WIP and updates, 10/3

So there are a few things I wanted to talk about briefly.  One, I have been doing a lot of background extra acting work and meeting lots of interesting people.  One of them suggest I look into the Air Force or the Air Force Reserves as a way of making some money, making ends meet, and maybe paying off debt.  It is not a small matter at all, and has huge ramifications, so I have taken the research and consideration very seriously and carefully.  If I do anything with that, it won't be right away, and will be after a lot of deliberation between my wife and I.
Second, I have a goal in mind for my demo reel.  I want to add at least 3 new pieces before the end of the year.  This is a tough goal, and one of them I would like to be a composite of a CG character into a live action background, this time a video with tracking.  It is a huge one, so I want to get started, and I want to make it short and sweet, something funny that will get lots of hits on youtube.
Third, I have been working on various aspects of the textures, this is going to take some work to get the level of detail I want.  So bare with me, and please give me good constructive feedback on anything you see as I go.  Yes I know it is too clean right now, but the next step is going to address that.
Finally, I might need to go back to the Starbucks where I took the original picture and capture an environment from a sphere, so I can use it for the reflection map, and possibly lighting (IBL).
That's it for now.  Don't worry about the Air Force, I've been talking to several people and decided it is right now more of a last resort option since I have some time.  Until such drastic measures, I will be continuing to work on refining my work, and making something really kick ass to show off.

The biggest changes this now are the addition of the white and green powders, as well as fixing the number of tiles and the size of the pattern on the floor.  I think I'll start on one side of the screen and work my way across refining the surfaces and then adding the grime/dirt/scratches/grunge after.

Just a hint of color

Not much to report today, except I've been doing tutorials for Renderman materials.  Good stuff!  It'll take getting used to with some of the different parameters/attributes, such as presence.  Well at least here is a small section I was briefly experimenting with.  It is way too clean and not refined and has no lighting, as it is just blocking in something, mainly messing with the shaders.

Some color at last!

Eggs and Ice

So I've been busy working on various shaders and am moving onto lighting.  I have been working on Michelle Ionesue's senior film doing her texturing and lighting.  I have just finished a shader focusing on icicle stalactite/stalagmites in her cave scene.  It is supposed to have an eerie other-worldly feel to it, and I think I managed to get the feel she was going for.  Once I finish with the final tweaks on the textures, I am going to be moving onto the lighting for her scene.  I also have my film to texture and animate, and another friend, Raymond, who's film I'll be helping him texture and light.  And I am going to try to help with the 3D Group Project film as well.  Busy busy busy...
Other than that, I've been diving into the advanced Photorealistic lighting class.  This is promising to be a challenge, and is somehow both frustrating and fun at the same time.  The current project we are working on is to recreate a photograph of a bowl (or plate?) of eggs as accurately as possible.  I am struggling to get the lighting just right, but the biggest problem is trying to get the geometry just right, repositioning, resizing, reshaping, and adjusting every single object dozens of times and then fixing the lights and shadows.  It is far from perfect right now but I am well on my way with it.  I want to make this look as close to the original photograph as possible.
So I leave you with 2 images, one of my eggs, and the other of my ice shader.    Enjoy! (Updated)

New Year!

Hey all!  This will be a short post.
First, I wanted to say Happy New Year!  Also, This is my last year at SCAD, as I graduate in the spring quarter (if all goes well).  Now that it is getting down to it, it is time for me to get an internship, apprenticeship, and/or job out in the real world.  So I am going to be preparing a new portfolio site, and putting together the best work I can to show.  I am also going to be attending the various career fairs and other events.  I will also be attending SIGGRAPH this year.  I just submitted my application for a Team Leader position, so here's hoping it gets accepted!
This quarter is supposed to be easier on me, but helping so many other people with their films is proving to make up for the easier class-load and I am already staying up late on assignments and deadlines.  Oh well, back to the grindstone.
Check out my latest update on my senior film blog, Last Light.  Got some cool new stuff up there.  Sorry about having to password protect my animatic, from here on out it is going to be getting too close to the final and I need to keep it from the public so I can prepare for film festivals.
So stay tuned for more work!  I'll leave you with a Sub Surface Scattering test I just finished that I think came out pretty good.  Still needs work on the highlight and bump, but it is a good first step.

