DRC-015 main illustration completed

Not the best ever, and it's kinda flat still, but hopefully it'll do. Honestly I'm not too concerned over the illustrations as I already know how it'll be built, these're more for the sake of doing so than actually of use to me but anyway.



This's the one which was built over the skeletal model from last night, took longer than expected but it came out fairly nice overall, even if it's still not great.

What can I say, I don't have much emphasis on sketching and drawing, not enough time to focus on all the things I need practice on. Still pleased anyway with it for the most part.

Epiphany whee

Think I've finally figured out how to do the 3/4 view... it doesn't really need to be truly 3/4 so much as just partly on an angle or at least showing some degree of shape and stance other than flat on orthographic.

So I did a dig through google images, got a dragon picture with a relatively close to side view image, then built the vague outline of the skeleton over top of it, making the adjustments as necessary, which included proportional changes, how the wings are built, leg length and construction, alot of stuff like that, then redid it over top as another layer to more accurately display some pieces which need to be more accurate like how the neck, tail and waist connect.

So, now I have a sloppy, basic skeleton to build over top with updated, better looking parts.

As it's getting late, and I'm having problems concentrating, think this'll have to happen tomorrow, but this should allow relatively quick building of the main illustration, which I've been struggling with for weeks now. I figure... 2-3 hours tomorrow probably and it should be done even now that I finally have a template. I should've done this from the start, but I suppose sometimes you just only think of these things when half asleep. Odd, that.

Anyway, here's the sloppy skeleton that everything'll be built upon tomorrow.

Another sheet cleaned up

Nothing much special to say here, just some more stuff detailing key parts which move or need closeup drawings of how they work.

Quickish update for the weekend

Been finalizing some stuff, inking some older drawings for easier scan, redoing an orthographic which came out kinda so-so quality, which honestly the third try on it wasn't really much better than the first, at least proportionally, but seems better on quality otherwise... should be able to just tidy up the proportional issues in photoshop, or at least so I hope.

Tons of drawing work and such over the weekend anyways, but it's come along well so far.

Only have one totally finished on cleanup so far from photoshop, but going to put that here anyway for the time being. Should have several more done by tomorrow.

Shall likely need a little more time tomorrow, and the trip to class is a waste on mondays since it's about 2.5 hours of travel time for a mere 3 hour lab... not to mention once home again it takes a bit of time to settle back in and get things set up again to continue work, so think I'll just spend the time home as it'd be more efficient overall.

Anyways, picture time! This's a quick sample of some design schematics for the robot being made for character design 300. Going with a steampunk stylized dragon concept, so it's a pain to draw... on the plus side, from tests already done in maya, all it really requires for most of the fancy stuff like gears and such is just a few basic models to be done, and the rest duplicated off the primaries. Things like piping and such are highly modular and easy to make/place, and in fact many of these modular pieces have already been modeled, despite technically not supposed to've done so until next quarter I believe.



Honestly, I liked the sketched version of this better than the finalized cleanup version, but that's probably just because I was working on the cleanup so far zoomed in on minor details I could see the tiny imperfections with far greater ease, and zoomed out I notice them since I know where they are now.

Either way, though it has minor flaws I was not able to correct, in terms of providing basic concepts of how particular features work and go together, it's serving the purpose it was designed for just right.

The side orthographic will take up most of the rest of the night; it's pretty much done, but needs some serious cleanup work. Tomorrow should be able to see the final versions of the top and front done, since they'll be based directly off these design concepts and the side orthographic for overlaying, all the dimensions will be properly worked out in final form, which should make those two go faster than todays' work did.

Have to admit, either way, that I'm still much better at the modeling than the sketching of designs... despite having worked on this for weeks and multiple attempts at each, and design sketches ranging back since christmas, still having alot of problems, and I'm starting to think that the 3/4 view is doomed to be hideous no matter how much I attempt to correct it or redo it. Have something like 5 versions of it now or something, and each one comes out bad. Was supposed to do that first and the orthographics after, but this seriously flat out isn't working. Hopefully getting the orthos done will somehow make it possible to get a version which doesn't suck horribly, but I'm not about to hold my breath. Simon may just have to accept the fact that I know exactly how to build it, how the parts fit together, how they operate mechanically, but that the 3/4 view he may get may end up just looking not that good since it's such a complex model.

I could've done something simple, but then again, everyone else is already. I want something that I can be proud of for having taken the hard road and done it well, instead of something on par with a stickfa, which even the top students from years before essentially are. Even Andre, who is constantly mentioned as being one of the top students of the school to graduate, his own robot couldn't even do a proper walk cycle because it was flawed from basic concept, and honestly, I wasn't impressed by the design, which resembled far too much to me as looking like the stickfa with curved legs and an old camcorder for a head, made to look more futuristic.

