sneak preview

here's a seek preview on the final model, did a ton of refining and research on materials, lighting, and rendering in zbrush. final sculpt is over 72 million heh

first finished iteration

So glad I like finished my quarter long project for the due date tomorrow... 2 weeks of iterations till final presentation O_o.  I think I'm exponentially getting better at zbrush every month, about 4 months since I started using it? 

WIP update

Hey everyone, here's an update on my 5 week project. It's almost the end of the 4th week and I think it's getting there. I retopologized it and uv unwrapped it (screenshot below is a little outdated) the higher res resculpt is pretty much done and then I'll just have to texture and render

I also worked on capturing, color grading, and editing film in my other class as well, along with an after effects abstract animation

work in progress

Hiya! loyal followers or random by passers; sorry I haven't had much time at all to write anything, been trying to land a summer internship along with doing all my college work as well, but here's an update on what I have been working on.  It's a character design I drew up and making, its about 20% though the process so far i'd say.  I think its gonna turn out to be the best thing I made.... like ever.  But hey if I don't get an internship maybe I'll enroll in a Gnomon summer class or something, one of my professors said I'm borderline triple A game company material so I'm pretty happy about that too.  Don't forget to check out my portfolio site, PhanManCG.com my demo reel is posted on it which has some stuff I haven't put on my blog I think.  I'll be around ;)

whats been going on

hey it's been a really long while, been really really busy with things going on lately I guess.  So I finally redid my portfolio site and demo reel, check it out at PhanManCG.com ... Pretty short blog post but there's a lot to check out on that site, I think it looks pretty good, hopefully good enough to land me a nice internship this summer :D

Everyone calm down I didn't abandon my blog! I've just been real busy but I just cleared my workload so here is a post... So breaks over and I was actually extremely productive during that time.  Besides starting a new workout programs, I decided to read a 500 page text book on zbrush and was determined to self teach myself the thing; for ten days straight I spent about 8 hours reading, typing notes (ended up with 12 pages about 5k words) , and doing some of the exercises.  This investment should improve the speed and quality of my work now that I can put it into my workflow.  I can gladly say that I am now a knowledgeable user of zbrush.  This program has proven itself infinity superior to mudbox in every way giving an artist not only the speed and versatility but the freedom to create.  Here's a quick list of some of the things I learned dynamesh (which is like the greatest thing ever! I can turn a sphere into anything...), zspheres, zsketching, shadowbox,creating booleans, retopologizing with zspheres, simple zsphere pose rigging,creating alphas and custom brushes, using curves to create tubes and surfaces ,rendering techniques, lighting with lightcap, textures with spotlight, polypainting, fibermesh, projection painting, custom shading, photoshop workflow, morph targets, surface noise, 3D and and polypaint layers, animating with the timeline... maybe that wasn't a quick list but you get the point. Here's a bunch of screen shots.

These are kind of old now but here are a bunch of quick small projects that I did for my 3D game design class.

 I think that's enough for now, next week I'll upload pictures of things I am currently working on, which includes a cool looking game character, a self portrait model, concepts for a new character, and another game character I am sculpting based on another artist's concept.  Some professors I met in outside of my major who do 3D things like a professor I talk to during one of my lab shifts, or my game design minor 3D professor gave me some advanced advice and some other techniques and programs to try out so hopefully these works will be a little higher level and something to look forward to next week.. in two weeks depending if I have time to post :)

week 2 and new projects

Hey so it's the middle of week 2 at RIT and I found out I actually have to be here for 4 weeks instead of 3 till the next break and my break is only 2 weeks long because they are switching to semester scheduling which sucks for us but we gotta just roll with the punches I guess.  So working really early for the first three days of the week isn't taking as much of a toll on me as I thought and I am getting my workouts in.  I am actually trying out a new diet or eating pattern since apparently that word is taboo or something; its called intermittent fasting where you pretty much eat your days worth of calories in an 8 hour window and apparently it works really well, it goes against everything I learned and believed in but whatever works I guess.  I come across it all the time since would read topics on forums in my free time.  You can read long articles about this but in short its pretty much comes down to just skipping breakfast.  I just started doing this strictly at the start of this week but it saves me a ton of time in the morning but I do miss breakfast foods a lot though, maybe i'll just eat my egg whites for dinner or something.  Well only time will tell if this thing is legit or just another silly crazy.

For work I actually picked up a new shift which isn't a short one that would make me get up early in the morning but I do have to show up on Sunday though.  I also received an email about a note taking job for my 3D class for my game design minor so hopefully I get that job, I don't want to gloat but I am the best in that class even more than the teaching assistant mainly since it is my destined profession, maybe I will even ask to be the TA for next quarter.  Japanese is also going pretty well, I think it might be because the teacher is actually pretty good at teaching and pushing us to study; over last weekend I had to memorize the first 15 characters of haragana (1 of the 3 writing styles in Japan) but then I found out I had to memorize the next 15 over night which I did thanks to my visual memory and memorization methods I developed but now apparently we have almost a week to finish the rest of those characters which is 16 more so I don't know how the thought process of the spacing of these quizzes was thought out.  I sometimes wonder if my friends care when I start yelling out random Japanese phrases.  So I got good with sketching on tablets and drew up some characters for my character design class based on a photo I took of myself in a T pose.  I still need to develop a back story which I might actually just develop a short story about a universe I thought of but the details for that are for another time.  For my senior thesis assist class I am helping design and develop some game characters for some game design majors with a partner in my class.  She's a really hard worker so I'm trying more than usual with getting things done early so I can pull my weight.  I am excited to start modeling all these characters this quarter though; I will post the details on my characters another time when they become works in progress.  As for my 3D class in the game department; it's really easy but I am still putting a lot of time in since I try to have optimized clean geometry, as for now I am just waiting for the teacher to teach about one of the game engines I can put my characters in.  I think that's enough for now, till next time.