No SSS (sub-surface scatter), lambert.

Adjusted SSS

Plant Shader

One of my final projects was to create a "shader" in Renderman for a plant.  The idea of a shader is essentially all the colors and patterns of a surface as well as the way the light interacts with it.  In short, it is a tool that the user adjusts that makes 3D objects look like what they represent.  So a rock will have a rock shader, a tree with a tree shader, and so on.  But in reality, these shaders are rarely so specific.  Most shaders are adjustable to look like a variety of things, and you can stack things on top of each other to change the look.  It gets really involved actually.  But to actually write a shader out by hand means you have far more freedom to make something look exactly like what you want, and for a very specific purpose.  As such, we were learning how to make an organic plant shader.  We actually had to go out and buy plants to study the patterns and figure out how to recreate the look with a coded shader.

I admit my shader is not as refined as I would like it to be.  I intend to take it further and add what are called "octaves", which is really just another level or two of detail, to really refine the shader.  I also want to refine the controls, but overall I am pleased with what I was able to come up with.  I would love to learn how to implement things like image based lighting and ambient occlusion into the shader, so I may have to study this on my own.  There is so much more to learn for shader writing, and I really enjoyed it so I wouldn't mind diving into this more.

So for now, here is a final render of my shader.  All aspects of it (including the interaction of light and shadow, the transmission of light, the backside colors, and so much more) are developed by me, and I hope to take it further.

Enjoy!

Patterns and Tartans and Weaves, oh my!

Short post for now...
So back to the shader writing, I have finished a shader (which may still need editing) that has been inspired by weaves, tartans, and patterns.  I used sine waves to make subtle patterns in the background, diagonal lines, and layers and layers of stuff.
This was harder to make than it looks, plus it is editable in Maya so you can change things like the colors and the thickness of the stripes.

Enjoy

An Intro to Shader Writing

So lately, I've been learning how to do shader writing.  What does that mean?  Well for anyone who uses Maya (or any other 3D software), the shader is the thing that lets you apply a texture or color to your geometry, and interacts with the lights in the scene, such as spec highlights, diffuse, glow, incandescence, etc...  Lambert, Phong, Blinn, and Phong E are all examples of shaders.  What I am just starting to learn is how to write my own shaders.  Eventually, I can even set these up so you can plug in the variables for the Maya users to adjust, to make it user friendly.
Right now, it really just looks like a grid, well a weave at this point, which isn't like any other shader I just mentioned.  It has none of the light-interaction controls yet, and the other shaders don't control patterns like this one does.  However, this is just a learning tool.
It has been really fun to program so far, and there is still more to do on it, but I figured I'd post what I have so far and let people see.  I plan to add more colors, and maybe another pattern to this.  We'll see how it turns out.

In other news, I have been doing some serious Photoshop editing, but I'll go into that on another post.  The long and short of it is, I haven't really learned any new tools in Photoshop since I started, but I did learn some techniques I have never used before (which is what i was hoping to learn).  I kind of wish I could take their advanced Photoshop class to really dive into it.  We'll see.

SCAD Generate 2013

Hey everyone!

So I just finished a competition for art students here at SCAD Atlanta, called Generate.  It is a 24 hour challenge where each department gets sponsored by a different company and we have 24 hours to break into teams and create an original work based on their criteria.  They often give prizes, free food, and have a lot of fun.  We had trivia (which we were surprisingly bad at), which helped lighten the mood, and waaaay too many sugary foods.

All that aside, our team was part of the Visual Effects challenge.  But why is an animation major taking the VFX challenge you ask?  Well this year the VFX department added a Technical Direction challenge which was right up my alley.  Our goal was to spend 24 hours making an environment for a character.  We didn't need to include the character, but we did have to describe the character.  We had to include an element of animation and part of our project had to use Houdini in some aspect.  Our character was a woman named Fern who lived in 1945 in Paris, France.  She has been getting lettings from her husband, a soldier in the war, and the last letter promised to meet up with her at the cafe they first met at.  Fern waits for him at Cafe Maison, but he never shows.

