Week 10/11 - Done... phew

Its been a weird last week.  I didn't have quite the scramble to final deadlines as I had in week 9 but it still wasn't easy.  Everything is handed in now and I can finally take a breath and relax :D

Original concept by Ryan Church

 For my Intro to Maya final I ran in a slightly different direction than the concept.  I matched the modeling and lighting with a little time to spare and found that once translated to 3D the piece wasn't that exciting.  I spent the last week tweaking the lighting, textures and adding a little extra modeling to tell a different, darker story.  I am so happy with how this piece turned out, I was looking back through this blog, waaaaay back to my old 3D work and I am so excited with the amount of improvement with my lighting and texturing!!  Can't wait to see my improvement with modeling next term with Hard Surface 1.

I reworked my SpiderGirl live action design for my Advanced Character Design final.  This was more fun than I was expecting in the end.  The technique is a little limited in terms of heavily relying on photo textures for a polished look but I can totally see myself adapting it with slightly lower standards of polish to very quickly iterate on costume design while still keeping that realistic look.

Again I am super happy with my final for texturing and shading! All that work on the diffuse textures really payed off.  I thought it would only take a few hours to knock up the materials in Maya after the diffuse textures were worked out but I was soooo wrong! I spent a very long time working on this project but I found just enough time in the end to put together the action comp above :)

Defiant ship model supplied by instructor

Week 9 sleep: a thing of the past

OK so I am now in week 10! and at the point where I am handing in Finals! though most of my classes moved into week 11 so it is only Digital Painting and Compositing I will be handing in this week.

Week 9 was the craziest week at Gnomon yet.  I have been pulling all nighters sleeping really weird times like from 6pm to 12pm :p just so I can try to get everything done.  I am just about on schedule but it hasn't been easy.

For Intro to Maya I have been working on my final. We had much less time to take this one from concept art to finished piece so I had to pull out all the stops to get it this far this fast :p phew!

I am pretty happy with the look so far, its all modeled UV'd  and unless the materials change the look drastically I think the lighting is there too! :D just texturing left and only one more week to go eek! no time to relax just yet

I finished my compositing final which was waaaaaay more than was required but I just really wanted to have some fun with After Effects and telling a silly story.  The requirement was a 10 second effect shot and I think I wound up with a 3 minute sketch with 8 effects.  A little dumb considering how much work I had for other classes but I don't know if I will ever have a reason to do something like this again so I went for it. I can't upload this one to Youtube because I used unlicensed music, sound effects and grabs from games but I might be able to upload the file for people do download but I just want to reiterate it was a student project solely to improve my skills with AE and I don't own any of the copyrighted material.

Texturing and Shading is coming along.  So far I only have the diffuse texture painted in.  I will be making a few tweaks and then moving onto building the actual shades to make the metal act like metal and the engines glow etc.

Wish I had a little more time to work on this one but here is my final for advanced Digital Painting!  I am amazed with how much progress I have made from last term! and I'm so happy with the level I can take my paintings too now :D there is still so much to learn but for me the next quest will be to try and apply these skills to 3D hand painted textures, when I can find some time to try it out.  I feel a little sad thinking my digital painting classes are over now but going forward I feel I have the knowledge to self check my work and keep improving.

I also got invited to a fashion show, as a plus one for my roommate, for a company she used to work for.  It was a pretty awesome show, there was singing and dancing lots of very well dressed people in the audience too!  I tried my best but I had also had about 3 hours sleep that day so I probably looked a mess :p  

Week8_Moving onto finals

Uuuugh so tired... OK one more week closer to break but looking at my schedule for the next few weeks it's going to be tough!

Advanced Character design has moved onto kit bashing photo real concept design but here is the final version of my game character.  Since I didn't get any feedback on this last week I just went ahead with the changes I wanted to make anyway and then took it to a more polished look.

My Midterm is shaping up, there is still a lot I would like to do to push it but I have to move onto the final now and maybe come back if I have time to polish and correct the last few issues.  I still have to put this through Photoshop - render out all the passes and composite them, add a vignette and color correction to bring it all together and link it a little closer to the reference... Hope I can find time!

Found a little time to make the last few changes to my first final for Digital painting I now have 1 week to work on the second one! eek! 

The second one is shaping up time to take it to a polished sketch level then work on lighting and rendering.

Lastly for compositing I spent a couple of hours at a friends awesome new apartment shooting for my final.  I pieced the rough draft together last night and it seems to hold up.  There are a lot of effects shots mostly involving tracking and masking plus my camera's mic is pretty bad so I will have to record some nice audio later too.  I don't know how I will be able to show this one, I might upload it to YouTube but that does limit the choice of music I can use... anyway back to class!