I suppose that's to be expected though, the majority of the class, and as far as I can tell, modelers in general, do not have much innate imagination of their own, but simply convert anothers' dreams into something closer to reality. Not an artist, despite it being artwork. A strange concept really.

I'm willing to bite off perhaps a tiny bit more than I can chew at the moment, if it means something I can proudly display on the final reel and learn a great deal from. I'll make mistakes, as I've learned in several past projects, but those mistakes teach one how to do it better the next time by understanding where the flaws are now. I'd rather come across these problems while in college than when getting paid, as many as possible anyway. If it looks like something other than a stickfa with some armour glued on the sides, then all the better.

This of course seems to clash with Simon's school of thought being to do something simple well. While this can be effective at times, it also doesn't really show much else either, and severely cripples the number of learning opportunities. I have admittedly done so a few times now, when on deadlines or with a large course load to bare, but on special projects, the ones that mean the most, such as this robot design, it needs to have that extra touch of care put into it.

Practically any other design I've seen done before that they've put on the wall posters in the school, I could do without even trying. They're simple, and though they look nice, they are ultimately so simple that I don't think they're honestly going to impress anyone when it matters.

I just hope I'm not signing my own epitaph down the line somewheres right now is all. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not, I suppose there's no way to tell, only thing I can do is my best, and strive to go beyond even that. Hopefully this will eventually showcase such in the manner I imagine it shall when completed.

Anyway, shall toss the other stuff up tomorrow, still have alot of work to do. Some parts may need to be finalized in photoshop a bit later if I keep having as much trouble as I expect to have with the 3/4 view.

Time to grab a quick meal and get back to work I suppose.

Walkies!

Two new videos today; updated walk cycles!

It's mostly one walk cycle with two versions; in version 1, the walk is normal, heading towards the camera. In the second version, it's a silhouetted form, to give better idea of the shape and animation without being distracted by the model itself which can draw attention away from the specific motions. After review, I've noticed several very slight things which kind of bother me, but kind of look natural too so I'm on the edge as to whether to bother changing them or not.

The eyes! THE EYES! =O

A quick 24 second video (well 12 twice, two camera angles) of the upgraded eye model. This is manually animated as no rig controls have been added as of yet.

This shows the full range of motion possible for the model.

Also, it's hard to tell with this low res video since it's been compressed twice, once by aftereffects, and once by youtube, but there's small tiny gears inside of the eye which are rotating to turn the gyroscope the lens is built upon.

Overall quite pleased with the design!

The second eye will be slightly different, thinking of a telescope like assembly, which should be much easier to model and look appropriate as well.

Oh and there's some flickering of the shading on it; this's a compression error, just ignore it for now.

Beginnings of... A MONSTER :O

So we need to design a robot for class... no big deal. I've been working on the basic concept off and on since Christmas now, so know what I want to do with a pretty good amount of certainty at this point.

So far, have the eye design pretty much modeled, just need to correct one error involving the rotational axis of several sections being incorrect, to which I'm waiting on a response from Matt with an explanation on how to do that since it's not working the way I expected.

Anyways! Here's a quick video of the iris design in action, followed by a semi transparent render to show the completed housing assembly.






The way this's set up, the iris blades can close in a circular pattern, similar to a camera iris, or the iris of the stargate in SG-1. Same concept and looks nice, while leaving a gap to allow the inner 'pupil' to see.

The iris is mounted on a gyroscope which allows it to rotate vertically and horizontally, with small gears to turn the gyros.

Furthermore, the 'pupil', is a mechanical construct of 4 cameras; infrared in the center, for primary vision capabilities, with smaller red/green/blue cameras around the central section which provide secondary inputs so that things which are cold or heat shielded don't go invisible.

The pupil can also rotate slightly in relation to the iris assembly, to give the impression of an eye looking around.

Behind the pupil and iris assembly, is a reflective surface which allows light to be reflected back, vaguely similar to a cats' eye, for adequate night vision.

It's pretty complex overall, but the rigging honestly shouldn't be that bad, and it'll be wonderful for a nice closeup shot.

New junk!

In the process of doing alot of rendering right now so there's a bunch of videos that aren't available to show just yet. For now though, I have some rather... well alright most of it's good but I think Simon's going to kill me when he sees the dalek.

The dalek is kind of messy; just playing with Nfur before bed, trying to set bald spots is a ridiculous pain to do though with how it's set up. Absolutely loathe the maya paint tool.



As a replacement for the Joan of Arc tutorial, I made my Kiana Schrödinger character from 2nd quarter instead.

