Russian Churches and Medal of Honor

Nothing like waiting a whole year to make a new post!  Wow life got crazy busy since the last time I posted here.  Since my last post I worked at Electronic Arts - Danger Close Games on two AAA video games.  Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel.  I also happen to get married to the most amazing man in my life!  Needless to say between work, dating him and preparing for a wedding there wasn't a whole lot of time for blog posts!

I'll get straight to the point.  While I was at Electronic Arts I worked as an Background Artist on the Environment team.  However I was a bit of a liason between the Lighting Department and the Environment Department; I was the Enlighten mesh Queen.  Some of you reading this may know what an enlighten mesh even is is and some of you may not.  What I will say is that everything I worked on at EA, unfortunatly isn't seen front and center at all in the video games I worked on.  Everything I did was more behind the scenes to make the lighting read correctly on the buildings.  The problem with this is I don't have a whole lot to show on my portfolio as far as Environment Art goes from my 10 months at EA.  And most everything on my modeling reel are characters.  I need more Environment Art - especially since I've been looking for an Environment Art position at a gaming stutio!

So I the first project I started working on after my contracted ended at EA is a Russian Orthadox Church.  I've just finished modeling it in Maya and I'm about to bring it into Zbrush for texture and color.  I can't believe it's been a year since I've moved around in Zbrush.  Hoping to never let that happen again.

Right now I simply have Maya screen shots of the Russian Church to post.  Once I get more into the texturing side of it I'll have some Zbrush stuff to post.  And hopefully I'll get this done fairly quickly and have it on my reel soon.  After that I think I'm going to revisit an old project I never completely finished.  My Hummingbird.  The Maya modeling is pretty much finished on it, I need to check out the UVs and then bring it into Zbrush and have some fun on the texturing.  After that I might revisit my Chevy Aveo and cleanup a lot of that typology (it needs help).

And here is a picture from the wedding just for fun.  If you're curious and want to see all the pictures the photographer's album of our wedding, the password is Irvine.  You can find our amazing photographer at his website: The Brides and The Bees

Zbrush realistic man sculpt

My focus over the last several months has been to learn Zbrush. It's been a slow process, only because my time gets divided with so many other things in life. But I finally have my first project completed and a temporary Zbrush turnaround on my demo reel. I ran into some issues with getting things to render out correctly in Maya/MentalRay but I've worked through those issues and will, hopefully within the week, get a Maya turnaround rendered for my demo reel. I have much more control over the speed and rotation on the Maya turnaround then the Zbrush one.

This project really has been a learning process, which is good because I definitely know what I will not do and what I will be sure to do next time around. Because this was my first Zbrush project and I stumbled my way through learning, this project took much longer then hopefully all of the following Zbrush projects will take. I started learning Zbrush with a great tutorial I found. Learning Sculpting in Zbrush (Beginners to Advanced) by Jason Welsh. This was incredibly helpful to get started in how to navigate around Zbrush and get familiar with the tools and such. I don't think next time I would approach starting a new character in Zbrush the same way, only because I ended up having to go back and spend a bunch of time retypologizing my character in Maya so that the typology was correct. However the tutorial did serve it's purpose for the time and I am very thankful I found it and was able to use it. I'm sure I'll probably go back and reference some of the points every now and again.

The thing I liked about this tutorial vs other Zbrush tutorials I've found online is this really did start at the beginner level. This assumed the viewer was a brand spankin' new Zbrush user and had no idea how to navigate around the software, which was the case for me. I wasn't able to really find any others that had this approach even though they may have claimed to be for a beginner. Most everything else I found came with the approach that you were already familiar with the software. And while those do have their place, it was nice to have this completely novice tutorial as well that was free.

Ok so here is the final turnaround and then I'll post images of the process going through it.

The very beginning of the sculpt I posted in Pipe head and learning Zbrush, this is the part that I was following along the tutorial. Then I decided to do a complete full body and take the pipes off of the head for a realistic sculpt of a man. I wanted to show that I could do a sculpt with realistic anatomy. I will go back and do a another sculpt with this guy and then I'll bring back the pipes and give him a full outfit with a lot of hard surface sculpting. It's going to have a steampunk feel to it. I want to be able to show a range of what I can do. However, I think before I do that I am going to go back to a previous project I never finished In flight and on paper and bring the hummingbird geometry into Zbrush. I want to really get into the detail of the feathers and do a full texture painting in Zbrush to learn what I can do with materials and textures in Zbrush. I'm sure that will take some time as I'll be in the learning phase of color within Zbrush.

Ok onto the images. When I did the initial layout of the muscles in his stomach and back everything was much harder and more defined. After having to retypologize the geo in Maya when I re-imported it back into Zbrush it softened the projection back onto the geo, which I realized in the end looked so much better.

12-10-11

As you see in this next image everything gets a whole lost softer here. Plus he now has hands and simple feet. I also unified his head to his body. All of which next time I will do first in Maya before I ever go into doing any finer detail.

02-09-12

Here are some images of some of the detail I worked on for his fingers and the simple progression of it. The final images being the typology of his hands and detailed skin textures.

Here is a close up of his chest before I started putting skin texture on. I ended up having to do the veins twice just because of loosing information on the re-projection.

His face actually changed through the process. I thought I had everything done (this was before I retyplogized) when I realized I couldn't ignore the typology in his head and that he really needed more typology around the ears, eyes, and mouth. I ended up bringing it into Maya and retyologizing his head... when it got projected back into Zbrush I lost so much detail that I had to re sculpt his face... which ended up making him look a bit different. The first image is the before, the second the after. I must admit I like the second one better because there is much finer detail.

Before

After

I love the detail you can get in Zbrush, the texture of skin!

I could go on posting all the random maya screen grabs I got when I was having issues with trying to get the normal and displacement maps to render correctly but perhaps I'll save that for the next post once I get the Maya turnaround finished. In the meantime here are the final turnarounds for my dude.

3D Modeling of my Chevy Aveo

I've come to realize, it has once again been too long since my last post. While I have set things aside for previous posts, they never managed to happen. So this post I will dedicated to my current 3D modeling project. Which I have actually been working on and off now for about 8 months (amongst many other projects), much more steadily recently however because I want to get this project done and on my demo reel

Today I also plan to update the galleries on my website as they desperately need to be updated. I am not a webmaster and I don't know all the coding that goes behind decent websites so I built my website using a Dreamweaver trial version. While I got it all done in time... I am unable to update it because the trial is now over. And while many other people would just pirate the software and do what they need, I have a strong aversion to using pirated software. All of the programs I have on my computer are bought and paid for.... yes the CS5 Production Premium that I have on my computer, I paid an arm and a leg for, but it's legally mine! And the Autodesk Maya and Renderman I have a year license, bought and paid for. Unfortunately Dreamweaver was not included in that package... and after spending $1600 on the CS5 Production package I just didn't have another $400 to spend.

Anyway the point is that today instead of working on my 3D Aveo model, I am going to attempt to stumble my way through updating my website via the coding! This shall be a fun attempt.

Ok so on to the reason I'm actually making this post, to show my current modeling progress on my Chevy Aveo. I chose my car because I love it for one, and it's right outside my window for me to pear out at while working. Here are some pictures of my little car that I love so much! This is actually the second one I've owned, my first one got destroyed in a tornado that hit my home in 2008.



I'm a long way from done but here is the progress so far.


These two images aren't the same, one is smoothed and one is not, click on them and you'll see the difference.






And as you can see the back is so not even close to finished... it's not even started!


And so that's all I have to show you for now. I want to have this done, UVed, textured and up on my demo reel within the next couple of weeks... that is the hope anyway.