AngryPolygon's Quest

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

2012-01-05T19:11:00.000-05:00

I am proud to announce that the game I am Character Lead on is announced!

We are featured on the cover of Game Informer Magazine's February issue. Have a look at the cover reveal here:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2012/01/05/february-cover-revealed-xcom-enemy-unknown.aspx

Stay tuned...

nice panel

2011-10-24T20:55:00.002-04:00

while retopologizing some stuff today at work, i watched/listened to this panel from blizzcon 2011 on the making of the diablo 3 cinematic. this was a pretty excellent panel and i recommend you check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-skQwvbuYU

friends! the blog is not dead!

2011-09-07T21:06:00.002-04:00

i know i have neglected to post up here lately but i am busy as hell! deadlines at work and in life are taking over. i promise i will post some work and thoughts soonish.

things i will post about:

more peter updates
texturing pipelines for production
high poly burnout
managing crunch to avoid project burnout
crunch/family balance
the future!

stay tuned...

interesting discovery that makes a lot of sense

2011-07-26T21:07:00.000-04:00

been working on peter's hair a bunch recently and something struck me that i've been doing the past 2 nights. i've switched my move and scale gizmos to operate only in screen space. now, i know that you can adjust the move gizmo to have that little box where the 3 axis meet, but i'm talking about switching the damn thing into screen mode and that's it! now, what happens with screen manipulation mode is you have to spend more time rotating around the model to get your proper move position and angle. think about it. what happens when you're rotating more? light is passing over your model more and you are forced to focus more on the form of the model while you're getting your gizmo position and angle right. this is great because no model is great without strong form. i have noticed an improvement in my form because i can't use a predictive gizmo. i am forced to rotate much more to get my gizmo oriented properly.

food for thought.

another long time inbetween posts

2011-07-11T23:05:00.000-04:00

hello there friends. it has been a while between postings. that's not to say this guy hasn't been doing any art, it is just the art i am doing is for work and i cannot show it as of yet. lets just say things are busy and i have been working a bit more than maybe i'd like, but don't we all...

in the coming weeks i will take some pictures of my recent figure drawings. i help put together a small bi-weekly figure drawing session at my work and i've recently had some pretty good drawings come from it.

i am still plugging away at peter. i am afraid the deadline i've set for myself to have him done by the end of august will probably prove unrealistic due to things at work, but it happens. i will try to work through him as quickly as i can so i can get to some new work.

sorry for the lack of picture. hopefully when i can show what i am working on at work, i'll have a rather large blog dump for you. stay tuned...

long time there, bloggo

2011-05-26T23:06:00.001-04:00

got peter's hair massed out using wrap it tonight. i haven't blogged in a while. been busy with kid and what not. also been doing manlier things than modeling. built a new roof on my shed, began design work on a workbench, and have begun tooling out my wallet.

lunchtime shader work

2011-04-04T13:00:00.002-04:00

peter with some updates

2011-04-03T21:13:00.000-04:00

peter has been updated with a new rig that will allow for better morphs. here's the new head model w/ UVs and the prototype skin shader that i am working up.

the above image is the new UV layout for peter. this will allow maximum resolution on the face area.

this is a skin shader that i am working on in mental ray. you can see the red checkers blend out into skin. the idea is that i will create a procedural skin shader that blends into the actual UV mapped one. i will start with the procedural one as the base of the texture so they will seamlessly blend together. this is just experimental as of right now.

this image has the mr sss fast skin + shader that i downloaded from zap's. it has reflection built into the shader. it looks cool, but i prefer the classic mr sss fast skin.

this is the mr sss fast skin shader on peter. i am currently working on the shader when i don't feel like sculpting, like tonight!

just for reference

2011-03-08T21:48:00.002-05:00

http://developer.amd.com/gpu_assets/WileyAuthoringforTessellation.pdf

http://wenku.baidu.com/view/95dcafbafd0a79563c1e7225.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tessellation.html

The right stuff

2011-02-17T20:58:00.001-05:00

I wish I could post an image of what I'm working on at work because I am trying out a new (to me) process for hard surface modeling and I'm really happy with how the piece is turning out not only in quality but in speed. I took the concept and made a super quick 20 min control mesh made in max and imported into zbrush and started sculpting out hard surface forms completely focusing on form, proportion, and shape balance, worked it up in zb and decimated and brought into max for the retopo and detailing phase. I do not have to worry about how the shapes should flow together while also worrying about topology. I can just retopologize and detail on top of a nearly fully realized mesh. granted I may not save time on this model, but the next one will definitely go quicker now that I have some experience with this. definitely shaping up to be my best model yet.

