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.