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!

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.

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: 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!