Week6_First Review :O

This was a tough week, I think I picked up a bit of a bug :( but work still needs doing so time to soldier on.  We had our first Intro To Maya review this week, it was on a Friday to make up for the missed week earlier in the term.  The class was entirely review so it was a great chance to see everyone's work.  I was really impressed with how good some of the work was, a lot of people in this class are using Maya for the very first time and I guess I was comparing it to my early stuff, very impressive to say the least!

We are up to lighting for the Midterm, just UV'ing and texturing left, but only 1 week to do it then we are starting on our Finals eek!

For advanced character we are taking one of our characters to stage 2 before we polish it out next week.  I like the direction and simplified look of this character now but I think I lost a little something with her main shooting hand so I will probably re-do that soon.

For Advanced Digital painting I took my thumbnails up to basic lighting and color, this week I will be starting to render out this piece and also make a start on my thumbnails for the final piece.

For Compositing we are still working on the Little Red Riding hood live action composite.  It is fun to work with live action footage but its still more of an exercise so I won't be uploading the video this week.

In Texturing and Shading we are still working with BB8 but next week we will be starting on the finals.  I re-did the dirt and ware textures for this week with a slightly different approach, I like the look much better :D

I also picked my final model from Matt's archive, I thought it looked pretty cool but I didn't realise that it wasn't UV'd or named or grouped or anything XP so I spent a crazy hurried few hours UV'ing naming and grouping this guy.  Its a little rushed because the workload was nuts this week but I think its ready for me to start texturing next week.

For history of VFX we took a trip to a local modeling house called Anatamorphex.  It was a very cool studio packed with lots of awesome models.  The owner Robert gave us a really nice talk about his work in the industry and some cool stories from his past projects.

Week5_Grimey

Half way through the term :) hard to believe I am already half way done with Term 5! I am feeling it for sure but this time next term I will be committing to a track :D that's kinda exciting and scary at the same time.

For Digital Painting I started on the first of my 2 final pieces.  They are both from one of the Japanese origin myths involving Izanami and Izanagi.  My first piece is Izanagi's dangerous decent into Yomi to rescue Izanami my second piece will focus on Izanami's terrible reveal!  So far we are just up to thumb-nailing but by next week I have to have a decent thumbnail taken all the way to color and lighting XP.  I think I can handle it but I am trying to do a painting in the style of the Riot splash art pieces which is a lot harder than I thought.  Thankfully this is something my teacher is also interested in so I am getting a lot of great advice :) Hopefully I will be able to make an awesome piece... we will see.

Intro to compositing was a little boring this week.  We were all given the same clip to roto, a very valuable skill but not the most exciting thing to do.  I added a little flare by expanding on the story of the scene a little.  What we were asked to deliver was a live action cut of red riding hood walking across the frame and gaining some strange glowing orb power... I thought there was an important character missing from the scene, obviously the wolf so I found a Skyrim cut out wolf in my hasty image search and just ran with it :p

Intro to Maya is still chugging away I have my whole scene modeled out and I have started blocking out my final.  We are going over lighting in class so hopefully I will have a tasty render for next weeks post :)

Advanced Character was a lot of fun this week! We moved onto game characters, each of which had to involve some kind of shooting mechanic.  I like the central one myself but developing each characters look and story was a lot of fun.  Subsequently I started watching Steven Universe recently (now a big fan!) so maybe subconsciously there was a little influence from Garnet in my design...

For Texturing and Shading we are still working with BB8 but this time we actually got to play with painting the UV's and baking out AO maps in Vray.  It was a pretty fun assignment and getting that extra level of control is always fun! The more we progress with Vray the more creative avenues seem to open up! Next week we start on our finals :D Matt is giving us a bunch of models we can render I am thinking of going with this really cool looking spaceship if I get the all clear ill post a pic next week.

Week4_Revolvers and BB8 :D

This week was pretty tough for some reason, even though Maya was cancelled which gave me some extra time to model alllll the stuff in my scene :p there is a lot but I am nearly done with it.  

