almost done!

i finally got access into the school's computer lab. just finished painting weights on the body. now to do the blend shapes for the face, connect it to the facial rig controls, then im done with this one. so close!

re-rigging

re-rigging my mesh. halfway through.

rigging.
is.
hard.

that is all.

body

stopped again by the limitation of my computer. i can't get any further, maya is chugging along on my home computer. so far, 2 days to model the body, one day for the head, another for the rest of the body. one day dedicated to uv mapping and messing around with textures. and one last day with building a simple rig. it was here where i was forced to stop because navigating around the viewport was way too slow for me.

head_01

this one is just far too frustrating to continue on. maya, zbrush, and photoshop consistently crashed on me as i worked on this. i really need to work on a better and faster computer. i figured i might as well move onto my next head model, seems like i'm not going to be finishing this one.

summer stuffs

i plan on doing bigger models, character models, scenes, etc, and zbrush sculpting. i will try to do these smaller models as i go, but i can't guarantee that.

for my lil bro

perfume

my girlfriend suggested that i model out one of her perfumes bottles. she gave me this one and i thought to myself, shouldn't be too bad. this model ended up to be a lot harder than expected. the hair of the model took around 2 hours to do. i needed to bake out a displacement map through zbrush. modeling took around 3 hours. texturing and lighting took a whole days worth of work (my computer chugged while test rendering). i'm really glad i did this though. gathering reference was fun. it was also interesting to find out that this particular perfume bottle had the most complicated shape to it.

broken hearts club

big big BIG shout out to The Associates, Dean "stkee" Ramos and Maxwell Corleone feat Andrew "Hitman" Heitman, and design by Kamva.
http://www.getassociated.net/wordpress/
http://www.fernando.kamva.com/

i love this design for the Associate's hip hop album "Broken Hearts Club."

(DOWNLOAD HERE: http://www.getrightmusic.com/2011/03/15/mixtape-the-associates-friends-broken-hearts-club/)

i'm really interested with the simplicity of the design. very sleek, very attractive. plus, the music on that album is just great. please give this a listen. the faceting on the blood drop is intentional. i wanted to add a bit of spice to my take on this, so i've given the blood drop a diamond-like feel to it.

spr 11, school updates

for my cg modeling class, we got to choose what kind of final we would like to do. i based mine off the naughty dog modeling test, where you're given a vis dev piece, and you are asked to model it out so it can be put in a game engine. i chose a vis dev piece off of sly cooper, but modeled it as if it were going to be put into a game with more realism, such as lara croft or uncharted. even though my skills were pushed, i learned a whole lot through this process, especially with the help of my peers. it's a shame that the video feature for these blogs make the resolution really small, i need a better way to showcase this project.

snes controller

3.5 hours of modeling, about 30 min to texture, and still a whiles to get the lighting. would like a faster computer to help with the lighting, but i can't be too greedy. i had to use a bump map for this one, but only to get the plastic bumpyness and for the L and R on the shoulder buttons.

nes controller

there was a challenge i've read on a forum some months/year back where you model an nes controller under a time limit. i wanted to go as low poly as i could but without the use of bump/normal/disp maps. i got it to around 2k tris within 3 hours of modeling. texturing and lighting took a while since i used this model to play around in keyshot. since i'm still learning the program, i went back into maya's mental ray and rendered with that instead. there's some slight faceting, but overall i'm pretty happy.

1866 carbine

revision for one of my assignments.
i've heard that lighting really makes the difference for modeling renders. you can have the greatest modeled thing, but have it look amateurish with bad lighting. lately, i've been watching a whole mess of tutorials on mental ray lighting, as well as experimenting with keyshot (hopefully i get to fully understand this program)

spr 11, vis dev: widow ching

we finally got to advance to a different author! our class was very excited, since we were all burned out from the gary soto world. we got to do character designs inspired by one of two stories from Jorge Luis Borges, "man on pink corner" or "widow ching." i did widow ching.

nickelodeon character design

we got to work with nickelodeon! this was such a great opportunity. they asked us to make one of two characters: 1) a female fox in sheep's clothing, 2) a male rhinoceros in female's clothing. this was my take on it.

spr 11, vis dev: tree house revised

this was so much gary soto. but in the process, i think we learned much more than we did as opposed to moving on with a new project. for my external scene, i tried experimenting with a broader color range. i know i fail with that attempt, but at least i tried. better that than being too safe (since my two from the first round, and my interior revision were all limited pallet)

spr 11, vis dev: tree house

more gary soto. this time we did a tree house based off the same gary soto poems. even though no where in the poems are a tree house described, we are to create one as if his characters made one. this was the first round of tree house ideations. little did our class know, that we were going to spend even more time redoing these.

spr 11, vis dev: kitchen

vis dev isn't my emphasis, but this class was a blast to take. i do realize i need to sharpen my photoshop painting skills, even though this was my first time really painting a picture with this tool (but that shouldn't be an excuse).
this project was our first one, creating a kitchen scene inspired by a Gary Soto poem.

conan

our assignment for my modeling class was to model out our version of conan the barbarian. but i was not able to get into the texture stage of it. maya hair was far trickier to figure out than i thought. but i did come out of this class with a lot of information. i knew going into the next semester that i would finish whatever project i have, no matter what.

115 animation

ive got to say that fall 2k10 was one of the most challenging semesters i've had. i've felt that i did not produce the kind of work that was expected of me during that semester. despite this, this is work that i've done so i will post it. this is a testament to myself not to fall behind this much art wise.

this class was tough, especially since i was not too fond of my story's animation. it was really hard to get into. even now, i find myself turning away as i watch this. but it is work that i've done, so it must be posted.

updating

going to update w/ the stuff i had during the year!