week 16 + Finals

So the semesters ending and so far so good, I can definitely say that this years finals week was probably one of the hardest weeks I've ever had to push through.  I thought the semester conversion would have made everything easier but some how I still had to stay up for 4 days in a row (8 hours of commutative naps a bunch of red bull and a jar of peanut butter gave me the strength to do it haha).  In the end it was an experience I will definitely look back on my crazy college days and be able to talk about.  I have a feeling that the industry isn't too different from this insanity.  

One thing that I did learn staying up a few nights working on this was that I didn't actually mind it,  I find that things come out better when you enjoy doing it and when there is a passion; I'm pretty glad that I feel this way about 3D work as well as going to the gym since I feel that they go hand in hand sometimes.  When weight training, it helps your posture which I feel working long hours on the computer will destroy and just going will relieve stress and build the endurance to work longer.  One more perk that comes with working out is understanding your body and muscle anatomy and movement.  So yea I found that balancing out the mental aspects of my life with physical activity has been really beneficial.  A balanced out social portion goes a long way as well; I found that not taking a break from those two to just have a little fun and happiness will cause a burn out where all motivation to do anything will be sucked dry for a few days or weeks.

 but anyway enough about my philosophies, ideals, and life, here's the progress I'm posting up for this section of my blog; I will hope to have a more steady and accurate week numbering, resetting when spring semester arrives. Also I will try to keep track of my hours better because lately it's been just wake up and go to class or grind out as much project work possible. 

So for my thesis I made great strides doing my design sculpting on my acceleration exoskeleton, I'm still new with hard surface sculpting but it's still coming along. There's still a long way to go since this is just a work in progress but I'm pretty happy with how far I got with this project this semester while balancing my other class projects.

I focused a lot on the silhouette, exaggerating where I can to give more visual interest.  I didn't want the suit to be too bulky so I tried slimming out some key points including the lower leg and waist areas.  I'm still pushing the design of the cybernetic ninja influence and so far my audiences get that feeling.  One of my critiques was that the model looks a little front heavy so I will try and make it more balanced since I don't want the character to look like he's having a hard time standing or would just fall over. 

Before I made the suit I spent a bunch of time working on the forms, proportions, and gesture of the body which I think helped it along pretty well in the long run even though only the head will be showing.  Another critique I had was that he was looking a little stubby, so I'm going to go back and recheck the proportions; with the use of transpose master in Zbrush it shouldn't take more than a few minutes.  

For the hair I used fibermesh and it came out pretty good, some of my friends actually asked me if I scanned my hair to make this.  I did this work flow actually a few days ago on my werewolf exporting the .obj and putting on a hair shader which gives me really good results without slowing down render times.  I still plan on trying out nhair probably by converting the strands into curves and placing the hair system in and seeing how that will look compared to the results of this hair since I think it would look really nice in the final renders if I can have hair blowing in the wind. 

Week 14 + 15

For these weeks I did a couple of things.  For my thesis I did a self portrait of myself for the inside of the suit as well as experimenting with how the helmet would transform.  For some reason seeing myself in 3D weird-ed me out but I think it came out pretty good, a newer revision makes me fit the body a little bit better and more aged.  For the helmet I have to create a bunch of little parts and indents so that it would make sense the way it collapses.

Just for fun as well as pokemon profile picture month I gave myself about 2 hours to see how far I can get sculpting a my childhood hero charizard, a charizard head was actually one of my first sculpts as well since the book I used back when I learned last year demoed a dragon head.  I think I will work on it a little bit more before putting it up as my profile pic.

