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.

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.