Final Dance

The biggest news I have is that my thesis is officially over! Things turned out better than I expected and I received an A for the overall project and results. I posted the final shots I have of what the level looks like in the UDK engine on my thesis blog, but I'll repost my favorites here as well.

I've still got some polishing left to do, but overall I am very happy with it!

I've also got some final projects and results from my Lighting and glass class to share.

For lighting I decided to create the storage room for a theater company. As usual, my plans were much more elaborate but time forced me to scale them back. I wanted much more dirt, dust, and maybe even cobwebs, but it's important to recognize when you need to scale back and sometimes you just can't do it all. I'm still very happy with it despite not having everything I wanted.

I collect glass paperweights, so whenever I could pick what to make in my glass class I decided to make them. I actually ended up only making one cup because I didn't find it as cool or exciting.

My first one turned out a little derpy because it was the first thing I made in the hot shop. I had a lot of trouble keeping it on center because keeping the pipe turning at an even and constant rate was difficult with my tendonitis. As a result the top of my paperweight ended up being lopsided.

My second one turned out much better and my teacher let me experiment with rolling the glass into a cone-like shape.

My third paper weight is one of my favorites because of the colors and how the design on the inside turned out. We used a speciall type of blue color that reacts when mixed with other colors, so I ended up with some really pretty white speckles and swirls where it reacted with the purple color. The big silver thing in the middle is actually a giant bubble, and it's really cool because on one side of the globe the color swirls up and kind of hides it. The pictures don't really do it justice.

I don't have photos of the final paper weight I made yet, but it was very fun to make because my teacher let me experiment again with cutting a flower into the colored glass in the center. I also got to use a special crimp on the flower's petals so when I covered it with the clear glass all these tiny bubbles formed from the air being trapped in the grooves on the pedals.

And of course as usual I have a plethora of other drawins I've done in my brief momments of free time to help me relax and just take a break.

I actually spent quite a bit of time on this one, I revisited it several times before I was actually happy with it. The main thing to know about this one is that the female is real, as in she's part of reality. Whereas the mail is more a part of her thoughts and feelings. The whole idea is that she constantly struggling with her emotions and no matter how hard she tries to move on and get past them, they are there toying with her in this endless dance.

 I really like this one design wise, although I'm not entirely convinced I haven't seen it or something similar somewhere.

 I'd like to actually finish this one someday, although I don't really have any plans set in stone for it.

 A quick painting I did. Didn't spend too much time on it, just needed to let off some steam.

I liked this one at first, but now I don't. I think it's the facial structure that bothers me. I didn't really spend a lot of time planning it or making sure it was correct.

Just another drawing where I was playing around with design ideas and photoshop.

Self Reflection

I'm back and with a final update on that self portrait I was making for my Modeling Strategies class. Last time I shared any progress on it was just after I had done the initial sculpt in zbrush. Well it's finished now and I have a turn table of it from my final for the class.


Modeling Strategies Final from Madeleine Rabil on Vimeo.
So basically the turn table shows off the model with normal map applied, the wireframe, the actual normal map, and a quick paint over I did on the UVs in photoshop. We weren't required to color it, but I decided to do one anyways since I knew it'd be easy and take hardly any time. Actually the color turned out better than I was expecting, except I think I could've done a better job with the transition of the top lip. But I'm ok with it for now, since I was really only doing that part for fun.

I've got two more drawings to share, both of which are kind of just the result of a lot of self reflection lately.

 This first one I've just been calling, "Scars," for obvious reasons. I tend to reflect a lot on the past and analyze how it has affected me in the present, mostly because that's the best way to learn especially when it's something that doesn't have a clear cut answer. Although the drawing definitely has a more negative feel to it, I generally find that past experiences, good or bad, have made me a stronger person in the long run. Which is why I think this image is more about the process of healing and still coping with whatever has happened rather than the final end result of it.

It seems a little silly for me to say "I think" about my own images, but a lately a lot of my drawings are the result of just that, drawing. I haven't really sat down to think about them, I've just been kind of doing them. It's kind of a weird feeling at the end, like when you wake up from a dream and suddenly think, "Okay, what am I trying to tell myself?" Unless, I'm the only one who does that, haha.

 I kind of did this one at the last minute today. I haven't had too much to really think about it, but lately I've been feeling kind of torn between two worlds, but unable to fully partake in either one because my other self holds me back. It's actually been kind of insightful though about who I am as a person, so I don't really know that it's a bad thing, just frustrating some times.

That's all I have for now. I'm hoping to find time to take some photos of the work I did in my figure drawing class now that the quarter is over. I would scan them, but scanners and charcoal aren't really a good combination so photographs are really what I need.

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! 

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.

Spring is Here!