making some editssssss

2011-02-16T13:24:00.000-05:00

i am hoping to keep the lunchtime working up over the next few weeks while i get adjusted to life with an infant. fatherhood is pretty awesome so far. though i am ultra tired all the time, i can't let that stop the momentum. i figure while i'm at work, i work and while i'm at home, i chill out w/ the fam. he's almost 3 weeks old now and i feel like emily and i are adjusting quite well. we've got a good system going so far : )

i talked this over w/ dennis a while ago about how i handled the hair on peter and i am taking a crack at actually having it be geometry on top of the head rather than stitched into the head as it is. i feel like this is a better approach for a few reasons which i will get into later. here's a quick grab of what i did over lunch. nothing special, but i think it will come together quickly. if i am going to hit my date for peter and carmen, i must be diligent!

kill the little hater

2011-02-11T18:53:00.001-05:00

my man dannny williams over at lunch crunch passed this along to the lunch crunch crew. it is all about how this guy kills the little hater inside him.

my little hater pops up when i don't give my work enough time to develop. i'll be working on something in zbrush and i'll think "why isn't this thing further along!?" and just start to get frustrated. the hater pops in then and starts telling me i should be bigger better faster more and sometimes i will start something new to mix it up a bit. the way i kill that hater is to give myself an extra half hour to have it develop. i find that if i stick with the model for another half hour, it usually starts to come together and i can push it until i want to stop and am ultimately more happy with the result. i kill my little hater with time and patience, how do you kill the little hater inside you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TpmJgSfZ_8

the little man

2011-01-30T15:48:00.001-05:00

shepherd "shep" sulzbach is born! after 9 long months and a 14hr labor, the man emerged covered in goo and screaming his head off. mom and baby are great and we will be discharged tomorrow. not sure when i'll have some new art up, but i'm not too worried about that right now ; )

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moving into final morphs

2011-01-24T22:52:00.000-05:00

these are taking a lot longer than expected. spend two hours on the upper lip morphs and got this far. gotta figure out a faster way...

here's the same morphs on peter, though i am not sure why he's segmented...

i am going to try GoZ tomorrow to see if that can speed me up.

another 40

2011-01-13T12:52:00.000-05:00

coming along. i've got an idea now of where i want this guy to go. i will put up an image of it later on. maybe monday i will lunch crunch a quick concept.

lunch

2011-01-12T12:54:00.000-05:00

did some technical stuff to this guy. broke his ears off as separate pieces and started working up some stronger planes. its at the stage where i'm not into it but will continue with it to push it into a better direction. but, as ed catmull says, show each stage to get rid of the embarrassment, so here we go.

as for the morphs, i have completed the first pass of all of them and will begin the refinement of the brows tonight!

a little lunch crunch action

2011-01-07T13:09:00.002-05:00

quick sculpt started from a box. needed a break from morphs. not sure where its going but it will go somewhere.

another lunchtime blast of excellence

2011-01-06T13:04:00.000-05:00

got the first pass of the whole mouth morphs done today at lunch. only a few more left!

i have found a great use for the Dropbox app that i will write about tonight, i am just putting this here to remind myself to do that.

lunchtime

2011-01-05T13:00:00.001-05:00

did some cheeks over lunch. that's another 10 down so i think i have like 10 to go for the first pass.

super tired, but managed the sneers

2011-01-04T23:37:00.000-05:00

i stayed up way too late last night so i can only stomach a small update tonight, especially after the day i had, but here we go. first pass on the sneers is done. i have 22 more morphs to go. i am uploading my files to my dropbox so i can work on them at lunch tomorrow.

on a side note, i've rediscovered the braid soundtrack for working and it is excellent. please enjoy this tune.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjudDROdUZM

about 30 morphs left in first pass

2011-01-04T01:23:00.000-05:00

I am trying to get at least the first pass of all the morphs done before my son arrives. once he does, dennis will be taking these over and finishing them so once i get my wits together with a newborn, i'll then be back on finishing peter's texture and carmen's model and texture.