She's finally fully rigged, and able to be posed as needed. The tail and ear controls are a bit primitive at the moment, but they allow for fluid, organic movement with little effort, so they're good enough for the moment. They just aren't really capable of complex motions yet is all. Think I'll see if it's possible to attach an IK handle in, or a toggleable secondary set of FK handles. Maybe have one primary one for basic movements, and can turn on advanced settings after the fact if so desired. I dunno yet.


At first I was going to go with 'Luminopolis' for my company name... then I realized that there were already quite a large number of people using it after some google searching. Hence, it has been changed to Nekolith, with this as the company logo/video. You'll be seeing more of it from now on since I also rendered off a video for use which is just the paw/yingyang icon and name, which can be composited onto other works, such as the demo reel, allowing for animated consistency throughout.

Here's a composited still life of 3 household objects I had laying around;

A thumb drive (it's animated to open, and this scene is rendering out at school now for the quarter's demo reel), a remote control; Magnavox NA471 in case you want to verify it's authenticity of appearance; and a lamp made from popsicle sticks that my uncle Vaughn (I just realized I have no clue how to spell his name... that may or may not be accurate) made probably 20+ years ago. I would've rather modeled the one I made, but it's back in Amherst and I'm not traveling back to get it just so I can make one, besides, this was a very similar design and looks good anyway.


This was a self taught test of how to mess around with maya Nfur; have since learned a fair bit better control, but this was good for learning alot of interesting stuff like how each attribute affected it as a whole, and how to get it to render quicker. Have since learned how to apply to specific areas, rather than having to rely on a single object application.

I was going to put in the swf of the anijam video segment I did, but then realized that blogger doesn't particularly car for swf files. I could convert it, but it's too much work for just before bed, and it was excessively messy anyway due to needing to animate about 1200ish frames in a few days. Hence... limited cleanup. If anyone's really really interested I can see about a copy for later, but it's not that big a deal right now.


This's the case to the tears of Noesis game I was working on for GD100; the background for it was originally designed as a desktop wallpaper for my mother for her birthday, but it came out so nice as it was, it seemed a waste to just leave it.

Waste not want not, so just made some adjustments and adapted it for use in this situation instead. Works fairly well really. I liked the blue version better, which's on the final printed copies which were actually used as inserts.


Due to the arena style combat in the game design, I wanted to show a 'level design' of sorts. This 'Colosseum' level design is excessively rough, and the shot isn't particularly great either. Overall, the whole thing took about 30 minutes to make, so I suppose I can't complain. Overall it looks nice for the effort put into it, which admittedly wasn't much.

Idea being to run the 'ball' (in this case a gemstone with the ability to grant the holder visions of the future) to the end 'goal'. The game's concept is vaguely similar to that of a football game, though only in the most basic premise; rather than guys in armour, you instead get magicians with spells. Seriously, wouldn't sports be so much more interesting if your opponent could cleave the ground in half and raise a wall of rock from it to bar passage from the goal line, or be forced to dodge meteors landing when carrying the ball? XD

I'll possibly provide more info on the game concept for later use, but I'm admittedly a little concerned about the information being grabbed since it could actually be turned into something playable, especially with all the mechanics and balance notes I have compiled.

The instructor's been generous enough as it is to ensure that all copies of this data is not available to the school, since 'technically' anything produced while there is the school's property... hence, we've been given the opportunity to create something in which it can't just be taken away, preventing us from getting royalties from it. As such, I'll be taking extra precautions towards ensuring that this idea is safe, since I rather like the concept and can see a potentially good market in it someday.





Anyways, that's it for tonight, most of the stuff I've been working on can't really be demonstrated without movies that have yet to be compiled into a viewable state. So far I have most everything rendered off at least, with only three main sections left to go, all of which are fairly fast to render. The issue is moreso about compositing them together, and the fact that many are either just targa sequences at the moment, or uncompressed video, of which neither is particularly useful in terms of value to show right now.

Tomorrow's agenda is to re-render the dalek and space kitchen, get the previous work properly set up into uncompressed video formats, and finish the walk cycle on Kiana up above there. Want to have her doing the walk cycle for the final reel, even though it's not actually required.

Been awhile

Have a fair bit to show, but don't have time to show much so just going to drop on a quickish playblast of the character model I've been working on. The blue areas glow when rendered properly, but since this's just a playblast, it's fairly low quality so won't do that. Fixed the hands and am happy with them now, though still a bit irritated at the head. Don't really have time to fix it though, and have tried several times already anyway.

Nothing today!

Have alot of things on my plate, and quickly piling up. Nothing much to 'Show' though.

