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.

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.

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.

Characterization

Recently I've been doing a little research on character design for my Project Pipeline class. I need to model a character for my project, but I've been having some trouble trying to come up with an actual character. I wasn't originally going to make a whole character but my professor really wants me to do one so I'm trying to put together a plan for it. I had originally planned an entirely different project and I had that all planned out, but I'm having trouble trying to turn it around an come up with something new. I've been trying to pull together images for inspiration but so far I'm not really feeling it. I've done a few quick sketches but they all seem to be going in different directions in terms of style.

 I want to keep the outfit simple because it's the first time I'll be trying to do normal maps in mudbox and I don't want to get in over my head. I think the simpler it is the more I can really practice and get it right without having to worry about having to get a whole bunch of details done. The issue is I really just don't have an idea of who my character is so I'm having trouble being able to invest myself in developing them.

 I started making some t-pose references, but I don't really like what I have so I'm still working on coming up with something different. I have to have everything done by Wednesday, so we'll see what I end up with.

I'm also taking a rendering class this quarter and I'm almost done with my first assignment. We had to make a maximalism themed piece while focusing on 3 point lighting, so it had to have a lot of detail. I took inspiration from the various rose windows you see in gothic cathedrals. 

We can only use shades, so no color, but I think it's turning out pretty nice. I'm not crazy in love with it though. It's nice, but I don't think it's going to turn out to be a portfolio worthy piece. I try to aim to make all my projects good enough to go into my portfolio, but they can't all be winners. Our next project is going to be on procedural shaders, which I am already familiar with from my shading class last quarter. I'm pretty excited to see what I can do with it. I have an idea in mind but I'm not sure how possible it will be.

I Heart Textures

I'm back again, and so soon too! I couldn't stay away really. I kept telling myself I didn't have enough to post yet, but that's really not true at all. I've been working almost all week on my portfolio pieces and I gotta say I really do love 3D.  It's hard for me sometimes because I struggle with it much more than I do with 2D. Most of which can be attributed to inexperience, but I also know that I sometimes struggle to grasp the more technical side of the 3D world. I know I can handle the technical aspects, but I do tend to have to put more time and effort into learning and understanding them. But once I understand something it becomes second nature and the more this happens the more confident I become and the more I enjoy and look forward to working.

Anyways, enough of all that! Since I'm saving all my rendering until next week, I decided to move on from my robot/oracle, and start working on the next thing. While I really want to keep working on King, I realized it would be better to get my smaller projects out of the way first. It would be bad if I spent my entire Christmas break working on him and ended up with only one thing for my portfolio. So some debate over what to work on I decided it was high time I revisited my piano.

I originally modeled this piano for my  3D Enivornmental Design class. It was for a group project in which we had to recreate an entire room. The hardest part was that all the models also had to be to scale, which was something I had never had to do before. So this piano is based on an actual physical piano that I got to sit there and measure with a ruler and a tape measure.

The original version of the model is high poly and the textures were done procedurely (this was before I really knew much about procedural shaders) in Maya.

 Here's a picture of what the actual piano looked like.

Since modeling it I have reduced it to a low poly version, which is what I have been working on this week. I started by first re-laying the UVs so that they would take up the majority of the UV space.

And currently I am working on retexturing the whole thing. I have been using a mixture of photographs as well as hand drawn elements to not only give the piano my own unique touch but also to help enhance it's realism. My favorite thing about texturing is that it really allows me to draw on my fine art expertise. I absolutely love drawing and creating my own textures by hand.

Right now I am focusing on adding in damgage and the kind of details that will give the piano a worn out look. I am not trying to copy the appearance of the original piano that I photographed and measured since that was only a requirement when I was using it for my class assignment. I'm maybe half way there with the textures. It's taking me longer since I am working at home and don't have access to a wacom cintiq. As much as I desperately want a cintiq they're too expensive for me to be able to afford on my own. It's unfortunate because I know that I could do everything in about a third that amount of time if I had one.

Anyways, even though I'm not done, here's a quick render of what the textures look like on the model so far. I'm only focusing on the color at the moment so ignore things like reflection and specularity as I have yet to get to them. Also remember this is the low poly version of the model so it doesn't look exactly like the one above.

Heavy Metal

It's holiday break for RIT which means I'm nice and comfy back at home in Maryland. Of course, just because I'm 6 hours away from college doesn't mean I'm 6 hours away from work.

This Christmas break I've been diligently working on my portfolio. I have about 8 projects I need to fix up and make shine before they are ready to be called "portfolio pieces." Overall, most of them are about 85-90% of the way there, they just need that last bit of polish before they are good to go. One or two of them are already in my portfolio but need turn tables or new renders and so on.

I spent a good amount of time last year putting my portfolio together for the Game Developer's Conference. I got a ton of great feedback from the people there, but haven't had a chance until now to actually start putting it to use and making changes. Plus I have a lot of new and far better work now (it has been a whole year afterall) that I want to add in.

I took the first  few days of my holiday break to relax so I don't have too much(at least in comparison to how much I have to do overall) done yet.

Today I just finished UVing and texturing a piece (left) I did earlier this school year for my High Poly Class.  Since it was a modeling class, we had to focus on modeling and nothing else and weren't allowed to texture any of our work except for the final assignment.

I started out laying out some of the UVs, not everything needed them, but some of the larger pieces
needed it. Once I got the UVs, I started making some metalic textures for it procedurely.

