More projects stuff

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

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

Not happy with the lighting yet.

More game things

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

Frustration

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

Ranged weapons

Hopefully will have melee weapons up soon too.

Game team stuff

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

Ani 300- Stapler Animation round 2

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stuff for class

I made this using chun lu's maya tutorial. Toooootaly not my stuff regarding the model. I liked the lighting though so I figured I'd share it. (c) 2009 Digipen.

Zbrush

Still figuring it out. Gotta figure out how to make it awesome, and how to export the normals. Getting normals in mudbox is pretty easy, but zbrush seems to want me to jump through some hoops.

Some more recent stuff

20 minnute doodle of a kitty. I like the colors, I was experimenting with limmited use of line.


The handsome half-orc I'm currently painting is a battle butler named Sebastian. He's one of my favourite DnD characeters ever besides Kate.



Some life drawing. These were all 5 minute drawings from late July.


Cafe drawings- some I was trying to characterize and some were much more observed.


Page 'o doodles. Notice the dreamworks faces on the characters in the lower left :)




Mildred's low poly model is done, and now I'm unwraping her for the high poly sculpt.

Also I'm pissed about track one no longer being an option for Junior Projects. I'm scrapping my whole storyboard and making a new one. I still want to use Mildred for whatever the new story is.

Makin progress

You guys remember this lady? Well I've been modeling her in Maya.



I'm about 10 hours into this and it's nearing completion. I still have to model her hair/hat, and I've been spending the last hour or so making the edge loops on her face look good. I also need to re-topologize her boobs because, well, they look funny near the top. I think I can re-do it so they go around rather than having an e-pole where they meet her chest.

The storyboards are in progress, but I'm sending them into jimbo before posting them here.

Also, I have to scan in some more life drawings/doodles later this week. Hopefully over the weekend. :>

Teaching

I haven't posted anything in a month or so since I've been working at UW teaching Maya and the UT3 editor for the past four weeks, through Internal Drive summer camps. It's the most enjoyable, fun, rewarding and well paying job I've ever had. Maya is a pretty slick software package and I'm glad I've been learning it, since I'm considering using it for my Junior Animation project. I think I've learned more by teaching it and solving issues than I ever would have learned just by taking a Maya class.

Anyhow, if you want to check out some of my student's work, check out http://projects.internaldrive.com/. I teach at UW, and I only teach it every other week- so you'll only see projects up there from week 2 and week 4. :)

This was made by one of my students. He didn't have prior modeling experience, but he did have a great fondness for rubik's cubes. He dissasembeled it and measured it out, modeling it from observation. All I really had to do was show where the modeling tools were, how to make materials shiny, which buttons to press during rendering and where to place his lights. He did everything else. I was so proud of him.

I'll probably post more of my own stuff soon- since I'll be making all new art for my game project (as all the old stuff just got thrown out the window due to a gameteam explosion) and because I have a backlog of stuff I need to post. Scanner, here I come!