For Digital Painting we completed our last 'exercise' based homework, this time looking at fur.  I am hoping to refine the above painting if I can find time but as a base I kinda like it. I just started painting this cute little guy and decided to give him a drink to hold and the rest of the story just kept coming and he wound up as the Dogfather :p Also added an orange since in History of VFX class we covered the usage of oranges in the Godfather films, (they signify when something bad is about to happen)

For Advanced Character I was mostly doing tweaks, I thought the last hand in was the final for this assignment so I kinda brought this guy up to a pretty polished state last week.  I did try to fix his arm some but its really tricky with his proportions.  Next week I think we are moving onto game characters which should be a lot of fun! :D

I can't post the video of my Compositing homework since it got a little too big but here is a look at how I set it up anyway.  The assignment was to do a move in 3D inside of After Effects.... its a nice concept but I do not like AE's 3D one bit. Also I got a little steamed that you cant import 3D assets unless you fork up $200.00 for a plug in! That seems to be the status quo with after effects, its only a great program if you invest thousands in the right plug-ins.  So in defiance I integrated a 3D asset in my own way buy building it in Maya and rendering out some loops.

Here it is.  Only gave myself half a day to model and render this so its not that refined but it looked good enough in the animation :)

Texturing and shading was awesome this week! Matt gave us a fully UV'd BB8 model to texture.  We are just taking it to basic materials this week and then next week we will be painting on the textures to add some character.

Overall a tough but fun week :) In History of VFX a few of us got to present our researched topics I along with a few others will be presenting next class though so a little extra time to research.  I was looking into Virtual Art Direction, which is a technique developed for Avatar that basically allows directors and actors to visualize what the shot will look like after it has been digitally enhanced.  Pretty cool stuff.

Week3_Jelly, Cars and Jelly Cars

Things are cruising along now.  It's a little strange thinking that its only week 3 though, previous terms have felt rather chill in comparison to this terms week 3.  Texturing and Shading was a lot of fun this week really looking forward to seeing how things progress throughout the term.

Just a quick side note, I want to keep this blog about the work I do at Gnomon but The US Government just passed an Executive order concerning Immigration.  Currently I am totally unaffected but it was still a little scary to see it happen. I really hope it doesn't affect the hard working international contingent at Gnomon or damage our chances of getting employed after we graduate :*( 

But anyway back to the pretty pictures :)

This week for Texturing and shading Matt gave us the above car model to texture and the below wine glass.  It was pretty surprising to me to realise exactly how many materials can make up a single object, but putting it all together was a lot of fun and with Matt's lighting rig it all looks soooo pretty!

The glass was kinda fun too, I wanted to experiment a little with liquids so I modeled a martini glass.  The liquid was a little tricky and I'm not sure I got it exactly right so I am hoping to get a little advice in class next week.

Intro to Maya is coming along too.  I nearly have everything modeled so next step will be UV'ing  Week 4's class got canceled though so I have a little more time to refine my modeling before Max teaches us how to UV properly in Maya.

For Digital Painting we were looking at Sub Surface Scattering (SSS).  The assignment was to paint a desert and drink, back lit, to show off the SSS. After a couple of hours of painting this I was super hungry :p

Compositing was all about gaming this week but I still managed to fit in a Bunny :D

For Character Design I refined two of my six characters from last week based on the crit from class.  The class was a little bare since we spent the whole time just looking through homework, I got some great feedback but since alphabetically I am waaaay down near the bottom I tend to get rushed feedback... this has been happening through my entire time at Gnomon.  It's almost enough to tempt me to go back to my childhood name...... but not quite enough (not even gonna write it in the blog :p )

Anyway onward to week 4 complete with fluffy animal painting, VFX presentations, UV'ing, and maybe BB8 (don't know yet but previous terms have worked with him for Texturing and Shading XD)

Week 2_The Circle of Hell

Phew this week was pretty tough.  We all entered the circle of hell this week with Intro to Maya trying to line up our digital cameras to the reference photos.  Its hard to explain but it is a much harder job than it sounds.  In essence there are three main things that can determine if your camera fits the photo: camera focal length, camera position and the accuracy of your geometry.  I managed to get mine finished but it was a trial.

And here it is :D

Thankfully Advanced Digital Painting was a really fun break from Maya this week.  Our assignment was to paint a metal weapon.  I am really happy with the final look of this guy the work I did over break helped so much.