Beginning a new character model based on a previous character design from second quarter (Kiana Schrödinger, in case anyone recalls her), updating and fixing the car model (it looks great to the untrained eye, but has alot of minor flaws that need fixing due to have been rushed previously), some flash stuff (the big anijam one is top secret! My eyes only until it's done!), some writing for game design, and some texturing stuff. For the most part, however, nothing of particular interest to show. Unless people would love to see how monotonous UV mapping is. I'm sure everyone who cares, needs not see it again, and those who don't know about what that means, are probably best off left in blissful ignorance.

For now, kind of lacking much of value to show for the moment, as either things aren't done enough to even really show anything yet, have had such minor changes most people couldn't even see them, or are under development.

Mostly just wanted to make a notation that this blog has not been forgotten, though when I get the time, I'll be remaking it into a flash site now that I know how to do that. Due to workload constraints, however, this likely won't be any time soon.

3rd Quarter Demo Reel

Car is totally finished, rendering settings have been completed.

I was *SUPPOSED* to be rendering this off on 3-4 computers at school... the school computers have been having a great deal of troubles lately, corrupting files and especially renders.







This time, however... I was having problems with one computer, so I saved the files back onto the thumb drive to transfer over to another. Bad idea.

The files got corrupted on the computer and don't work, and I didn't realize until after I transferred onto the thumb drive, which no longer had the files anymore, just the newly corrupted ones.

So I'm back home now, and what should have taken 3-4 hours is going to take all night and probably some of tomorrow.

This worries me that I may not have it finished in time for the demo reel... which's bad. Always something... would suck to miss the deadline for that due to technical problems >.<

Even so, going to try to bypass the school computer issue by doing all the final renders at home for the car. The stickfa's no problem and won't take any time to do, but the car is going to chew through probably12+ hours of render time considering it's taking roughly 2 minutes per frame to render off on my computer here... it was closer to 1 minute at school, and I could've run it through several computers at once there until the files got corrupted -_-

On the plus side though, it looks gorgeous, just truly beautiful as I had hoped. The previous 'movies' I've left on here before barely showed anything, just the basic model in a playblast, but never fully rendered like this.

Now anyone who sees this can finally see just how stunning it truly looks once rendered properly.

Hrm I think I'm going to add fog to the forwards lights... sure it'll take a little longer on render time, but this should make it even better. Lighting is everything!

Finished video of the car





Image of the forwards grill since I'm so pleased with how the lights came out.

Update on car

Working on this all day, it's not 100% done yet, but it's getting closer quickly. Should be done by tomorrow.

Space Monkey Mafia

This's a video worked on by myself and my partner Greg Ripley; it was supposed to be based off the intro to the original Planet of the Apes. Neither of us have actually SEEN planet of the apes, however... and in my opinion, this's actually a good thing. While the other groups were tied down to tradition and what had been done before them, we were pretty much the only ones given the true purpose of the project... to take a basic script, design models, and build a short movie out of it, from the storyboards, design, animatics, and eventually to production, all on our own. Since we had no character designs, environmental information, and so on, other than really, really basic stuff like "camera goes past Jupiter", this gave us a ton of freedom to do as we pleased, while still sticking to the script given.

Specific details:

The models of the voyager space probe, and of the monkey's hand were done entirely by Greg with only minor consultation from me. He did an excellent job on them for such short notice =3 I handled most of the modeling and the compositing and rendering, while Greg handled the conversion of targa image sequences into videos that could be used in premier.

The music was chosen from a group of selections I had pre-chosen, and presented to Greg, who made final choice. The final choice was a bit surprising, but after seeing how perfectly it lines up on the timing on the video, I think it was an excellent choice ^^

The management for the project was handled by myself, director duties and human resource management and so on. Essentially, storyboarding and ideas were co-written without any issues, with Greg adding alot of great ideas to the project, but handling in between stuff such as deciding who does what and so on, I ended up with the 'leader' tag whether I wanted it or not XD

Out of anyone in the class though, I'm glad I got partnered with Greg. He worked hard, and we got along well. He's had a few difficulties with maya, but getting to work next to him, and nudge in the right direction, I think helped him out alot. The voyager probe is a great example of having gotten something from scratch to work well. Think he's come a long way and is doing much better now ^^

Overall I'm happy with how the video came out, though we had alot of rendering problems... many, many, many sequences either had files corrupted, randomly delete themselves, or fail to work into video sequences due to errors. Some sequences were rerendered at least 3 times, and in the end, we were able to force most to work, though a sequence from frames 522-588 always failed, despite being rendered off something like 6 times or so.

