Bacon Lettuce!

Current Project: Fall of Cybertron

2011-12-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

FXVille is an awesome place to work; they recently extended my contract. I'm on a new project, doing FX art and animation. The project is High Moon's Fall of Cybertron. High moon recently put out this teaser, which makes me really excited for the trailer next week.

I am excited for when this ships so I can share some of my FX work with everyone :)

COD MW3, second shipped title!

2011-12-01T09:15:00.001-08:00

BTW, my second title shipped recently, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3! I worked on the Wii port. I ported two single player levels, "Eye of the Storm" and "Stronghold."

This screenshot is from "Eye of the Storm." Many of the buildings in here I rebuilt entirely in order to meet the strict Wii specs. I rebuilt all of the windows as BSP from the expensive, many polygon models they were before. I also LODed and streamed everything in the map, made new materials and a few new textures. I found a video online that someone else took of the Wii playthrough of this level. This 15 minutes or so of gameplay was about 3-4 months worth of work. I was the sole builder for the Wii port for this level.

The other level I did worldbuilding for was "Stronghold." This level I was the primary builder for, but not the sole builder. For the first three weeks of building in order to get it in memory I had a lot of help from my coworker Eric Dyer. I was the person who finished the level for the last 4 weeks though and got it to the AAA level of quality.

Lifedrawings

2011-12-01T09:10:00.001-08:00

Painting

2011-11-27T21:41:00.000-08:00

Been a while since I posted. Anyway, I did this painting as a for fun exersize! Yay!

iD tech camps success story!

2011-02-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone!

I recently got featured in one of iD tech camp's success stories. iD stands for internal drive- it's a summer camp who's goal is to get kids interested in technology. iD has camps nationwide- I got to teach at the University of Washington for two summers, covering topics like Maya/Unreal/Hammer. I had a lot of fun teaching there.

Check out the article about me and iD!

Jobternship

2011-02-17T14:12:00.001-08:00

I haven't posted here in a while. I recently got a job/internship at FuelCell Games in Seattle. I've been doing art for the upcoming game Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. I had NOTHING to do with this trailer, but it'll give you a good idea of what the game is about:

It's been really fun, and I love working there.

Demo Reel- January 2011

2011-01-03T19:24:00.000-08:00

New demo reel! :D

'Hookshot' animation

2010-12-28T18:16:00.001-08:00

Part of an animation test I did for a local game studio a while ago. I didn't get the job, but I enjoyed the animation test.

Push WIP

2010-12-26T19:47:00.001-08:00

Paintings 'n things

2010-12-23T21:49:00.000-08:00

Traditional animations

2010-12-21T20:38:00.000-08:00

Some animations from freshman year :)

Super cool! My animation got featured!

2010-12-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone! My quadruped walk assignment got featured on British academy award winning animator Tony White's blog! It helps that he's also my teacher at Digipen. :) You can click here to see his post about my animation. He also gave me a signed copy of his new book, 'Jumping through hoops: the animation job coach.' The book is really helpful for people like me who are just beginning to start their animation careers. Tony emailed a ton of game and film studios and asked them what they wanted out of animation students. Good read if you're about to graduate!

Zen's walk and run

2010-12-13T19:42:00.000-08:00

Zen-Walk, 1st playable vers. from blindsey on Vimeo.

Zen- Run, 1st playable vers. from blindsey on Vimeo.

Animations for first playable! :)

Drawings 'n doodles

2010-12-13T19:41:00.001-08:00

Push blocking plus- WIP

2010-12-12T19:14:00.001-08:00

Push- blocking plus from blindsey on Vimeo.

Owl revisions

2010-12-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

Owl revisions from blindsey on Vimeo.

WIP- Push blocking

2010-12-05T17:16:00.000-08:00

WIP Push blocking from blindsey on Vimeo.

WIP- Owl pan

2010-12-03T16:31:00.001-08:00

Owl WIP- color block from blindsey on Vimeo.

Gonna be some big changes comming to this in the next few weeks, but this is where it stands right now :)

Monster in the mirror progress

2010-11-30T21:34:00.000-08:00

Revised! Original can be found here! Depending on the critique I get, I might revise it again.

Dog walk polish

2010-11-21T20:03:00.000-08:00

Dog walk polish from blindsey on Vimeo.

Dog walk

2010-11-19T15:32:00.001-08:00

Dog walk from blindsey on Vimeo.

Owls- drawing them is a hoot.