I thought I had done pretty well at first, because when I rendered close ups of the different materials it looked pretty good, but then I rendered the whole thing and quickly        
                                                                 changed my mind.

I'll be honest... it looked pretty bad (to put it lightly), haha. The colors were all wrong and the materials barely looked like metal. It was pretty clear that I had a lot more work to do if I wanted to make the materials procedurely.

I've had a lot of experience making my materials by hand in photo shop and painting the different maps and so on, but I have yet to fully master procedural shaders. I could've gone my usual route and done it all by hand, but that requires the UVs for everything to be laid out. And since this was a model for a high poly class my geometry was such that
UVing while not impossible, would be difficult.

I took a break from working and came back refreshed and ready to work. I managed to use the shaders I had in the image above, as bad as they were, as a starting point and kept building from there. For the most part I had things right, I just needed to tweak the values and some of the colors.  And once I got the hang of it with one of the materials I was able to easily adjust the others. Even though it took me longer than I planned, I still saved myself a few hours of work had I tried to UV everything and do it the way I usually like to.

After some playing around I ended up with this:

Overall it was a major improvement. Looking at this I honestly don't know how I got what I had the first time I tried. Maybe I just really needed to take that break and get away so I could refresh my thought process. I'm very happy with how the shaders turned out, especially since I haven't had too much practice with doing shaders entirely in Maya. I tried to make each of the metals look and feel slightly different so they wouldn't all look exactly the same.

Now that I have it textured the only thing left is to re-light and re-render it and I'll be all done fixing this project up for my portfolio!

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!

Finals Fiasco

I have returned! I know it's been quite a bit since my last post, but in my defense, I have yet to even nail down an official posting schedule. Either way, I'm here and I've got a lot to share.

When I last updated, I talked about some difficulties I ran into with my character project. Well if you haven't guessed already, the reason for my absence is exactly that. As it turns out things did not go as smoothly as I had hoped they would. 

I went through with my plan to step backwards on the jacket and retopologize it using 3D coat, unfortunately, when I brought the new topology into Maya and attempted to UV it, I found that I was unable to because Maya kept telling me I had more than one object selected. I have since attributed the issue to a bug with the auto-unwrap UV tool that can be found under the bonus tools. Unfortunately, at the time I had no idea what was causing it, and since I was running out of time on my final I decided to just bite the bullet and start over.

Quick note on the Bonus Tools : They are absolutely fantastic add-ons that users can get for free by signing up for Autodesk Area on the Autodesk website (Click Here For More Info). If you haven't looked into them, I highly recommend it! The Auto-Unwrap UV tool in the bonus tools is, in my opinion, 99.9% more effective than the auto-UV tool that comes built into Maya, and unlike the standard tool, it actually works! Aside from a few bugs (like the one I found) it's fantastic! I've found that it's far more effective than doing UVs by hand with planar, spherical, and cylindrical. It still might require some adjusting after wards, but it saves a lot of time.

That's when things started to go down hill. I restarted the jacket, almost from the very beginning. Except this time I was sure to UV it before taking it into Mudbox. I re-did the whole thing in Mudbox, and tried to take it back to Maya, but things where still just not working right. Bottom line, somewhere along the process I had my workflow messed up and I was running out of time for my final. At that point I had a little over 2 days left to UV and texture the whole thing, plus get the jacket figured out. 

It became pretty clear that as much as I wanted to learn these new modeling work flows, trying to figure them out right there and then was not an option. I had to fall back on my older methods and ended up recreating the jacket again for a second time, only this time, all of it had to be done in Maya. I managed to model in the folds without any issues (I've found that my drawing experience with cloth has really helped me when modeling it in Maya) but I had to take out his front pockets because I didn't have time to really add them in and make it look like they weren't rushed. I managed to get the jacket redone and everything UVed half way through the second to last day. I started texturing as soon as I could, and managed to pull off decent enough textures for my final. I even found time to add in hair while my ambient occlusions were rendering.

And here he is! Texture-wise, he is far from finished, and I have a long way to go. I did almost all of his textures by hand using Photoshop and some filter forge to generate the tile able cloth patterns.

Overall though, considering the obstacles I ran into at the last minute, I am very pleased with it. I think I have some great base textures going. I should be able to build off of this without too much difficulty.

I do want to mention that while the actual zipper is a texture, the material on his zipper pull is just the mea material default chrome shader and that I do not plan on keeping that. I will be replacing it with my own textures. 

Aside from that I'd really like to add more dirt and tears to his clothes. They look far too perfect and don't really fit in with the idea of him being an orphan. 

I hope to start working on him again very soon, but I also need to work on my portfolio overall this holiday break so it might be a little while until I can work on him again. 

Right now, I have to redirect my focus to fixing up my resume, putting together some turn tables, fixing up my portfolio site, and showing more of my process in my portfolio overall. Winter is when companies start accepting applications for internships, and I'd really like to get one for next summer if possible. I've spent the last two summers working for Bethesda Softworks as a QA Tester, and while I have enjoyed every minute of my time spent there, I really need to try to get an internship where I can do actual 3D work. Ideally I'd like to stay at Bethesda, but unfortunately they do not always have openings for 3D interns so I have to look elsewhere for the time being. 

With any luck, I'll get a decent portfolio together in time and hopefully land myself an internship. Keep your fingers crossed!