Week 11 and Break

OK so a quick update before next term starts.  Last term extended all the way into the end of week 11 for the final Visual Structure presentations.  It was so cool getting to see everyone's hard work  especially since I had only seen glimpses of my classmate's projects up until the last day.  There was some amazing stuff being presented too.  My team also had to figure out how to get one of our gang to video conference in which I thought would be tricky but in the end worked really well.  We were all expecting some kind of long delay like you see on the news when they switch to their on site reporters :p
I uploaded our final project to YouTube and you can watch it here Visual Structure Final.  We just managed to get everything rendered in time but it took 15 computers running for about 4 days just to get all the frames rendered! It was pretty stressful and also kinda made me happy because it was likely the last time I will have to worry about freaking out over render times since I am now going even deeper into real time rendering for games. Speaking of which my Vray license dongle broke again after I had to wait 2 weeks to get it worked on before.  So I quickly picked up Arnold Renderer for Maya and I think I will be sticking with that from now on. :D

 

So here are my final models for Hard Surface 2 rendered in Arnold.  I don't think I will keep my car on ArtStation too long though.  I like it and I worked really hard to get it to a level I was proud of but I just found it a little boring and I really don't want to be the car modeling guy in the future.  I would much rather be the scrappy pirate robot modeling guy :p Still it was a very valuable exercise.

 Lastly I uploaded my Scripting final to Gumroad :D I've never sold anything digital online before so I have no idea if it will sell or not but it felt pretty cool to upload it along with a tutorial I recorded.  That was a weird experience too... anyway you can check out the tutorial here and there is a link to the script in the description if you're interested :) Gumroad Tutorial


So over break I had my birthday party, slept a looooot and I started doing some Unreal and Houdini tutorials.  I tried to get a class switched for next term so I could actually take a Houdini class but didn't have any luck so I guess I'll have to self teach this time.... if I can find time...
Unreal seems like a really amazing engine.  I only had experience with Unity before now which made picking up Unreal a little easier but just from playing around with the materials and simple blueprints I can see how shiny my work will be in the future!!
Anyway a couple of days of break left and I have to do some lame tax return stuff first.  C you guys at the end of week 1 term 8!! wow can't believe I am nearly in the final year!