Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Term 2

 Well, here we are again. Another exciting and stressful term has come to and end. This term was quite a bit different from last. Most of our classes did not have homework, but rather, one big project we worked  on all term. Not too much to show compared to last time, but blood, sweat, and tears definitely went into this stuff. Hope you like!

Sculpting:
  By far the most anticipated and most enjoyed class all term. Even though I chose to pursue 3d back in the early years of college, I always wanted to try my hand at sculpting. due to class schedules, I was never able to take it till now, which in hindsight, I'm glad I waited. I'm still amazed that this was the first time I've ever sculpted.



Nurbs:
 Probably the most difficult class for me this term was Surface Modeling 1, aka NURBS. What is a nurb? Well, its a non-uniform rational b-spline, silly. And what does that mean? ... Well I have no idea, but basically its a different way of modeling things in 3d. I usually use what's called polygon modeling, which is much like building a very blocky simplified shell, that can later be smoothed out. Nurbs is all curved based, which makes it more accurate. Its got its own set of rules though, and it was a challenge to get even a very simple model to work. My final came out looking something to the equivalent of a child's scratchy crayon drawing, but this one won't be going up on the fridge. I will however, post the concept I used. The rest is up to your imagination.



Hard Surface Modeling 1:
 This class was not only great review for me, but I really did learn a lot as far as building something that's functional and structurally sound in 3d. We did have some homework in this class,  but our main focus was one fairly complex model. I chose to do a robot from the video game Portal 2. His name is Atlas, and he was a pain in the Atlas to model. I truly didn't realize how many little pieces were on this guy until I really got going. I still have some more hours to put in on him as far as the modeling goes.



Texture Painting:
One of the very nice things about this class was our final required us to paint an object that had at least 10 different materials on it. Luckily for me, I modeled a little robot that was full of pieces to paint. This is still a work in progress, but it should be done by the end of this week.


Intro to Zbrush:
Zbrush is an amazing program. It allows you to start out with a very blocky character, and end up with a character so detailed you can see the pores, wrinkles and veins. The final for this class was to model and texture a sea creature. I found this concept by Mike Baccin.. My model is currently missing some teeth, eyes, and those red lips, but I'm happy with the way the color on the wings and shell came out. Thanks again, Mike Baccin!
Concept by: Mike Baccin

Work in Progress: Zbrush model

Anatomy:
Anatomy was a great class. My drawing skills were really rusty and it was nice to get back to a traditional medium for a change. My eyes can only stare at the computer for so long. This class had some very time consuming homework, but I came out with some nice portfolio pieces, and I got a lot of figure drawing practice as well. Its been almost 9 years since my last figure drawing class! If my schedule permits it, I'd like to continue figure drawing next term.



Sunday, September 11, 2011

Term 1

An exciting and mildly sleep deprived ending to the first quarter of the Gnomon Digital Production for Entertainment program. I was told over and over again, "Say goodbye to your social life." How true... It's been very difficult to stay in touch with people, sleep, and eat non-vending machine food, but hopefully next quarter I will find a good balance. I do not at all regret applying to this program. Some of this term was review, but I found that all of the classes blend together very well. This first term I had Visual Communications 1, Intro to Maya, Texture Mapping 1, Storyboarding, Overview of Visual Effects and Games, and Intro to Compositing.

Visual Communications

This class was all about drawing things in perspective from a product design point of view. We focused on the primitive shapes for 70% of the term, starting with cubes, moving on to spheres, cones and cylinders, and then gradually learning proper line weights, value, shadows, and composition.





 After that we did a primitive sort of character using at least one of each shape. I really am surprised at how much time I had to spend on this class just to get some decent results. It usually took all day Sunday and on many occasions, all of Sunday night.










Our final was a fictional or non-fictional product design. My weird little brain came up with a toy for kids to interact with their goldfish. Goldfish are not the most exciting pets, so I thought, what if you could take it for a walk, or even a swim?

We had go from our rough concept sketches to our line drawings, value studies, and final renders showing a beauty shot, detail shot, and usage shot. I would actually like to see this concept get made, after a few design tweaks. The fish does get the short end of the stick and I'm still thinking of a way to make it a gentler ride.







Intro to Maya

This class was mostly review and I really was disappointed with the amount of time I spent on the homework. I definitely could have tried harder. As seen in this example: "The Love Toilet". Why not share your bathroom time with your loved one?

This class was pretty fast paced. For our final we had 1 week to model a room, 1 week to texture it,  1 week to light and render. Fortunately we got a bit of an extension. I'm still working on this but here's my work in progress. This is from that not so well done TMNT movie, and this is the sewer den.