In this gap, seen roughly around 22ish seconds in, we had to sneak in a playblast to cover the hole. Removed all the things like camera gate and light arrows to hide that it was a playblast, but the lighting was totally different due to the vast difference between preview lighting and actual lighting. Sooo... did a quickish dip to white at the front and end of the problem area which masks the light transition well, though the dip does seem a little out of place, and we were forced to use several of those due to various errors, such as the third camera was upside down for no apparent reason and refused to fix itself and I had been unable to correct the problem, so just rendered the scene out as normal and did the dip to white to hide the fact that the camera movement doesn't quite 100% line up.

The final scene with the monkey's face closeup also had issues with rendering, and was eventually forced to be done with playblasts. Even the final render image which is held on screen refused to render properly despite several attempts, so a photoshopped image of it is used instead. If you look closely, the last frame jumps ever so slightly.

Mike, the instructor, pointed out that the last half of the video does tend to slow down significantly, it was nice and fast paced until about halfway, then some camera moves just drag out really long. I hadn't realized this at the time, until mentioned, but he does have a point. Think we'll be keeping that in mind for any later projects, to maintain the same atmosphere throughout, rather than a drastic change midway through.

Overall, it still looks epic win anyway ^^



*Note that Brendan had to come in and yell at the rest of the class for being behind the other class and behind schedule significantly at one point; our group was actually ahead at the time, so got out of that. While the other groups in the class passed in playblasts totally, mostly without changes to the settings so they looked clearly like such, we managed to get ours done early enough to render it off almost totally, and would've had it done sooner if not for severe issues with renders failing and getting corrupted.

Overall, quite a good dealie to get done early and with better quality ^^

Oops forgot one!

Forgot about this one, not sure how, possibly just because I've been working on it for the better part of the entire quarter off and on, and it's never been finished...

Until now!

This was originally in black and white. Technically all we had to do was to just put it into basic flat colours, then do some generic shading.

I realized the old 'rock' texture we'd done a bit before this looked very scale-like, so with some colour modifications, adpated it for use for the underbelly scales and wings.

The rest of the scales... well it's hard to see in this blog, since it severely reduces the image size unless you actually click directly on the image itself to expand to full size (I highly recommend it for this piece), each of the 'black' scales, were manually inscribed with carved runes. Each rune is carefully made; some are from actual runic alphabets, others from various game world runes, some from my own personal designs, and others are just random scribbles that look really neat. It took hours to get the runes in, in the first place, and even longer to make them actually work right and not be black on black.

The choice of blue runes on obsidian scales was one made due to a roleplaying character I'd made some time ago, in which I'd come up with a rather neat idea of a demi-goddess dragoness, Noesis, who takes after her name as a sage. She's blind, and rather 'sees' things as they are, as they were, and will be, and essentially 'knows' where everything is without having to see it. The rune design on the character was just too nice a concept, and I wanted to make use of it here.

Overall, I think it was worth all the effort.

Only major finalized problem, is that the green scales on the wings and face, in order to allow the darker base detail lines to show through, aren't quite dark enough, and look a bit washed out. I tried everything I could think of to preserve the effect, but no matter what I try, it ends up looking either so dark that you can't see the detail lines, or it looks washed out. There doesn't seem to be a happy medium in between, and even toying with the levels and saturation levels hasn't helped. Ah well, it's a minor gripe. It still looks great I think.

Finished on photoshop (mostly)

Pretty much done photoshop's classwork now, other than one final project which I'll do later. Have a bunch of other stuff to finalize first.

Here's the last few I finished up.



Been interested in Scottish Gaelic as of late, so made a few adjustments to some stuff regarding text due to this.

Deich Uidh should roughly translate as 10 steps, or something very close. Not sure if the grammar's correct though.




Next off a girl jumping turned into an angelic form!

The method by which I'd done the wing selection had been many times quicker and easier than the one suggested, same with the girl herself. However, there was a minor error on cleanup that left a rather hideous white boarder around the wings. Rather than try in vain to correct it, which wouldn't be possible without damaging the wings themselves, instead I added a white glow and a halo to match, which hid the problem neatly, and worked well with the theme of the picture.

Oddly, reminds me of Fall-From-Grace from the old game Planescape: Torment; a succubus who got kicked out of their ranks for not being mean enough, and then decided to open a 'brothel' (in a loose sense) dedicated to mental stimulation - conversation, debate, etc, and mental games such as chess.



Another one done in Gaelic, should roughly translate as 'there will be no more thirst'.

















This was supposed to be a checkmark. I was toying around with attempting to merge multiple ones together to see if it'd look right, and this was the result; ended up working out just fine, other than that, due to shape, it's a bit off center.