For my lighting, rendering, and materials class, we had to do a Halloween themed piece so I decided to do a werewolf since for some reason I really like sculpting muscles.  I was pretty happy with the results.  I wanted to do texture painting with Mari but I ran out of time but the professor guaranteed me a good grade so that I wouldn't have to rush through it and so that I can have a better piece for my demo reel. For the hair, I was originally going to do nHair in maya but I decided to fool around with fibermesh in zbrush and with a vray hair shader it came out really well so I kept it, my favorite part about that workflow and this project was that each frame rendered out in HD took only 2 minutes.  That's when I realized how simple my scene was with two lights, a really light scene at about 200K polys and just a normal map, and the non dynamic hair; the 10 sec camera move finished overnight under 16 hours.

week 12+13

Haven't really been updating this blog because of how busy I've been and the weeks have been getting jumbled up but since I usually post on facebook I can recall all the work thats been done.  So for these two weeks I did 3D projects for my two visual culture theory classes,  One of the classes was traumatic images where we studied the idea of trauma and looked at art and photography throughout world history that related to the themes of trauma.  For our final we had the option of doing a piece of art so I decided to create my visual symbiotic representation of the manifestation of trauma.  For thi sI created a Zbrush sculpt of a depiction of a person who looked like he was suffering from trauma and figures of traumatized people crawling out of his head which represents the many faces of trauma and how it runs deep inside someones head.  One of my inspirations was the Holocaust memorial of Miami.  With this project I got to explore sculpting a starving figure.  

For my other class I created a UDK game of a virtual museum that I designed which is kind of like an interactive postcard. Throughout the class we learned about spaces and experiences and how they affect us and others along with the idea of gaining and learning through experiences. One of the topics was postcards and how they take an experience and project it to another individual. The idea of my project was to simulatean interactive postcard in which a person can venture through the space I created and almost experience the visuals that I have had the way I have. To accomplish this I used images that I personally captured of visuals that I personally experienced with the exception of one section of the virtual museum. 

To further channel the experiences I decorated the spaces in a fashion that represented the real space. One of the field trips was to the cemetery which was outdoors in a beautiful environment on a sunny day so for that part of the museum I made it an outdoor gallery decorated with nature. For the visit to the abandoned subway station of Rochester, light was absent of the tunnels so I made it pitch black with only a small opening of light coming in and equipped the player with a flashlight that I programmed in that let the player view the sights. The trips to the Gallery R and MAG, the gallery presented the art in an organized way so I set images in the traditional museum fashion along the walls with the art grouped in a way that made sense. The last set of images were from Artisan Works, I remembered that they mentioned that they have art on the roof so I thought it would be creative to put those images on the roof of my museum, I also put them in an untraditional disorganized 

chaotic way they did with expensive work mixed with junk since to them a piece of art’s value is worth is based on the viewer and how they see it, they do this by manipulating the way it is presented and it’s context.

Week 10 + 11

Forgot to write stuff about these pics but here's some work on my thesis character, just experimenting with the proportions with a quick sculpt for practice and then trying to design and form the armor pieces.

the tiger is almost done, I've decided to type a short story for my thesis to help the design process so the mechanical parts are actually going to be like an endo-skeleton kind of like a terminator; as the flesh gets ripped off this is revealed.  things I still need to work on for this would be the head, tail, and paws.  So far there isn't any super high details yet and I might also modify the silhouette.

I normally do anatomy practices on a regular bases, each time I try to have it done more accurately and quickly.

For my lighting, materials, and rendering class our final project was a take on a classic horror film since the professor came up with the idea around Halloween time.  I really like sculpting muscles for some reason so I decided to do a werewolf which I also turned into a gargoyal for my UDK class.  

Week 8 + 9

This update is a little late and kind of a mash up of this week and last week since I've been so busy.  For my thesis I completely revamped the mech portion of the tiger.  While I was working on the block out of the former design I created a few weeks ago, it felt like it was clunky and just not cool.  Switching over to zbrush for more free form design work I came up with this design.  Greatly inspired by transformers I realized that having a large number of smaller parts gave it the messy kit bashed look I was going for while still feeling fast and strong.  I hope to finish the sculpt by the end of this weekend.

For my real time design class I kept adding on to my level, at one point I was slightly getting motion sick from the straight hours I was putting into it.  For the future I plan to do what I like and sculpt some gargoyles, entrance statues, and maybe more as well as finish up my low poly character.  

