Rock Monster Man

Things have recently started to get really crazy for me school-wise, so I'm going to hopefully be keeping this short. I haven't had much time for anything other than my thesis and job so most of what I have been doing is just doodling.

 Like I said, I've mostly just been doodling. I've found it's really great to just take an hour break and just kind of let myself relax and draw something. It's been helping me keep from getting too stressed out, which is really nice.

I didn't really have any purposed for drawing this, just something I thought of that was easy enough to do. I couldn't decided how I wanted to make his legs and pretty much just drew them like legos.

This is the only thing I spent more than 1 hour on because I was feeling so stressed out I couldn't even focus on my homework. The weird thing I found out about fine art is that no matter how upset or bothered I am I can still zone out of life and just focus on doing it. I've had ADHD for a really long time, and drawing is the only thing that has ever been able to hold my complete and utter attention like that.

I absolutely love the drawing, but his neck is very clearly too long. I tend to do that with necks, but it was actually worse in this drawing before i changed it.

That's all for this week, I have to get back to doing homework.

Catching Up To Summer

Now that I'm back and ready to roll, I thought it would be nice to take a moment and post all the stuff I did over the summer. Although I was mostly busy, I did find time to fit in some artsy things every here and there.

But first, I should also mention that I did hear back about the Girl Gamers In Real Life Scholarship

Competition, unfortunately, I did not win. But that's okay, I had a lot of fun participating and the overall experience was worth it. I'm still excited to have made it to being a semi-finalist, even if I didn't win. 

Something I spent quite a bit of time on this summer was preparing for my senior thesis. I did a lot of conceptual work, mostly with quick models in Maya. 

But before I get to what I did for it over the summer, I want to mention that I am keeping a separate blog of my progress which I will be updating each week. I added a tab at the top of the page that will give easy access to anyone who's interested in following it.

That being said, I expect to be very busy with my thesis this school year, so if there's ever a week that I can't update this blog, you can check my thesis one and still see what I've been up to. I'm working two jobs on the side of school this year as well, so there's a good chance I may have to change from my weekly posts to something less frequent.

Anyways, back to the art!

As I mentioned earlier, I did a lot of conceptual modeling for my thesis, but even before that I did some experimenting in Zbrush to help me decided whether or not I wanted to go for project focused on characters or on environments.

This summer was the first time I ever got to use Zbrush, so of course I started off with some online tutorials and just playing around. My goal was to learn the basic tools and just get a feel for the program overall. So I ended up making a face from a simple sphere shape as I watched the tutorials on the different tools and tested them out.

I only had enough time to try it out for an hour when I did this, but for my first try I was pretty happy with the face I managed to sculpt into the sphere.

I felt comfortable enough to the program to decided to sculpt off of a base mesh, so I spent an hour of free time every couple of days making a bust for me to sculpt off of.

But by the time I finished and found time to work again I had decided to go with environments for my thesis and abandoned the bust for another time.

 When it comes to characters I prefer to draw rather than model in regards to conceptualizing, but I found that since I have less experience drawing architecture it was much easier and faster to model the concepts than it was to draw them. 

This was my first scene that I created in roughly 8 hours to help me visually create a style that was cohesive.
A good example of this is how I changed the bridge in the top image to the one on the bottom because I realized the first one felt too big and bulky and just didn't fit in with the rest of the scene. I was planning on remaking this scene for my thesis with better models (these were mostly just blocks that I quickly adjusted to get the look I wanted, so model-wise they are not something I would actually want to re-use), but then I realized the number of models and textures I would have to produce would just be far too much for me to actually finish in time. So instead I'm using this has a sort of style guide/inspiration for a smaller scene with the same idea. All of which you can read more about here.

After spending about two months working on my thesis whenever I had time, I decided one night to do something different and picked up that bust I had made earlier. I brought it into Zbrush and just started playing around. I didn't really have an end vision or goal, I just wanted to see what I could come up with.

I ended up making her into some sort of alien species. Again, there was no real goal other than to just have fun, and I think I spent maybe 2 hours on it.

The rest of the stuff I did consisted mainly of sketches, so there's not much to talk about. I just did them for fun.

I have another one somewhere that I'll have to find and post. I know I scanned it, but I'm not sure where I saved it to on my computer.

I'm Back!

I'm finally back! My summer ended up being much busier than I was expecting, and it quickly became clear that I just needed to put things on hold for the summer. Now that I'm back at school, however, I plan on getting back in gear and doing my regular weekly posts. I've got a lot of things to share from the summer, so expect an update soon!

Until then!