The example was to do a random guy with a stone texture. I went looking for a fire based fractal image for a basic texture instead, and recalled seeing Phil Collins doing alot of similar shots with a black background. Was easily able to get ahold of one, with some minor adjustments to match the two together.

Overall, looks nice, think he looks good with a full facial tattoo. Maybe someday he'll see this and realize how good it looks and get one XD

That or sue me. Whichever.

Ah well.





This was the base picture for a photo cleanup; have to place this here so it's possible to see just how big a difference there was, since just posting the cleanup doesn't really do much.











Technically I needed to remove the white dots and crease lines.

With a bit of effort, however, was able to salvage the large tear in the corner and the archetecture under it.

I could've stopped there, but furthermore went in and did some colour correction and some careful adjustments to make the girl in white in the middle stand out more.

And then made use of some creative filter use to make the people who were looking a bit glum or upset happier. This was done by doing an edge detection, raising it a few pixels upwards, then erasing most of it, and using it as a 25% overlay which gives the impression that facial features are raised and expanded slightly; ie - eyes look like they're opened wider, eyebrows are raised slightly more, and mouths appear slightly curved more towards a smile. End result is people like the woman on the left don't look like they're in a foul mood so much anymore. Subtle effects, only 1-2 pixel differences at a time, but I learned from knowing two friends who do alot of work with spriting, that a 1-2 pixel difference is all it takes, usually, to create artificial forced perception of something being more complex than it really is. When one only has 12 pixels of height to work with on a character, you learn awfully fast to make those pixels count. I never got into it as much as they did, but I did learn alot of lessons from talking to them and seeing stuff as they built them in the process.


And here we have two things I'm quite pleased with.

On the left, we have a plasma beam. I LOVE how the design came out, and the way the liquefying worked, the streams curling inwards picked up some of the darkness from the black background as they passed through. I'll be keeping this in mind for later since it looks wonderful.

As for the picture on the right, technically I needed to make swirly energy lines like she was casting a spell. Alright, so those ARE there... as is the plasma beam from several projects later as I intentionally did these out of order so I could give her a spell to actually cast in the first place. The wings were slightly accidental, in that when I was trying to liquefy the streams around her arm, I added some additional stuff to try to make it look better, but it came out looking a bit odd. Then I noticed it looked vaguely like a wing, so went with that and expanded greatly upon it.

The extra complex wing design outer edges, were actually created by accident at first, via use of an outer glow and inner glow filter, which apparently does some rather 'creative' interpretation of heavily liquefied forms. The entire wings were drawn out from 3 rather small dots that are hidden under her stretched out arm, between the shoulder and the fabric, so a rather small amount of base material to work with. Even the rear wing is drawn out from this location, but it was partially erased out to create the illusion it was from behind her. Due to this excessive overuse of liquefy, or at least that's my current assumption, photoshop got 'creative' when attempting to figure out what to do with the outer glow effect. I'll be keeping this in mind for later to toy with when I get a chance and am not buried under last minute preparations for end of term.

Continuation con carne! Also, additional alliteration allowed

Rather liked how this one came out. A nice little piece of a paradise resort showing what it really is like when that's your whole world for a few weeks.

Further Fun with Fotoshop, all alliteration, all day, always

Today is Fun With Photoshop


First off, a watercolour on canvas; was lucky enough to find an image on google of a poster I actually have in my room. Had been looking for a different one and stumbled across it, so it's all good!







Next off, smoke! There's a bit of a problem on the righthand side with it looking a little unnatural, but otherwise could pass for a photo of 'real' smoke probably. Just that one strand came out pretty messy, not sure why since the rest was fine. Either way, looks good regardless!











After that we have "smoke letters". Decided to go with a little wordplay on the dealie. Honestly, this wasn't supposed to look QUITE like this... but there were some minor issues due to the font of choice not playing nicely with the suggested filters. As such, it came out a bit differently, but while trying to fix the issue originally, came up with some rather nice accidental effects that looked really nice, so just ran with it.




A movie poster for a horror movie's next. The extra blood splatters weren't suggested, but it looked better with them.














Odd, there's another but it won't lemme post all at once.

Hood done

Got the hood done; another day, another playblast. Noticed a few small irregularities on the smooth preview playblast I'd missed previously, shall have to go fix those shortly.

Another rotation video

Sorry, replaced the other video with this newer one. Removed UI elements to see a full 360 rotation, and set it smoothed preview with a second half copied. Not useful to work on, but shows off what's finished so far better.

Another car section done

Another day, another piece done. Doesn't look so great right now due to messy lighting, but that'll be fine later on anyway.

Took less time than the others, but was really picky on some areas. Still took a good 6 hours of effort though.

On the plus side, there's only really one more armour plate to go, for the front hood, and then I can get to work on the main car chassis.

