Outer Space, Doors, and Ice Cream

Woot! I'm done with finals! Which means I have a ton of stuff to share! Seriously, I have so much to show it's not even funny.

First of all I finished the textures on my character.

I still don't like a lot of things about it, but at this point the issues I have have more to do with the model than with the textures. I am extremely happy that I managed to do the entire thing with procedural textures (with the exception of the patterns on the belt which I drew by hand in photoshop). I think that the wrinkles in the white shirt turned out extremely well for being a procedural bump map.

So remember way back in December when I said I was going to be assisting some seniors on their thesis projects? Probably not because I haven't mentioned it since (click here to see my post, "Working Toghter"), but I'm actually done with that as well now.

I was working with Skybase on his film The Door to Tomorrow to make some of the settings for his scenes. I modeled a very simple Hospital room and hallway which he then rendered and painted over before adding the animations.

I've got some renders as well as the painted over versions that Skybase was generous enough to allow me to share. I did the models but he did all the rendering and painting.

Please note that the renders are purposefully noisy because of the process he was using to paint over them worked better when there was more noise.

 He presented the finished film last night and it was absolutely beautiful and I am so honored to have been able to have been a part of the project. As far as I am aware the full video isn't currently available online, but he has several trailers which you can find here on his Vimeo. I highly recomend paying it a visit as the stuff he's been doing really is amazing.

I also worked with my friend Kyle West on his senior thesis. He created an asset package with a character and vehicle. He developed this really cool idea of an ice cream man with a special customized ice cream truck. My job was to make the logo for the ice cream company, which he had a pretty specific vision for so it was more just making that idea a reality in illustrator.

He really wanted the logo to be simple and straight forward so the overall concept was always pretty set. He knew he wanted an ice cream cone, for obvious reasons, and that he wanted the company name to be on a banner. So the things I played around with was the style of the cone and ice cream as well as different shapes and placements for the banner.

We came up with the idea of the bow tie because the character wears one as part of his work uniform so we thought it would be a kind of cool way to add a little branding to the company. I think we definitely made the right choice in the end. I wasn't a huge fan of the soft serve cones I was comming up with.

Another thing I did was make the eyes, teeth, and eyelashes for his character.

I know it's a pretty creepy render. He looks like he's wearing a ski mask, haha, but I didn't want to post up Kyle's face model, so I just used the parts I used to match things to. The eye lashes I modeled one lash and then animated along a curve and had it generate copies as it animated.

And one last thing I have is yet another digital painting I've started, hoever I'm going to be finishing this one. I'm doing it for a scholarship so I'm hoping I can finish it up well enough to have a shot at getting some financial aide for college. I've only put four and a half hours into it so far so it's not done, but I'm extremely happy with how well it's going considering I'm not extremely experienced in digital painting.