Hiatus

I'm going to be taking a short hiatus while I rest up and recuperate from the school year. I generally don't take breaks but I'm finding myself very exhausted this time around so I think I better give myself a break before I burn myself out.

The End of Junior Year

It's the last week of school and everyone is intensly focused on their final projects and studying for exams. The end of the year is always bitter sweet for me. I want to go home for the summer but I also want to stay at school and keep learning. It's important to get away though, so I am looking forward to hopefully having some time to relax. We'll see how things turn out.

Anyways, I need to get back to working so I'll try to make this quick. As usual I've got some updates on my final projects. 

I'm done with everything for project pipeline except for the turn table, which hopefully wont take too long. 

I spent last week finishing textures and making her hair.

 It's the first time I've ever attempted hair cards, and I will admit, I was pleasantly surprised with how they turned out. Unfortunately I made the face way too low poly so if I ever want to use this project for anything I'll have to redo it. I'm relatively happy with the rest of the project, but I don't think it's on par with the level of detail that professionals are able to make. I wish I had had more time to work on it but things just didn't work out that way.

What I'm really excited about is my rendering final. The project reached a whole new level once I was able to add in normals and so on. It's pretty close to spot on to what I envisioned there are a few issues with the quality in the textures.

I purposefully put an ambient light in the scene to help flatten it out. I don't want it to look entirely 2D but I also didn't want it to look too 3D. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I'm happy with it either way.

I also finished working on Galactose, the game project I mentioned earlier this quarter. We have some videos of the game up on the Galactose Blog, so please check it out. The game came such a long way and I'm so proud of how it came out.

All that's left now is for me to add some small touch ups to my rendering final and make the turn table for my character and then I will be done for the year! 

Countdown to Finals

There's only one week left of classes for the year and I'm still in over drive. I've been working to hammer things out so that I wont be down to the wire come next week when I have to present my work for final critiques. As of right now, things seem manageable but based on past experience I know I can't let that distract me. The unexpected is always possible and I can't afford to let any thing throw me off.

I am currently working on balancing my rendering final with my Project Pipeline Final. It's been tough because I can never be at the same point with either of them. Working on one means putting the other one off and they are both equally important.

Right now I'm behind on rendering as I made a big push for progress with project pipeline. This week I textured almost my entire character.  Unfortunately not everything went as planned with the character and I was unable to practice painting normals in mudbox.

 Right now I just have the flat color worked out and I'm really hoping I'll have time to add some bump and fix up the specular map, but I can't say for sure. Ideally I'd want to continue working on the color as I think it could stand have a lot more details but I'm having to put that off for now in order to get this thing done.

Rendering is turning out well, but I'm not as far as I wanted to be at this point. I have the displacement maps almost done, some of them need to be fixed up some more and I've only just begun the colors.The issue was figuring out exactly how to get the look I wanted, which took quite a bit of trial and error in terms of painting the displacement and colors.

 The Ottoman is not the right color and I will absolutely be changing it. I also need to change the pictures on the wall.

I was hoping to have the whole thing textured by the start of this week, but things did not work out that way. My plan is to finish them tomorrow so I can begin working on the lighting and the render settings. I also want to add some special paint effect toon lines to give it that outlined look that Van Gogh often used, but I am unsure as to whether or not I will have enough time.

Despite the crunch for time I'm extremely happy with the direction things are going and I'm staying positive about the outcomes. We'll find out after next week if things worked out or not. I am confident however that everything will be ok and I'll be able to manage my time effectively enough to get things done.

Painting 3D

Only two more weeks until the quarter is over which means I've been stepping up my game and going into over drive mode. I spent the weekend designing a UI for Galactose, as well as hammering away at my rendering final. I'm crunched for time and will be until the end of the quarter so my posts may be a little later and or shorter than usual. Still, I will try to keep things as up to date as possible.

For rendering we had to draw out our composition for our final. Mine was pretty easy since I'll be using the same scene from my last project and pretty much had the composition set already.

I did move some things around as well as add in a few new objects. I tried to give somewhat of a sense of the look I was going for, although I'm not quite sure I pulled it off as well as I could have. 

Aside from that I also started working on the displacement maps which are going quite well. 

I've got about a 3rd of the displacements done and I'm hoping to finish them and color the scene this week. I decided not to change the rug like I have it in the drawing and just kept the one I had before. I am also not too happy with the displacement on the ottoman, so if I have time I'd like to go back and redo that. We'll see how things work out though.

One last thing before I go. I did a quick doodle the other day in about 15 minutes for fun. Just thought I'd share it as well.