For my rendering lighting and shading class I had to refine my two projects, have them fully lit and a short camera movement to show off specularity.  One of the scenes had to be a night scene and the other a morning scene so I decided to do that with my motorcycle.  The insect design took a lot longer that I thought to finish because of all the textures, shaders, and all the little pieces to account for. There was a lot more texture work than I thought including subsurface scattering textures, working displacement maps, dual sided shaders, ect.  I also decided to go with bump maps over normal maps this time for this project since I easily edited them in photoshop for any of my desired effects.  

Thesis and other stuff part 6/7.5??

major update incoming! been slowing down a bit cause of all the work, maybe 2 3D classes and 2 art history wasn't the best idea to take at the same time as my senior thesis but I'm still making progress... The weeks have been jumbled up and stuff too since I forget to post sometimes, last week was like 5 and 6 and this week is like 7 and a half but w/e.  For my lighting/rendering/shading class I'm almost done with the bug and after all the work I can pour more energy into my UDK class.  

It still needs a bunch of textures including transparency, normal, specular, gloss, sub surface scattering, and a few more that I might have forgotten but so far the displacement and cavity are working pretty well along with the diffuse I made with polypaint in zbrush.  

 Lots of texturing left to do

For my thesis I've been working on my Tiger's organic parts; the plan is to create the organic and then mechanical versions and then mash them together.  When I was doing the head it turned out to look like a dog so after a bunch of tweaks, staring at references and stuff I think it's looking pretty good.  

Vick's dog version 

fixed head

Part of the design is to make it look like its on steroids since its suppose to look like it was experimented on and formed into a weapon, after some critiques I think I'll make the head smaller to make the muscles look even bigger like how the pro bodybuilders look but I'll do that after I start having fun with the mechanical design sculpting since I'm starting to get tired of looking at this thing, I must have spent at least 20 hours on this alone this weekend just nudging the sculpt, which I find might be a weakness of mine. I can get some base sculpt forms down pretty fast and even some of the details but then when I start trying to perfect it I just waste so much time poking at it.  

I have to mention how game changing the new zremesher tool in zbrush is as well combined with the ability to project detail back into it; I used it for my bug and now I used it for my tiger, I still have to look closely and find out if its animate-able topology but for now I can sculpt the higher surface detail into it without "working against the grain" and at a lower polycount.

Zremesher 

My one friend is a photo tech major and one of the best photographers I know so I got him to take some nice orthographic pictures of my head for me to use for when I do the self portrait head sculpt for my other model.  I was planning on using the photos for creating a model automatically in a program called 123D catch but then soon found out I did not take enough and apparently you need a detailed environment for the algorithms to work but since I don't need them to be high def either I could just use my phone.  My school recently got some new programs form the Foundry including Mari which I believe can use RAW images for texture painting so I think that's what I'll use the images for, it seems like a worthy program to learn so I'll do that over the break.  I'm still deciding though if I want to even try 123D catch still since I do enjoy sculpting in Zbrush and it might just be quicker than taking the pictures, learning the program, and then fixing up the model but that'll be for next week to decide.  

images for ref and texturing 

For my UDK class I've been redoing the character design that I did last spring and so far so good (still have to texture, rig, and add a few of the missing parts). Personally as you might know, environments and texturing aren't my thing (modeling/sculpting characters which are) which is why I was spending so much time with the 3rd person character but I gotta do what I have to for the class so bring it into the game will be something I will have to postpone for a bit.  

Real Time Character Design

Low Poly with DX11 Shader

I still have a lot of texturing to do as well as grinding through all the level assets which I plan to finish by the end of this weekend along with my tiger mech.  But its looking pretty good so far I think, I did my best to work hard and efficient making modular pieces and reusing some of the things I already have like I plan on using a different version of the character for some statues and I also included a reformed armor set I made over the summer for work.  For the things I still need to do, I still need to make trees, the flying landscape, some trees, water, touches to compliment the moon for lighting, waterfall, mountains, a bridge... yea a lot of things, its gonna be a long weekend, I just hope the quality won't deteriorate because of the long list.  

My flying Gothic Cathedral in UDK WIP