Fishes are so Delicious

I have quite a few updates and new things to share. Let's start with the updates on projects from my last post.

First of all I completely redesigned the character I am making for my project pipeline class. I realized that I didn't have a clear idea of who my character was and it was really holding me back in terms of being able to let her inner personality show through in my work.

I'm really glad I decided to rework the design. Going back and doing thumbnails really showed that I didn't have a style really nailed down, and even as I started to form a better image of my character in my head it still took me several tried before things started to become more consistent.

She's still very simple design-wise. I mentioned last time that I really wanted to keep the design conservative so that I could really focus more on building my skills instead of spending time making everything really complex. My professor pointed out that something I should really work on is trying to make a unique profile for her so that she's more identifiable. While I was purposefully being conservative, I think my professor was bring up a really important issue. Right now she doesn't really stand out at all, and if I can find a way to change that while still keeping her simple I think it would







I spent a lot of time playing around with hair styles. I knew I wanted her to be a more butch and serious looking female, but being a girl myself, I know how many different things can be down with hair. There is no such thing as just "short hair," there are hundreds of different styles and types of short hair.  But there are ways to limit options, luckily, and since I wanted her to feel more professional and serious and it was pretty clear that anything too wild or messy would send the opposite message. Not only is she a professional, but she's also very rational. I decided she's the type to keep her hair short not because it looks good but because it keeps it from interfering with her work as a soldier. really help.

With all of this in mind, I've decided to go with hair style number 2. My second choice would be number 6. I'm going to begin modeling her today so I should have more to share next time.

Now on to rendering!  I finished my last project. It's not too different from the image I posted last week, but the lights are better and there's some AO in the picture too.  It's still not the most exciting thing I've ever done, but it's not too bad.

I've also begun my second project for rendering in which we have to make an image using only procedural shaders. I decided I really wanted to challenge myself for this one, and boy did I pick a challenge. I decided to make a gold fish, which doesn't sound too bad but if you've ever had to make scales using procedural texturing then you'd know it's no picnic.

It took me three hours to get just the shape of the scales alone. It took me a while but I finally managed to get the shape using just ramps. I then added a bump map, color, incandescence, and some other attributes. In the end I used mostly ramps for a good portion of the entire shader.

The next challenge was getting the texture for the fins, particularly the tail since the lines need to follow along the split "Y" shape of the tail.

They're still not perfect, but I need to work on finishing the rest of the scene and the eye before I play with them some more. It's due on Tuesday, so I should have a finished image to share next week.

Before I go, remember the doctor concept I created in my post The Doctor is In? Well I'll be using him for my next rendering assignment, so make sure to check back to find out how he turns out!

New Over Old

Oh man, this is going to be one of those blog posts where I'm going all over the place in terms of what I am working on.  I do so many things that are considered art each week that sometimes it's hard deciding on what is worth sharing and what is not.

Before I start sharing some new pictures, I'd like to direct your attention to the blog for the new video game project I've recently joined. I mentioned it in the last post, and I've yet to determine where I should be posting the work I'm doing for it so for now I'll be refraining from putting anything here on my personal blog.

Ok, so I have some new things and some old things. Let's start with the old.

Remember this?

I did a little more work on her face. Fixed the nose which was off to one side too much. Added more detail to the hair and to the face as well. Fixed up the overall shape and made some other adjustments to the placement of things.

I've realized over the past few years that my general style for drawing people and in particular faces has become more and more set in stone. By that I mean, it's not evolving as much as it used to in the past. Possibly because I've become more comfortable and confident in how to draw faces and I'm not erasing and rearranging things as much as I used to. Either way, there's definitely a consistent and noticeable similarity now in how I draw faces (except of course when I am purposefully trying to stylize things), and I have yet to decide if this is a good or a bad thing.

And now for the new!

Well kind of, actually everything I have to show this week is work on old/previous projects that I'm improving. But, it's new to this blog, so I'm counting it as new.

I originally drew this in pencil and ink over the summer. This week I have started trying to color it digitally. I am constantly starting new digital drawings mostly because I'm trying to develop the skills and techniques for doing them. It's something I've always wanted to learn but have never really had the time to devote enough energy towards to become consistently efficient at it. I decided to try a different approach for making the base skin tones in this one and so far I am very happy with it. I quickly realized that same method would not work as well for the cloth unfortunately and ended up with the not-so-successful pink sash around her waist. I'll have to redo or at least change up the cloth so that it looks better, but for now I have to focus on my 3D.

Which brings me to my shading final. I'm repurposing a character model I made earlier this year in my high poly class and will be shading it using mostly procedural and some image based textures.

She's not my favorite model, in fact I actually kind of hate the model. I just don't think I did as good a job in making her as I could have. I fixed her up some for this project before UVing her. I am still not happy with her fingers or her feet (although her feet used to be much, much worse) but I am hoping that if I do a good enough job on her textures then I'll be more inclined to salvage the model.

This is my first time using sub surface scattering, and in my opinion I have not been very successful so far. I've gotten it to a much better point than it used to be, but she looks more like she is made out plastic than actual flesh. I am not trying to make her 100% realistic, but even so I really just don't like how her skin looks.

I still have a lot of work to do on her, and every time I work on it it looks better which is always encouraging. I'm still not in love with it yet, but it's getting there. Hopefully by the time I have to turn her in two weeks I'll be at a point where I am happy with it.

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!