2010-11-19T10:45:00.001-08:00

I found this image online, and I just couldn't help basing my next assignment on it:

wip- dog walk

2010-11-15T23:29:00.001-08:00

WIP- dog walk block plus from blindsey on Vimeo.

WIP- dog walk

2010-11-11T12:49:00.001-08:00

WIP- dog walk from blindsey on Vimeo.

Artist's block? NO WAY!

2010-11-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

The best way to get over artists block, for me at least, is to DOODLE. I found myself stuck on some animation this weekend so I sat down for an hour or so and just relaxed/doodled stuff. I like to doodle stupid pointless irrelivant things. It's fun. It lets me reset my brain.

Industrial concept

2010-11-05T12:10:00.001-07:00

Game animations

2010-11-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

I wish that my school spent more time talking about animating for games. We are taught good process work, like doing video reference, and of course thumbnails:

But then we're not taught other things, like how to rig for games, or what you should think about while animating for games. How do you animate for a game when the camera is up very close, vs an RTS? An MMO? Depending on where the camera is, your animations will end up looking very different. It's important to take that into consideration when you animate a cycle for any game. When I first started animating for games, I concerned myself primarily with how my cycle looked from the front and side. That was what I was used to from animating for my projects classes and from my 2D animation classes. I was always in control of where my camera was.

Zen Persp from blindsey on Vimeo.

When, in reality, a lot of the games I've worked on are 3D adventure titles. The player will view most of the animations I make like this:

Zen Back from blindsey on Vimeo.

This run cycle was something I blocked in in a few hours, btw. It's going to be getting changed soon along with it's rig.

Revised animations

2010-10-28T18:43:00.000-07:00

Walk cycle revisions from blindsey on Vimeo.

Kicks- Render 2 from blindsey on Vimeo.

Kicks- render

2010-10-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

Kicks- render from blindsey on Vimeo.

FP- Run polish

2010-10-19T15:54:00.000-07:00

FP- Run Polish from blindsey on Vimeo.

Axolotl

2010-10-17T15:50:00.001-07:00

Axolotl from blindsey on Vimeo.

I painted this in photo shop and keyframed stuff in after effects. These little guys are creepy.

FP- Hammer attack 1st pass

2010-10-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

FP- Hammer attack- 1st pass from blindsey on Vimeo.

Kicks- blocking

2010-10-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

Kicks- blocking from blindsey on Vimeo.

Kicks- planning, research

2010-10-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

Futurepoly- Run

2010-10-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

FP- Run from blindsey on Vimeo.

I made some revisions after talking to my instructor, chris. I think it still needs work.

Unique walk cycle- blocking

2010-09-17T18:23:00.001-07:00

Walk cycle blocking from blindsey on Vimeo.

Stepped keys! Woo hoo!

Monster in the mirror WIP

2010-09-16T16:32:00.000-07:00

'Monster in the Mirror' is my favorite song from Sesame street, and I made this based on that song. :) For art 401. I think I will probably work on this more before I hand it in.

Simple idle wip

2010-09-14T11:53:00.001-07:00

Futurepoly Idle WIP from blindsey on Vimeo.

Idle I made in class at futurepoly. It has a simple flourish near the end.

New demo reel

2010-09-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

Demo Reel summer 2010 from blindsey on Vimeo.

I updated my demo reel with animations from Exato. Check it out.

Monkey render

2010-04-24T21:44:00.000-07:00

Monkey Final from blindsey on Vimeo.

Durp!

SC3 Block plus

2010-04-21T18:33:00.000-07:00

Has a 'muppet mouth' right now- obviously still a work in progress. Lipsync is easy and the last thing to do though. Still needs finessing... esp in the hand. Hoooo boy.

SC3 Block plus from blindsey on Vimeo.

Monkey progress

2010-04-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Monkey- Block plus finish from blindsey on Vimeo.

Animation block plus is about done. There's some weirdness with his head I need to fix. I also have to make a moving hold at the end. Once that's done I will start refining my arcs and editing my splines in polish.

Face ref

2010-04-09T17:06:00.001-07:00

Some face studies I did for ani 350.

SC 2 Ani 350

2010-04-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

Animation for Ani 350's second dialouge test. First animation with the norman rig and first shot at 3D lipsyinc. I want to go back and polish it more. It's not quite ready for my demo reel.

SC2 Render from blindsey on Vimeo.

SC2 Blocking from blindsey on Vimeo.

SC2 Vid ref from blindsey on Vimeo.

SC3 Planning

2010-04-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

Planning stages for SC3.

