A Good Book

I've been feeling ill on and off all week so I'm going to be keeping this post short. I mostly just want to focus on the updates with my rendering project which I finished. Last week I mentioned that I wanted to find a way to recreate a painterly style with the room, which I did quite a bit of exploration for. However, I decided that due to the amount of time I had I wanted to save that for my final project in rendering and just focus on creating a traditional living room scene for this week.
I still spent quite a bit of time on the assignment though because I wanted to make all of the textures by hand in photoshop. I had a lot of fun with it and I'm very happy with the final outcome.

I think that if there's anything I would want to work on more it with be to make the lamp and picture frames a little dirtier because they stand out as being more "3D" than the rest of the image.  The lighting was done using Sun and Sky and bringing that into the interior scene using a portal light. I then added in Final Gather and Global Illumination to give it that nice soft look and feel.

Vestibular System

Ok before I start the blog post I thought I should probably explain the title. Basically it's just a very bad joke (if it were a good one I probably wouldn't feel the need to explain it) about the fact that I spent a lot of time this week trying to balance out my work and that my next rendering project was somewhat inspired by Vincent Van Gogh. Everyone knows (hopefully) about how Vincent Van Gogh cut off a portion of his ear. So the joke is that the Vestibular System is what helps people control their balance which coincidently happens to be in the inner ear...funny right? No, not really but I decided to keep the title anyways. 

This week has been busy, but what else is new? I noticed recently that the amount of work I was doing for each of my classes had started to become a little unbalanced so I spent this week trying to redistribute my time and focus to try and get everything back in balance. Which meant spending less time on rendering and more time on my production pipeline project. Basically I told myself that I couldn't spend any extra time on rendering until I get the model and UVs for my character for production pipeline done.
Considering how excited I am for my next rendering project it seemed to have worked really well because I actually managed to finish the model very quickly and efficiently this week. I don't know why but all the other times I tried to work on it just went painfully slow, which was frustrating since I knew I was much faster at modeling than I was actually going.

And thanks to the Maya Bonus Tools that you can get from the Autodesk Area, I have managed to UV more than 80% of the model in less than 4 hours. I think that must be my new record for UVing an organic object, particularly one this complex.

I just have to mirror over the boot and arm and finish up a few small pieces and I'll be done! Which means I can really start having fun with my rendering assignment.

I am very excited about this assignment because I'm going to be using it to lead into my final project for the class. I started out in fine arts, and ever since I started doing 3D I've been wanting to try and find a way to make it look like my models were painted. I've done a lot with painting on textures by hand, but obviously that's not enough to make something look like it's made out of paint.  So my hope is that with my final project I can really explore some of the possible ways that I can add thickness to the object in the way that it looks like thick globs of paint brushed on. I've been working out several different options in my head for a while and I'd really like to finally try them out to see if I can make this happen.  I have a feeling it's going to fail miserably but I really want to try it and see.

I've painted in a lot of different styles, but I always really enjoyed expressionism/impressionism and this is what I'd really like to try and mimic in 3D. For our next rendering project we're required to create an image using Global Illumination and Sun and Sky. My plan is to create an interior scene that I will then use portal lights to pull in the light from the sun and sky for the Global illumination I set up in the room.

I decided to take inspiration from some of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings of interiors, specifically the ones he did of bedrooms. Van Gogh often painted entitre rooms, but due to time constraints and the amount of work I have this quarter I decided right away that I wanted my scene to be very small and really just a portion of a room instead of the whole thing.

This painting in particular inspired me for the set up of my interior, although strangely it hardly has anything in common in terms of the furniture or set up. Believe it or not it was the green he used in this painting that caused me to suddenly visualise the set up of my scene.

So far I only have things modeled and UVed, but I plan on getting to the lighting and eventually the texturing before the end of this week. I have to finish the UVs for my character though before I can start. Hopefully I'll be able to begin work again tomorrow.

Surreal for Breakfast

Before I get into posting new work, I have some very exciting news to share. I found out this week that I am a semi-finalist for the scholarship I mentioned in my post, Spring Is Here!. My art/essays passed the first test and now I'm up against roughly 40 other semifinalists for the grand prize. I am extremely excited and honored to have made it this far and I will be sure to share any updates as they occur.

And now on to the art!

First off, I finished the doctor and I have a quick turn table of him to share.


I am very happy with how he turned out. I only wish I had enough time to make a scene to go with him. That's something to save for later though as I already moved on and finished the next rendering project.

The only project requirements were that we use displacements in our scene. I didn't really have an idea of what I wanted to do for this assignment but for whatever reason I started thinking of a dry desert with cracked earth. Then that somehow led to me looking at surrealism which eventually led to me  putting together this quick concept of what I wanted to do.

I only had a week to do the assignment, so it's not that crazy or out there in terms of surrealism. I made several changes in the composition though once I actually started making it in 3D. 

It's definitely not a portfolio peice or anything I'm too proud of. I wanted to put a lot more time into it than I was actually able to so it ended up falling short of my expectations. I'm glad I changed those awful arches that where in the original concept I made in photoshop. I never really liked them but they at least gave me a sense of what I wanted to do.

I really wanted to be able to get the metal texture that is on the front hand in the concept, and I had a texture that I was going to use. But for whatever reason the shadows just weren't working right on it and I didn't have enough time to investigate so I ended up just changing the texture all together.

I feel like trying to make something be surreal in 3D is cheating because it's so easy to get that look to it. Even more so since I could add things in in post and play around in photoshop. The weird part is despite all that I still didn't really get it to be what I wanted.

That's all for school work at the momment, but I do have a little something I did last night on the side.

I was done with work for the day and decided to do a quick self portrait in photoshop based on a photo I had. Nothing too fancy but I thought I'd share anyways.

That's all for now!

Presidential Punchout

I went to Pax East on Friday. It was a three day trip overall, and even though I only got to go for one day it was definitely worth it! I got a ton of swag, met some really awesome people, and played a lot of sweet games. There were a ton of big companies there, but I honestly enjoyed sitting down with the Indie games more. It felt more personal, and I got the impression that the Indie Devs got more joy from seeing people's reactions to their games than the reps for the larger companies.

Speaking of Indie Games, I got to dress up and take a photo for the ipad game, Uncle Slam. Here I am giving my best Boxing Abraham Lincoln Impression.

 

I love how the photo came out so I had to share of course!

My favorite indie game was Beans Quest. Basically you are a bean who is constantly bouncing and you're trying to bounce your way to the end of the level. It doesn't sound too complicated but there's a lot of slip and slide to your controls so it's actually difficult to control. The retro art style is awesome and really compliments the game play as well. 

Alright back to work! I finished my gold fish rather nicely. It turned out far better than I was expecting so I am very happy with it. It's all procedural with just a little bit of post processing. This is what it looked like when the render finished for the most part.  It's definitely a portfolio piece so now I just need to work on getting it into my portfolio/reel.

I also have been working on the doctor which I am hoping to finish up tomorrow. SO far he's not too bad, but I wish I had had more time to work on him. Of course I did go to Pax, so I lost a good amount of time to that. 

It took me a while to get the blood right. I kept having too much and he was turning out too scarey becuase of it. I want him to be weird, but he's supposed to be a good guy of sorts. At least he wants to be a good guy. I'm hoping to do more texturing-wise but we'll see how much I have time for this week.