Sad, I know, you can blame me, I came up with the sappy details.  And I did a ton of work on this with 6 other students, all contributing their skills to the project.  Nicole and I were the two Houdini artists, so we made a billowy smoke effect for a blown out candle on the table, but she really did all the work there.  I was mainly in charge of making sure the work got divvied out and shaded most of the glass work and such.  I was also the only one who had significant experience in Nuke, so I was given the challenge of compositing the project with literally minutes till the deadline.  I had a TON of fun, and we managed to finish a rather complex scene in JUST under the wire.

While I would love to say more, for now I will leave you with a single still image of one of our two shots.  I know it isn't perfect yet, but with a little more work (and a LOT more sleep), it will look amazing!  Enjoy!

Shaders and Textures Final (TECH 311), part 1

Another sleepless night, but that is expected during Finals week at SCAD.

Today, I have for you all my final from my Shaders and Textures class.  In short, this is a class that teaches how to make objects looks really cool with textures and a realistic reaction to light.  So you'd think the final project in this class would involve making some photo-real objects, but it isn't.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Our final was to use a non-traditional shading technique to make something that looks 2D in a 3D world.  We aren't talking toon-shaders, but something more advanced.  Our in class assignment was to make it look like a drawing, and still have a reaction to light.  As you can see here, the sketchy pencil marks really help make this scene look drawn, but it is in fact 3D.

So for my project, I decided to do a painting.  Specifically, I wanted to make an homage to one of my favorite artists, Vincent van Gogh, and his most famous painting, Starry Night.  In order to make this project, I got the assistance of my beautiful wife to help me literally paint with Acrylics (because I don't have nor know how to use oil paints) onto Bristol board and scanned into a computer.  I then manipulated the scans, adjusting colors and tiling the images and such.  From there, I input them into Maya, did a lot of adjustments, and placed them inside various procedural textures which add a lot to the render to make it look like more than just a bunch of flat strokes.  The scene I chose to do is, in fact, a direct homage to Starry Night, which is not as well-put-together as I would like, but I will play with that later.

I am also working on animating this scene with a camera pan through the painting.  I tried this already, but I forgot to bake in some of the textures, which messed up the sequence.  Once I fix this as well, I should have a pretty cool short flying out of a painting.

So for now, enjoy my rendition of a 3D Starry Night.

And now... SLEEP!

Diner

So you remember yesterday how I showed you all a sneak peak of my project for today... well I finished everything and it looks great!  I plan to do more with this though, but I am satisfied with where I got it for now.
In this scene, I modeled the background, the bottles, the cups, the plates, the ketchup  the salt and pepper shakers... pretty much everything except the chairs (which you can barely see), the bottle caps (which I adjusted for my scene), and the flatware (which I also adjusted).  All the textures (with the exception of the photograph in the back) were made by me.  With the exception of the labels, they are all procedural.
This project was specifically designed to show reflection and refraction, which is why almost everything in the scene has some of this on it.
In the future, I plan to adjust the plate thickness, adjust the brightness of the glasses, add some wear and tear, model a booth, fix the background, and give it all new lighting.  I also plan to take this into Nuke, and do some post production composite work on it.
Again these are all NURBS (which the exception of the table and salt shakers, and the things I didn't model), which are really underrated.  NURBS can be used for so many different things, and or really great tools to use, I am surprised more people don't use these.  I would like to learn for Subdivision modeling on my own, but for now, NURBS are doing a fantastic job.  I am also really pleased with the way the table came out and the Coke bottle.  The ketchup was also fun to do and very effective.
So enjoy my newest render.  I will post more when I make edits to it in the future.

Now I'm hungry...

A sneak peak...

Hi again everyone!

Time for another daily pixel fix.  This time I am working on a very complex materials and shading scene, and I'm not really ready yet to show it, since I have little time left to work on it.  So instead, I will show you something I am using as reference, just a quick snapshot I took.  What you will see will not, I repeat NOT, look anything like the final project which you should see tomorrow or so.  However, it will be using the same theme.
I find that visiting a location and taking a few pictures, even mediocre pictures, is a big help in getting ideas for a scene.  But it is better to take nice pictures, which I just didn't have the time for.

So back to work I go...

Material samples

I'm late!  But I did spend most of the night working on things.  No worries, i will have 2, TWO updates today (a-ha-haa).

So here is a new sample of textures I made.  Some of these are actually works in progress (as some of my previous posts actually were).  These show fresnel effect, different metals, and a car shader (all custom made).