I started off thinking about who I was designing the weapon for.  I liked the idea of using some of Darius's shape language, from League of Legends, but making something a little more playful.  I used the approach I picked up from Advanced Character Design to quickly iterate on some forms before combining a couple together to make the final look.

After that I build a couple of texture balls to represent the different materials in the lighting set up I wanted.  From there is was just lots of rendering.  

Finally had my first Intro to Texturing class after last weeks cancellation.  The homework this week was pretty fun, mostly just playing around in Vray.  We were all given a pretty cool lighting set up so thankfully all I had to worry about was the material rather than all that complex lighting set up.

Intro to Compositing week 2!! I am really enjoying this class, it is so much fun to just play around for a few hours every week.  This week I tried out a teleport effect for bunnies! enjoy!

No Advanced Character this week which gave me more time for Maya phew! This is kinda similar to Term 3 when we kept getting super lucky breaks with class cancellations that seemed to coincide with tough weeks from other classes yay :)  For History of VFX we watched the remake of Jungle Book.... This wouldn't have bothered me if I didn't find out that the other class got to watch Warcraft! Noooooo  I know that a lot of people didn't like the Warcraft movie but I really enjoyed it, I would love to analyse and make a presentation on some of the FX in that movie.  Instead though I have to struggle through awkward child acting and a story that I didn't really like in the original.  I do agree that the CG characters, fur and lighting were beautiful so it's not all bad just super jealous of the other class :*(

Week 1: Picking up speed

This week was a pretty big one.  I had my first intro to Maya class which was really intense! but at the same time very inspiring.  I like the no nonsense attitude of the class, I am sure I will learn a lot from this one!  Anyway onto the pics

For Advanced Character Design I had to design 6 characters based on the same archetypal base.  So I went for the gruff heroic legendary fighter and his physical antithesis.  The relationship I was picturing was a father son dynamic, quite like Stoick and Hiccup from How to Train your Dragon.  For the process the prescribed approach was a little different from my first character design class.  This time I worked purely in silhouette first just picturing the details within the larger shapes.  From there when I felt I had the shape language for each character down I moved onto color and a little value.  This week is pretty rough which allowed me to iterate on the designs quite a few times before settling.  The next few weeks will be spent refining one of these pair.

For Advanced Digital painting we started much like last term with some exercises.  These were focused on replicating lighting scenarios with different materials at different times of day.  It was pretty cool to think of the physics behind how we perceive color and how light changes throughout the day.  Next weeks homework however is to design a metal weapon think WOW or LOL style! So I am pretty excited about that yay!

For Intro to Maya the first weeks assignment was to collect a series of photographs to use for the Midterm project which is a replication of a photograph as a 3D environment.  I am going with the above image which is an interior shot behind the bar of the Green Dragon Inn from Hobbiton! The set actually exists and is a tourist destination in New Zealand!! Since I am still grounded in the US for the next two years I will have to settle for visiting it digitally for now.

Our Texturing and Shading class was cancelled this week so no update on that but I am looking forward to seeing what our syllabus is for that class soon.  For Intro to Compositing the brief was to build something in After Effects that uses a countdown but is also entertaining.  I went through a few ideas before I settled on the above video.  I think I am really going to enjoy this class. My uploads will probably be very low resolution though because of bloggers limitations but you will hopefully get the gist of what I was going for.

Anyway back to work!

Year Two Begins!

First day back at Gnomon after a great break and after my first Intro To Maya class I am pretty fired up!! So here is a quick post about some fun mini projects I did over break before I dive back into Gnomon Life.

I got a BloodBowl Starter set for Christmas and I spent quite a few hours painting some of my new Ork team! The classes at Gnomon like color theory, viscom etc actually helped a lot! comparing these guys to my previous stuff I can see a big improvement :)

Over break I did a little work including working along with Kelvin S Tan's Gumroad tutorial on hand painted textures.  I didn't quite find the time to take it to fully finished but I learned a lot about painting in this style.  I may pick up this guy again just to try to take it further before I start doing my own models.  Since I do want to get a lot better at this style of modeling and texturing I will probably be doing more of these personal projects when I can find time :)