SC3 Vid Ref 1 from blindsey on Vimeo.

Long shot vid ref, so I can get in the body mechanics.

SC3 vid ref 2 from blindsey on Vimeo.

Close up vid ref for better face/expressions.

Monkey Animation progress

2010-04-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

Monkey Blocking Plus from blindsey on Vimeo.

Video Ref from blindsey on Vimeo.

Just got into blocking plus with this. Still working on blocking plus. Hopefully refinement will soon follow.

Sexy beast

2010-03-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

Pretty hot stuff.

Fun times with rimlight

2010-03-05T11:21:00.000-08:00

I've been experimenting with getting a more cartoony feel for monkey. A lot of this I'm trying to pull off with the shader. I really like the way rim lighting looks on him; I think I prefer it to an inky outline.

I made a few small modifications to his blinn texture to get this. I took a maya toon rimlight shader and fed it's transparency into the blinns speculairity. I also averaged the diffuse of my painted texture into the cel shading- I averaged it 2 parts painted texture to one part cel shading. I think it gives monkey a nice feel. The transparency on the toon shader has the added effect of softening the cel shading's edges. The normals are connected to the blinn as one might expect them to. I did soften their value a little, but I didn't want them to completely go away.

Updated monkey

2010-03-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

Updated rig, skin and texture. Still needs some tweeks to polish.

New Website

2010-02-27T22:28:00.000-08:00

Hey guys,

I have a new portfolio website.

http://bryannalindsey.com/

Please check it out and leave me some feedback. It would help a lot!

Thanks guys! :)

Final Dialouge

2010-02-24T11:49:00.000-08:00

Final Dialouge from blindsey on Vimeo.

Final for the first dialogue assignment.

Monkey model progress

2010-02-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

The model is getting close to completion. I want to re-do his sculpt and get better anatomy on his normal map. Also his diffuse needs work and he needs his fur tufts.

Animation Progress

2010-02-19T09:55:00.000-08:00

Remember those thumbnails I posed earlier? Well, here's the progress I've made on my first dialouge test.

Blocking from blindsey on Vimeo.

Stage one, blocking. Here's where I took my thumbnails and turned them into keyframes. Still in stepped keys.

Blocking Plus from blindsey on Vimeo.

Stage two, blocking plus. Here I added more breakdowns and started to work on splines. Still needs polish of course.

Prjs 300

2010-02-19T09:54:00.001-08:00

My PRJ 300 video from blindsey on Vimeo.

Never posted this. Figured I should.

Doodles and drawings

2010-02-15T19:01:00.000-08:00

Doodles I did while at the greyhound station. Some are from imagination, but a lot of the faces/posed people were doodles based on real people.

Monkey King- Rig, model, texture progress

2010-02-15T16:20:00.000-08:00

Cool. I'm getting closer! :) Here's what I have done in the last two weeks:

-The rig has a completed FK spine, IK feet and FK arms. The legs/feet have a reverse foot control with custom attributes I set up in Hypershade. I don't want to put an IK on the spine or the arms. I perfer FK for animating these since it gives me more control with the pose.
-Diffuse map.
-Normal map.
-More details on the model.

Here's what I have left to do:

-Tweak diffuse map on the character, and texture his skirt/costume.
-Add finger controls.
-Make a face rig with face controls.
-Speculiar map.
-More fur tufts w/alpha channels to make him look more hairy.

Mudbox Monkey!

2010-02-02T08:08:00.000-08:00

Still needs some love but it is getting there!

Ani thumbs

2010-01-27T19:37:00.001-08:00

You know, the good stuff. Just some thumbnails.

Lighting

2010-01-21T19:42:00.000-08:00

Lighting is difficult!

Ani 350- Pose assignment

2010-01-20T14:56:00.000-08:00

Some poses I did for ani 350. Mental ray kept trying to eat my renders while making these- but they turned out ok I think. I would like to add a baby to the one with the stroller. I got some great feedback in class on how to improve these.

Monkey- low poly

2010-01-18T20:30:00.001-08:00

Had to be under 1000 tris. I will do some cleanup on him later- I could save tris in the knees if I made them triangle joints instead of using 3 edge loops to do it. :> Good enough for now though.

Cut protogami animations

2010-01-17T19:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not uploading all the animations I did since some of them were really terrible. These two characters got cut from the game entierly. I did the model, rig and animation on them. :)

Drawing-A-day: Week 1

2010-01-17T19:19:00.000-08:00

From now on I think I'll just do a sketch dump every Sunday.

