make each of the metals look and feel slightly different so they wouldn't all look exactly the same.

Now that I have it textured the only thing left is to re-light and re-render it and I'll be all done fixing this project up for my portfolio!

Tea Time: Update

So I was looking over my blog post from yesterday and I realized that I uploaded the wrong image of my still life. The difference is not that big, but I spent a good amount of time working on the lemon slice (I'm still not done, but that's not the point) and I wanted to be able to show the latest progress on it.

I also wanted to bring up that currently I have the Mia Material X applied to my spoon and silver tea pot, and that I'm planning on replacing that with my own shader, and possibly reflection map (I probably won't have time for this but if I do I would like to do it), in the future.

Tea Time with the Hoodlums

My latest project for 3D Shading is to create/recreate a still life. As a fine artist, still lifes are somewhat of a passion of mine, especially when it comes to painting, so I was very excited when we got the assignment. I first began trying to recreate a still life created by Will Kemp, which can be found here. I was particularly drawn to his painting because of it's simple, yet compelling composition. As much as I wanted to do an overly grand and complex set up for this project, I managed to convince my self to keep the scope small so that I would be able to produce a higher quality piece overall.

Although I began copying the set up of Kemp's painting, it wasn't very long before I ended up changing the composition around altogether and even adding in my own objects. As a result, the only remaining similarity between my composition and Kemp's is the tea cup with lemon slice and spoon. However, I decided to go with a more dramatic downward angle.

I am far from done. I have a lot of work to do with the shaders and even have some things I still want to add into the scene. The texture for the tea cup is my own creation which I hand-drew in photoshop. I am very happy with it as it is my first time entirely hand drawing a tileable texture. Here's a small snippet of the whole thing.

Now that that's done and over with, I am super excited to share an update on my character, King! When I last posted about him, I mentioned that I had some issues and was forced to turn him in without getting to do everything I wanted with the textures. I had always been planning on returning to him and finishing him up, but it's extremely difficult to find time for extra projects when I've already got my hands full with class assignments. I finally found some time today, and got a good amount of work done, especially on his pants.

I pretty much finished his jeans,  I just need to touch up the bottom where it folds and lower the amount of fade near the bottom because it looks weird having a straight stripe. I gave him some adorable back pockets too, which you can't see in this shot, but I assure you they are there.

I spent a good portion of my time on the jeans, as I originally wanted to hand paint them entirely. But I just couldn't get the fading to look right so I ended up layering in actual photos of faded jeans and then altering them with my own brush strokes and so on.

Aside from the pants, I added a patch to the arm of his jacket and started layering some dirt onto the jacket as well. So far I'm very happy with the direction things are going, and can't wait to keep working on it!

Working Together

One of the things I am doing this quarter is assisting several of the seniors in my major with their thesis projects. I’m really excited about this because I really enjoy working with other people, especially when it has to do with 3D. It’s really great to be able to bounce ideas off other people and work together to solve problems. I’ve found that you learn more when you work with other people and you develop a lot of strong bonds with the people you get to work with.
One of the people I’ll be working with this quarter is my really good friend Yuya Takeda (AKA Skybase). I’m especially excited about it because he’s an extremely talented and creative individual and whenever I work with him I get to learn so much.

I’ll be modeling two scenes for his project, The Door To Tomorrow. A hospital room and the hallway in the hospital that the room is in. He’s going to be painting over the renders in the end, so we’re not really concerned with small details, or having perfectly smooth edges. For the most part things are going to end up being pretty low poly, which will also help on saving render time. On their own, the scenes probably won’t look like too much, but after Yuya paints over them and runs his different filters, it will look absolutely stunning.

You can get a good idea of the process he’ll be going through to paint over and change the render of my scene by visiting his site here.

I’m already almost done modeling the hospital room which is great considering I’ve only put 4 or 5 hours into it, including the UVs of the room itself. I have to add some wheels to the bed itself as well as model a lamp that plugs into the strip above the bed.

I just did a quick AO render of the room so far because it’s easy and let’s face it, AO passes look so pretty!

The last thing I have to share is a concept drawing I started for a character idea me and a few others came up with. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on him, but I think he looks pretty good for only 2 and a half hours of work.  I’d like to think I could finish him if I had another 2 or 3 hours, so hopefully I’ll be able to share a finished version soon.

Red Pears Are A Thing!

After only 1 week into the new quarter I am already up to my head in homework! It looks like it will be an extremely busy quarter for me this winter. Which is good news for you all because that means I will have lots of new work to share! That is, assuming I can still manage to find time to share it. At the very least I will do my best to post the images. I might not always be able to write as much as I usually do, but this is a blog for my artwork so hopefully that won't be a huge issue.

Speaking of images, I just finished my first two mini assignments for my new 3D Shading Class.They aren't anything too special since they are essentially mini assignments that were based off of a tutorial. I didn't follow the tutorials entirely though because I like to do my own things (I live on the edge).

Note: The focus of the class is on shading procedurally so we're supposed keep the modeling to minimum. So just keep that in mind when looking at the work from it.

For the flag, the tutorial originally had a US Flag, but I'm half Lebanese so I wanted to make a Lebanese Flag instead. The tutorial also originally had us using the marble texture in Maya to make the rips and tears, but it looked awful even in the tutorial so I made my own transparency maps for it in Photoshop. I also did the dirt map on my own in photo shop even though the tutorial didn't go over it. The purpose of the tutorial was more about doing things procedurally, which I did with the exception of making a vector for the tree, the transparency map for the tears, and the dirt maps. Everything else I did in Maya. Overall it looks pretty flat because we were supposed to use a flat plane. Ideally I would've modeled some wrinkles into the cloth and actually given it a little bit of thickness.

Our second tutorial was to make a pear. I learned that not very many people know about red pears that since a lot of my classmates told me I was making it the wrong color or asked me if I was making an apple. So I'm just going to take a minute to say that Red pears are an actual thing and that they are delicious and everyone should try them!
 Anyways-for the pear, I did do the entire thing procedurally in Maya but still I deviated from the tutorial quite a bit. I'm pretty happy with it except for the stem, which I think takes a way from the rest of it. The focus was the body of the pear so I put most of my effort into that and just kind of threw the stem on at the end. I might fix it later but for the purposes of the assignment I decided not to worry too much about it.

I believe our next assignment is to do an entire still life, which I am extremely excited about. I've done so many observational drawings of a still life, but I've never really done one in 3D so it should be fun. I'll be sure to share on it once I have something for it started.