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

Week 5 thesis

A little late on this post since I'm almost going to put up updates on this weeks post but here's what I got done last week.  I did some rough block-outs for the mechanical parts as well as watched a bunch of tutorials on designs and workflows for mechs with my gnomon subscription and digital tutors subscription from school.  I'm still doing a ton of tweaks to my motorcycle that I started last month but here's an image I forgot to upload back then, the background didn't really get too much time since time has been sparse.  The insect I've been designing has been going pretty well also.  Starting with a simple blockout using dynamesh to experiment with the forms and silhouette then to a more detailed sculpt, and I'll upload the polypainted version with a high detail pass soon.  Lastly for my real time design class, I've been working on a low poly game character and been watching videos on UDK.  

It's been a busy and rough week here's a bunch of problems I had to deal with... had to buy a new tablet since the one I've been using kicked the bucket. My ssd was running out of room for some reason and as a zbrush user that'll cause a ton of problems since it runs off ram but I eventually found the problem using a software that showed files that took up the most room.  Apparently windows 7 likes to hide away 50gbs of memory saved up for hibernation mode and for when you use up all your ram so that programs don't crash.  Luckily I run 32gbs of ram so deleting those files won't cause any problems for me.  Lastly the internet at my off campus house is awful even though my 4 house mates and I pay $100 a month for 50mb/sec; I highly recommend never getting time warner cable.  It doesn't look like next week's gonna be easy either; at work I have to meet with 4 people to train them to work in the 3D design lab.