After that, have to do a door, internal stuff like chairs (the last video showed a failed attempt at a chair from some time ago), dashboard, and so on. Fortunately have much better reference photos for the next few pieces than this last one, which was very much so a pain.

I figure it should be done in total within a week, barring any unforseen circumstances or setbacks. Hopefully that doesn't occur, but I could be off too. Still need to set the materials up as well, think I'll be using Mia Material X for it since there's alot of plastic and metal, and that should give the best control over it, even if it means rendering in mental ray.

I'll have to bug Matt about that sometime soon. Sure it'll take forever to render, but for how nicely this's coming out, it deserves no less. That, and with the number of organic curves on this thing, it just will flat out look better with proper smoothed rendering. The default looks alright, but there really are way too many organic curves that don't quite come out right without an excessive poly count.

Last thing before bed

Should've slept earlier, not sure why I didn't, oh well. Here's a quickish last minute playblast of the car model so far, still a long ways to go but got another section done today, and fixed some older ones that were annoying me with inaccuracies and minor problems.

Took about 9 hours worth of work to get this much done, scary how long it takes, but I guess that's the price of doing things right.

Oh, and sorry for the quality of the playblast; really last minute thing before bed, took like 5 minutes to make so it's kinda messy and doesn't have more than a simple control turntable, which makes for crappy camera angles but it was fast and I'm tired.

Car update

Update on the car, coming along slowly, but it is coming along.

Made the top armour section, and fixed the lower part significantly, as well as an error I noticed on the rear lights. Hard to see in the image unfortunately, but it's getting better each passing day.

Finished the model fully now

Hadn't attached the cockpit during the last post, this time have it fully connected so that it makes sort of sense going from a cylindrical shape into a rectangular one.

Also, I made a quick playblast of it for an example to show off the finished product. Doesn't go into much detail, just a simple turntable, but not going to go for complex shots with it; have to do those tomorrow so may as well save it until then.

Monkey see, monkey do do ...fling?

More work today, got the interior of the cockpit for the ship done, this'll allow for outside shots and most of the shots up to the very end. It's not textured yet, so not finished obviously, but it can be used for the animations except the very last two shots which require the pilot, which isn't done yet.

Textures and lighting will make it look far better, but don't have those up yet, not needed for the animations in question however, so not a big deal.

Anyways, here's a shot of the interior; very basic looking, wanted to go for the whole 60-80's view of the inside of a ship. Lots and lots and lots of buttons, not much of anything for readouts. Controls are basic, joystick and a throttle, chair's cushy (20+ g's suck on escape and reentry), with a nice bomb to ride a la Dr. Strangelove.

This's supposed to be based on the planet of the apes original opening... I've never seen it, neither has my partner, Greg Ripley. As long as we stick to the script though, we're allowed to add any number of details we want. We kind of abused this, but Mike seems to like the idea so far, so good enough. It doesn't have to be a carbon copy of the original, and I think I'm actually glad I haven't watched the movie yet because of it. Most of the other movies people got were so popular as well, that they would be confined to only what was done in the movie itself, not open to interpretation of the script, like this whole class is supposed to be about.

Being able to read a script, come up with your own interpretation of what it means, storyboard it, create an animatic, build it, and shoot it... it's a pain but having some artistic license makes this alot more interesting than just following what was done before. So... this'll be an example of an alternate reality version I suppose.

Further car stuff

The previous showing of the car through a screenshot wasn't all that great, and I'm quite pleased with how the wheels turned out. Wanted to do a test run on how fast to animate them spinning for later on, so did some number crunching with some reading into how quick a wheel this size SHOULD rotate at a given speed, so here's an example of a wheel sitting at rest, and then accelerating to 40kph.

BMW Vision

Been working on a car model for class, it's a bit slow though, each piece is pretty painstaking work due to the vast number of organic curves. Getting each one just right takes forever, but so far, it's been worth it. Each piece is near perfect, regardless of how complex they were to make, and I'm quite pleased with such.

Here's a quick screenshot since I'm not sure how to add wireframes to a render just yet.



Further info on the car model:

Based off a BMW Vision concept car, I've noticed a few key traits to the design which should help in modeling significantly. Primarily, it's that the car itself seems to be comprised more of a central main chassis that's pretty much the shape of a 'normal' car, but has the nice looking side pieces attached like armour plates, more or less. Much more elegant than bulky armour, perhaps, but the concept seems to be the same; just excess 'stuff' bolted onto the sides.