I apologize for the late post. I've been trying very hard to keep on my once a week posting schedule, but my schedule for Spring is so crazy that I had to immediately hit the ground running in order to keep up with my course work. On top of that I've been rather sick this past week.

I have two updates, both of which are for a scholarship I am applying to. The first is the digital painting I shared in the last post. I am having to call it on this one for now. Ideally I would love to keep working, but the scholarship deadline is coming up, not to mention I need to be focusing on school work.

I'm pretty happy with it. I'd like to add in more details and really just push it further in general, but all things considered, it is probably the best digital painting I have produced thus far. I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out the lighting for the leaves and I'm still not convinced I got it quite right, but it is much better than what I originally had.

And now for the other half of the scholarship application, a character that goes with the environment.

I was very frustrated with myself today when I opened it up and realized that at least 3 hours of work I had spent on it earlier this week was entirely gone. I had added a lot more details to the base of the harp to make it more balanced, but somehow managed to lose all of it. Unfortunately, I've run out of time and have to submit it without.  Again, ideally I'd like to fix it up more but that's just not an option right now.  I wanted to give her more of a back drop/setting but I had to chose between that or polishing the character as much as possible. And since the character is what is actually required for the scholarship, it was obvious I had to go with that

Possible scholarship aside, I'm very happy that I was able to produce both of these images because it was an incredible learning experience. I've never gotten to sit down and really focus on a digital painting before, and even though I'd like these both to be more polished I am extremely proud of how far I was able to take them  both. It was definitely an extremely worthwhile experience.

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.

Modern Forestry

I finally have something to show for my current shading project, although I only have the modeling done.  I actually started the project over twice because I couldn't come up with what I wanted to do, and I kept hating everything I ended up with.

The assignment is to do an interior scene, and my initial plan was to do a classroom with a shot into a messy student's desk. So I modeled the whole scene and realized I had to do most of the shaders procedurely so it would be a lot more difficult to get the result I wanted. I'm still not used to procedural texturing/shading, especially now that we're building our shaders procedurely too and not using the default blinn, lambert, phong, etc. So while I really liked my idea I decided the scope would end up being way more than I could handle.

The problem was that I then had no idea what I wanted to do. I originally didn't want to do a modern interior design, because everyone does that. But I really love design and seeing as I was running out of time I gave in and decided to take the easy route this time and just go modern. I usually like to challenge myself to be more creative/push the limits of what I can do, but with two weeks down the drain it just wasn't an option any more.

So I spent a reasonable amount of time modeling today and got the majority of the scene done (I still need to add a few small decorative elements so it doesn't feel so empty).


Please keep in mind that the lighting and textures in the image are not final and are simply to give a basic idea of what I am going for.

Today one of my professors approached me and asked me if I would be willing to make him an illustration of a forest to be used in a play for elementary schoolers where they will be using 3D and projections to create the backdrops. Basically they are going to project a 3D forest ontop of the background to give it depth and in all likely hood not much of the background will be visible. He showed me some examples and told me he would need it to be very stylized and illustrative and I could just paint it really fast. Since it wasn't a complex request and I like helping out when I can I told him I'd do it.

I spent about an hour on it today and here's what I have so far.

I'm going to show it to him tomorrow to see where he wants me to take it. I'm thinking the tree trunks might need to be blurred a little more since their outline is pretty crisp, but that will be easy to do so I am not too worried at this point. He wasn't entirely sure how it should be stylized so I want to wait before doing too much else with it.

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!

Return of the King

And I'm back again! It's really because I just can't contain my excitement about my current 3D project. I worked on him again today, even though I told myself I'd get my other homework done first. Normally I would probably wait longer before posting new pictures of progress, but I feel like the changes I made today have made such a big difference that I couldn't wait to share.

Redid his face today. I decided to just do the whole thing over again because using Mudbox had made the mesh so high poly that it was difficult to effectively make any changes to it. What I did was make the old mesh live (making something live makes it so it's like a magnet and you can snap other things like vertices, objects, and so on to it) so that I could use the create polygon tool to redraw a lower poly mesh directly on it.

Having less polygons allowed me to quickly change around the face in Maya without having to do too much clean up after wards.It made it a lot easier to keep his face smooth and free of creases(visible pinches or lines on the surface of an object when smoothed). In the end I was able to fix up his eye sockets, which needed a lot of work and end up with a much cleaner looking model overall.

Straight on view of his old face. The nose was far more simplistic, which wasn't bad, but didn't really add anything to the model overall. There's some obvious issues with his eye lids as well, as they don't quite match up cleaning with his eye.

And here he is with his new face! I went ahead and made his nose more complex, but not too complex since he is supposed to be a cartoon. Having the new nose and eyes really adds to his character and in my opinion make his design so much stronger.

Only a few changes left to make before I can really start focusing on the textures again.