I think week 1 turned out okay. I still need to work on getting out of my comfort zone. It's just traditional media is so conveinent and portable, and whenever I am in front of a PC I want to do 3D work. Which, hopefully, I will upload to this blog soon.

Protogami Trailer

2010-01-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

This was a game I worked on for one semester sophmore year. I was one of two artists along with Sarah Grissom. I was the primary 3D artist while Grissom did designs and textures. There were a few more models in there that didn't make it into the final game, including an origami cat and a origami spider, which had their own rigs/animations.

Drawing-a-Day: 3

2010-01-14T21:31:00.000-08:00

I know, I didn't post yesterday. I did some studies but didn't scan them in.

Today I did my usual doodling on a tablet instead of in my sketchbook. I'm not good at all with my tablet/digital work. Hooray for working outside of your comfort zone!

Also, the kid in the top left is wearing a tanuki (racoon) suit per super mario bros 3.

Ani 350- In class poses

2010-01-13T14:45:00.001-08:00

In class poses- 10 minutes each. We did these from thumbnails we drew in class. Good practice!

Drawing-A-Day: 2

2010-01-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

It's not a drawing, I know. I wanted to do a pose study. This rig was made by Suzanne Kauffman and is (c) Digipen I think. It's called the larz rig. I spent half an hour on the pose and ten minnutes figuring out camrea angles/rendering things. I did it in maya 2010.

Drawing-A-Day: what a cool idea

2010-01-11T20:29:00.000-08:00

So one of my favouite artists on one of my favorite forums, the penny arcade artist's corner, made this inspiring thread. Basically, the idea is that you will draw each day in 2010 working towards a specific goal outside of your normal drawing routine. So, you can't post a drawing for the drawing-a-day challenge that is for something else (school, work ect.) It's for you and only for you so that you can get better as an artist. Beavertron's daily drawing blog can be found here, if you want to see some inspiration.

Here are my goals for the drawing-a-day 2010 challenge:

1. Draw something/do a 3D peice for the challenge every day. At least once a month do an animation to improve.
2. Work ouside of my comfort zone. Try new traditional and digital techniques and draw differnt things.
3. Work on strong poses and strong lines of action. I want to do animations, right?
4. Work on solid drawing. Solid drawing I still struggle with. Make drawings that make sense.
5. Get better at strong value. I still struggle with value a lot.

Here's some stuff I did today, to start off. I haven't used toned paper in a while. Getting out of my comfort zone is hard.

Some boxy monsters. Still in my comfort zone. At least I broke out the toned paper.

Some not very excellent drawings. Bleh poses. I realized I needed to get back to the basics.

I like the top right pose. The others need love. Good practice though!

Brody

2010-01-07T13:45:00.001-08:00

Just a doodle.

TF2 propaganda poster

2009-12-15T22:21:00.001-08:00

I love tf2. It's the best game ever made. :) Go play it!

Environment renders

2009-12-13T14:37:00.001-08:00

I'm glad to be done with these. More than anything else I want to animate over winter break.

Monkey Buisness

2009-12-13T14:26:00.000-08:00

Not bad for only spending two weeks on this. I had to start over on my prj 350 pitch since Digipen ruled no quadrupeds two weeks into a four week project. The wolf I posted here previously was scrapped to make way for this project. I think it turned out okay.

Even more progress

2009-12-11T19:27:00.001-08:00

It's not good enough yet. But it will get there. Hopefully.

Progress

2009-12-09T14:51:00.000-08:00

I want these to be done! But they're not!

Monkey turn around wip

2009-12-06T19:46:00.000-08:00

I want to be done with this!! WIP WIP WIP WIP but feedback is loved as always. Also the side view hand needs love, lol.

Monkey colors

2009-12-04T22:36:00.001-08:00

So close to final colors I can taste it.

Game team models

2009-11-20T23:58:00.001-08:00

These are all super low poly models. :) Made for my awesome game, legend of the steam yard. They are meant to look very boxy so smoothing groups are used sparingly here. Our color palette is inspired by He-Man and the masters of the universe, as well as other horrible cheesy 80's cartoons.

Zombie Chicken

2009-11-19T21:25:00.000-08:00

Storyboard assignment from a few weeks ago. I got a pretty good grade on it. The biggest critique the instructor gave me was to finish my drawings overall- I agree with him. I think I rushed this to much. I don't like the ending either. I wish I had spent more time on it.