This makes it a bit easier to model, however, since it means I've been able to isolate a few key sections which are physically distinct from the rest of the car. The front hood section is one such example; the lower fender area that covers the side of the car and part of the back (seen in the picture) is another, then there's an upper part that trails from the rear to the hood of the car but is thin and narrow, tracing along the entire length of the car. The inner main car itself seems more like a rounded bubble with these extra pieces merely stemming off of it. The side doors, and several other pieces can be easily separated into their own sections as well.

For the amount of effort it's going to take to get this thing just right, I'm a little annoyed at the stickfa having wasted so much time. I suppose I could've jumped ahead of the class's suggested pace, but didn't realize it was going to end up so complex, even with having simplified the issues alot.

Car'll be done by the end of the quarter on time, that much I'm not worried about; rather, what I'm worried about is what's going to have to be sacrificed to get it out in time and done right.

Something's going to have to be sacrificed somewhere, there's only physically so many hours to work with. Quality on the car is one thing I'm not willing to sacrifice, however. I want this one to be nearly perfect... it's going to be the showpiece of the demo reel this quarter, the #1 prized possession, to show the top end capacity of what I can do.

Problem is, this means that quality elsewhere is going to have to drop... I'd really wanted to learn flash inside out, but with how much of a ridiculously disproportionate time sink it is, I'm afraid that's looking like the main area that's going to have to suffer. Photoshop's pretty easy and fast, haven't had any issues breezing through there. Maya's the main thing that NEEDS done, since it's the whole point of the course in general. I can't skimp on the mini-movie opener for Mike's class, since I have a partner there who's relying on me to get my stuff done, and I refuse to drag someone down with me.

So... chances are flash is not going to have remotely the time left over for it that it deserves. Suppose that's how it goes though. It'd be nice to know it inside out, but something has to give, and flash just sucks up way too much time for the end result. It's hours upon hours of busywork, just stuff to get used to practicing the motions, and that makes perfect sense considering... and I value the course, but it's going to have to be turned into quick scribbles instead of carefully done stuff from now on I think.

They weren't kidding when they said the flash homework was going to kill us. Oh well, can't let one secondary course absolutely ruin every other main course that means more.

And of all things of value, that car is going to have to take center stage, so most of my time is going to be devoted to perfecting every tiny piece of it.

More photoshop stuff today

Catching up on photoshop and flash stuff, got a ways to go yet over the next few days, but it's coming along well so far.

Evidence of such is here!

Apparently, this blog doesn't accept .swf files, fortunately it's possible to convert them to other formats, but it really hurts on the file size. This tiny example is a painful 8.5mb, so don't think I'll be loading it up too heavily with videos.

This was originally supposed to be a laser, but after several failed starts and discovering flash can't actually do what I wanted to do without blowing ten times the effort into it, ended up going for a still interesting, but not quite as nice effect as the original desire. Still looks nice, if not very laserish.

Junk and stuff

Been doing alot of stuff which I'm not sure how to place here, but the stuff I do have is rather interesting.

For example... KITTENS!













Or a nice icon of Slaasnesh with fire and stars. Star background I could've made, but I found a photo from hubble of the pleiades which I just had to use... with some minor adjustments so it'd look better with the icon.








Also, this old guy just didn't look old enough, so the photo was aged significantly through quite a few different methods combined.






Anyways, I'll add more as soon as I can figure out how to add .swf files to this thing.

Been excessively busy last few weeks, have more stuff to post but having problems finding time to set it all up. Shall do so in the near future as able to. Have a 6 day weekend starting tomorrow so should be able to find some time int here somewhere.

Because nothing says supper like the smell of an exploding planet

Or something like that.

Anyways, jumped ahead a few weeks in classes since the stuff's laid out ahead, toyed around with some effects and came up with some neatish stuff.

Have a rock texture, added a lightsaber to an older picture, and blew up a planet. Starting to see why photoshop costs $700ish, and why it's actually worth it. It's definitely capable of far more than just cleaning up redeye which's what most people would use it for.

Tonight's project shall be an assortment of plasma beams to blow planets up with!

This dumb thing almost made me late for school, hadn't expected it to be 2.5 hours of effort...

On the plus side, it does look very nice when finished.

Just an exercise in using the tablet, and learning to shade.

Fun with fire!

So we were shown how to make a nice fire effect on an already made photo or drawing... there was a perfectly good example and tools to show how to use it but I decided I wanted to use something of my own collection instead.

Must say I like the results... took ages to do compared to most of the effects I've seen so far in photoshop, but I'm more than happy with the output ^^

The evidence suggests I am stupid

Why did I stay up for about 4 hours longer than I meant to instead of sleeping? I'm not sure really. An epiphany struck me when I was about to go to sleep and I just had to make use of it.

So... 4 hours later I have a model finished.

Sure, why not. Sleep's overrated anyway.