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.

Pipe head and learning Zbrush

In 12 days I will have been at Pixomondo for six months; which means it's been six months since my last post. Looking at my previous post I realize I haven't touched that digital painting since then. Now I want to run off and go work on it. There always seems to be something to take me in a different direction though. I often find myself skipping from project to project so quickly I never actually finish anything. While this can be very frustrating, the more I talk to other artists, the more I realize that a lot of us operate the same way. But it is nice to have something finished, otherwise I feel like I'm spinning my wheels really fast and going no where.

However, reflecting back on the last six months I realize that I haven't accomplished nothing. I have in fact accomplished a lot. Most of my hours are spent at Pixomondo as I work a minimum 50 hour work week. Who knew 50 hours a week would suck so much of my time up! I'm also very involved in church activities which take up a lot of my time. After that, I get a few hours here and there to create. And just think, I want a husband and kids someday. That will suck up any remote chance of free time.

I have ended up spending a lot of my extra time working on making jewelry for my Etsy shop. I've started a new steampunk series that I have spent a lot of my stolen free time on. It's been a blast and I've had a grand time running around Los Angeles looking for bits and pieces to use. I've ended up spending a lot of money and time on this little venture and hope to actually start making money back at some point. I bought my first feature spot on Etsy for next Thursday October 6th and a week later bought another for October 12th. I'm really hoping this drives some business to my shop. Otherwise I'm going to go broke on this little hobby! You can visit my blogspot dedicated to my shop or you can Like my shop's facebook page.


I've ended up having to pull back a bit because I found myself spending way too much of my time on it. Now why in the would should it matter if I spend my free time doing something I absolutely love? Well that is because I need to learn a certain software called Zbrush that I didn't have the opportunity to learn in college. Because I'm pursuing a career as a 3D modeler, knowing this software is an absolute must.

I, however, am really good at procrastinating with my free time and for some reason haven't been spending as much time learning this software as I know I should. I have come to the conclusion that because I spend 10+ hours a day in a dark room staring at duel monitors, the last thing I want to do is go home into an even smaller dark room and stare at duel monitors. Thus I end up spending my time on jewelry making instead of software learning. Well last week I came to a header with myself. It's a do or die situation. My current job here at Pixomondo will be ending at the end of the month. The goal is to move me into a modeling position. However I'll be extremely ill prepared if I don't learn this software ASAP. So I've started cracking down on myself.

Right now I'm going through an awesome free tutorial that I found online. I'll come back in later and post the link in here, I don't have it on the computer I am currently writing this one. I will post some pictures of my progress. I haven't spent much time on it yet, but for the little hours I have spent, I think it's progressing nicely. As you scroll down you'll see my progression.









I have to say I am absolutely loving this software. It is the coolest thing since sliced bread in my world! So why in the world do I procrastinate when it comes to sitting down in front of it? Once I actually get started it takes everything to pull me off of it.

As you notice the there is a progression of proportions on his head. At first the top of his head was too short, fixed that. Then someone else pointed out in the second group of images that it looks like the back of his head is too far in. That's actually an illusion created by the pipes on his head. I should post a picture without them for perspective. And yes those are actually going to be pipes eventually, not horns. Something with this type of feel (mainly I like the connection points on these - NOT the coloring):



I have a feeling this model is heading in a steampunk direction but I have no idea really and probably shouldn't even put that out there in case it heads in a whole different direction. Oh well, it's already out there. We'll see where this goes. I'll keep you posted.