Look 'n feel

2009-11-19T21:00:00.001-08:00

Long way to go on this one too. At least I got most of the colors blocked in. Lots of help from Peter on nailing the colors. Blocked stuff in with hard brushes and the polygonal lasso tool.

Wolf design

2009-11-19T20:16:00.001-08:00

Still have a long way to go. I'm bad at making up my mind.

Quick face

2009-11-13T21:33:00.000-08:00

Just some for fun practice.

Just a little render

2009-11-10T22:38:00.001-08:00

Skinning? Check! Textures? Sort of. Here's what I have to do:

1. Figure out how to get normals out of zbrush so they look good.
2. Re do the hands.
3. Make hair not look like it's made of chrome.
4. Finish the textures.
5. Figure out how to work DOF in maya so that it looks good.
6. Re-do the lights to make them look like florescents. Actually re-do a huge part of the lighting so it's not so dark. I think making the walks not that dark shade of blue would help.
7. Make maya SSS skin look good w/more sub dermal maps.

GATTAI! Animations

2009-11-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

Here are some animations for my awesome game team. I've been working on modeling the main character's interchangeable parts as well as the animations. Obviously all of this (even texture) is a major WIP but the team needed something for the presentation so I brought it up to a level of semi-polish. I have other parts modeled too, but I used all the same ones for the presentation. No bumps or normals yet, just diffuse. Animations need work; it's so hard to animate for interchangeable parts! A fun challenge though. I liked animating the thriller dance even though I (obviously) need to make a second pass on all the animations; I haven't touched the splines very much. I got up and danced thriller a little bit, and it really helped me to animate better.

I find working on game team stuff much more enjoyable than projects class, mostly because my team is more fun than my professors. I guess professors aren't supposed to be fun though.

Happy birthday sinclaire

2009-11-01T20:54:00.001-08:00

Sinclaire, my older sister, is turning 23 tomorrow. This is for her, it's a painting of her two cats. Happy birthday sinclaire.

Storyboards assignment two

2009-10-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

This was a collaboration between my amazing boyfriend Kyle and I. He wrote the script and I made an adaptation of it. I changed the ending quite a bit from his original more dark ending, but I really enjoyed working with him.

This is for tom price's storyboard class.

More projects stuff

2009-10-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

My environment needs love. The lighting sucks. I don't have normal maps, just bumpmaps everywhere. I'd also like to try baking in some AO to make it look darker/more gritty and to save on render time.

This week I completely redid the legs for this model. I tweaked the body and the hands (only spent like an hour tweaking those) and I also compleatly redid the face. I didn't redo the face from scratch, I kept things like the nose, but I spent a good 6 hours reworking it- not counting the time I spent on those ears. It took so long to model those ears, I went through three iterations. I also unwrapped the half of the model before collapsing the two instances into themselves; so I only have a little bit of tweaking to do on the UVW front. I should finish the UVs tonight.

Things I still have to model are the glasses (my first attempt turned out sucky) and possibly a belt for her dress to help show where her hips will be during animation.

Once the UVWs are done I'm going to zbrush some wrinkles onto her face and folds into her dress.

Glass

2009-10-09T13:52:00.000-07:00

Glass is shiny. Used a tutorial for this, with a lot of my own tweaking and changes. Still not happy with my lighting 8(

Environment

2009-10-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

Not happy with the lighting yet.

More game things

2009-10-07T11:07:00.001-07:00

I like the legs the most. The 'clux fepacitor' legs make you go 88 miles per an hour.

Frustration

2009-10-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

20 minnute doodle. Doodling is a good way to relieve stress.

Ranged weapons

2009-10-04T21:42:00.000-07:00

Hopefully will have melee weapons up soon too.

Game team stuff

2009-10-02T13:56:00.001-07:00

Doop dee doop doop doop. Freelance for the rest of the day. Also, chun's homework.

Ani 300- Stapler Animation round 2

2009-09-29T21:20:00.000-07:00

Finally done. There's a lot of weaknesses with it, which I can hopefully rework after the next crit. I would like this to be a demo reel peice eventually.

I used ambient occlusion and motion blur on this because I wanted to be cool too.

Colorful life drawing

2009-09-26T16:48:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to improve in color since its one of my biggest weak points. I paid a lot of attention to angles vs. curves. I think I am slowly improving :>

Trees!

2009-09-25T11:34:00.001-07:00

For backgrounds class. 3 different trees. I spent I think around an hour and a half on each of these. The only one I feel is somewhat good is the last one of the pine- the other two are to lumpy. All of them are drawn from observation.

