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.

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!