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.

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.