Also, if you read my blog, please feel free to leave any feedback you have, especially critiques that can make me a better artist. According to the counter I put on my blog I'm getting around 7 unique visitors daily- so if you have something to say, please do so.

Ani 300- Stapler Animation

2009-09-23T15:09:00.001-07:00

For Ani 300. We had to pick an object in our classroom and use it as a puppet, shoot video reference and then make an animation about it. I want to make another pass on this eventually and make it a portfolio piece. Animation needs tweaking and I'd like to put better materials on it.

Done in 3DsMAX 2010. Its been a few months since I've used 3Ds and I keep using Maya shortcuts!

Jr projects

2009-09-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Trying to get better at this stuff. I have a long way to go. I'm thinking of using 'teahcers fix' as my working title. She's essentialy a 81 year old alcoholic teacher who works with 3rd graders. I'm going to rehash the storyboards pretty soon to make them more clear/amusing. My instructors Jim Johnson and Peter Moehrle have been invaluable in helping me do this project.

Today I am animating a stapler and drawing trees. 8D

Guitar and maya notes

2009-09-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

For Chun Lu's modeling tutorial. (c) 2009 digipen.

This weekend I'm working on my junior projects. I'm nearly done with the block-in environment, then it's off to take my rough storyboards and make them finalized and pretty. Expect a post of those sometime tomorrow or Monday along with some updated old women sketches that are currently in progress.

Also, I posted some polygon modeling notes for my digipen compadres who don't know Maya yet. Most of them are familiar with 3Ds MAX. I'm reposing them here on my blog for your reading pleasure; I hope these help you guys out somewhat!

1. The 1, 2, and 3 hotkeys in Maya are for viewport smoothing. They are the hotkeys for low, medium and high quality display setting respectively. This means that if you want to render something it won't work if you use these hotkeys since they are for the viewport.

If you want something like turbosmooth in Max, go to Mesh > Smooth. You can also smooth just parts of a model by picking the faces of the area you want to smooth and going to mesh > smooth.

2. Do you want to have smoothing groups like in 3Ds MAX? Select the faces you want to smooth and go to Normals > Average normals. This will smooth out your model without adding extra geometry. You can also pick an edge and go to Normals > Harden edge to make an edge stand out, while having an edge selected.

3. Bevel is an awesome tool Chun didn't talk about. You can bevel edges like you can chamfer edges in 3Ds. Just pick your edges and select the proper settings for your bevel and you will have nice rounded corners.

4. Miss your symmetry? Not to worry! If you make half of a model in Maya, then go to edit > duplicate special and make a copy of your model as an instance, you can have pretend symmetry. So on the top of the options box hit 'instance' under geometry type instead of copy and also make sure to put '-1' under the scale of the proper axsis for your model. Usually it's the first axis (which I think is x) if your model is oriented to the front. By scaling by -1 you are making a mirror of the model. When you are done modeling select both instances of your model and go to mesh > combine then pick your edges and merge them by using your favorite merge tool under the edit mesh screen.

5. Want to export an OBJ, but dont' see it as an option under the export screen? What about mental ray, why doesn't it show up in the render options? You need to load the plugin. Go to window > settings/preferences > plugin manager. There you can check 'loaded' and 'auto load' for features that aren't currently loaded into maya, such as mayatomr (mental ray) and objexport (obj exporting.)

6. Append polygon tool is an awesome tool. It's like bridge, but you can keep clicking on edges if you need to span a large gap somewhere. Try it out some time.

7. Chun kinda glossed over how to 'inset' the faces in maya when making the top of the guitar neck. She just said 'extrude in the faces.' Extrude can be used as the equivalent of max's inset tool. Just pick the faces you wish to inset and in the extrude options box, look for the box labeled 'offset' and put in a value of .2 or something. Then it will insest.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Observed perspective

2009-09-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

Some stuff for layouts class. The 2pt perspective didn't turn out to good with my inability to draw awesome elipsis; but the interior one I am happy with.

The assignment was to do two line drawings from observation, the first being a one point perspective interior and the other being a two point perspective exterior. This class is taught by the very talented Peter and I've been having a blast with him so far.

Expect some storyboards for my junior project soon. I've been wrestling with a story and I think I finally have one that's worthy of animating!

Life drawing

2009-09-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

These are all 5s, 10s, or 20s. I need more practice. Messed around with colored pastels too just for the heck of it. :)