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.