sltioba

2011-01-02T21:54:00.000-05:00

on wednesday, august 27, 2008 i started this blog. the original intent was to help me break out of an "art funk" whatever that means. the main thing that i have gained with this blog regarding the "art funk" is the give yourself an extra half hour rule. if you're not happy with where a piece you are working on is going, especially if it is digital, focus for another half hour and see what happens. usually i have found that with digital work, you expect greatness quicker. "well i'm using zbrush, why doesn't this look better?! i've put 10 minutes into it already!" it doesn't work like that, obviously. with experience comes speed. anyway, peter's head was one of the first posts on this blog. by august 2011, i will have had this blog open for 3 years. it is somewhat sobering to think that in under 3 years, i have finished 1 digital piece on my own time and that was for a contest i helped organize at work. i do art a few nights a week whether it be sculpting, sketching, leather work, or some other random gig or piece that sits unfinished. i have a improv folder on my hard drive with speedsculpts, unfinished models, and stuff that my hand craps out every now and then. and then there is staged. staged takes up a lot of time, granted it is good because i am enjoying it and i can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but to think i have been going at it for more than 3 years with nothing final is definitely sobering. i am very encouraged about it lately because seeing what dennis and justin have been doing with the models and bringing them to life is more than enough to keep me going, but i want to finish. i need to finish. i need to get both carmen and peter done before august 27, 2011. i need to get these two characters over and done with so i can move on and make some of my own work.

my wife is 36 weeks pregnant so my life can change at any point and with that everyone has told me how much i should get done before the kid comes, but i can't help but think about the guys at work or on forums with kids who still inspire and wow me with the stuff they do on their own time and it gives me hope that if you want it bad enough, you will make time for it. the other stuff is justification for one's own laziness or disinterest.

take an hour and watch this

2011-01-02T12:45:00.002-05:00

Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc&feature=player_embedded#!

all non-bone carmen first pass morphs done!

2010-12-01T02:30:00.001-05:00

hello again.

all of the morphs in white are carmen. slowly chewing through the list.

this is a test expression. not great, but cool to see.

i used a different technique for the morphs tonight. morphix! http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/morphix this plugin was written with the sole purpose of re-ordering verts on a model with the same topology but different vert order to another model to make morph targets less painful. this process went a bit quicker than with the re-sym tool which is good, but it can be finickey. if you're working with morphs of any kind, morphix is a good tool to have in the arsenal.

i also found this blog today called lunch crunch. http://lunchcrunch.blogspot.com/ it is a public blog (meaning any artist can join and post) and it is just a deposit of different artists' 1 to 2 hour doodles on their lunch break or any spare time. i plan on joining it, but not tomorrow since i have a (probably terrifying) dentist appt.

i've also been setting up my kids room. i'm super excited for my boy to get outta the womb and meet my wife and i. i digitized all his sonogram pics and enhanced them a bit. his in-utero name is godric. that will change once he's born, but for now, here's little godric doin his thang. crazy ass 3d sonogram! soon i bet they'll be able to export .stl files and you can get your fetus 3d printed! gross!

in for the long haul

2010-11-30T21:38:00.001-05:00

a small cup of coffee turned into a big one with carmen smiling over me. lots of stuff to do tonight...

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another round done

2010-11-04T00:49:00.002-04:00

i am going to knock out the bulk of these morphs, do a round of tweaking, and then hand them off to dennis for thorough testing and feedback. here's the eyelid update.

carmen morphs begun

2010-11-03T00:52:00.000-04:00

tonight has been my first art night in a while and it feels pretty good to get some work done. i've got the first pass of carmen's brows done. they don't all work together well enough yet, but the bulk of the work is out of the way on them. my process is as follows:

begin work on the morph targets in zbrush working on only 1 side of the model. i am using zbrush 3.5 r3 for this because the layer system isn't as crappy as zbrush 4.

after the first initial pass is done on all the morphs, i export them as .obj files and import them into max. this gives me the left side of all the morph targets. i then begin the process of mirroring them across the model. for this step, i use a tool that the greatest tech artist in the world, dave black, wrote for me for something that i was doing at work, but has come in handy for this as well. the tool requires a perfectly symmetrical model on origin. the tool caches the verts of the base mesh

next, i will select the verts on the side of the model that i edited in zbrush.

after resym is pressed, the verts mirror over to the other side, leaving me with the expression symmetrically present on both sides of the face.

to get rid of this, i simply select the verts on the originally edited side of the face and apply a morpher modifier to them. i then select a copy of the base symmetrical head and turn the influence up to 100 to reset the verts back to normal.

after that is done, convert the model to an editable poly and voila. you've got mirrored morphs in under a minute without reordering verts at all!

here is a quick expression test. the morphs definitely need more refining, but getting 16 pretty far along in 2 hours is good i think.

over a month

2010-10-27T00:03:00.000-04:00

yes, it has been over a month since my last post. i am ashamed...

there is a lot of stuff going on right now. i am prepping for my first son's birth, dealing with a death in the family, work has been super busy, and am trying to get my robust bottom into shape. in between all of this, i am still working on peter. i am working out some hair issues that we currently have, so i hope after things settle down tomorrow, i might be able to get to it a bit more. life is hectic.

content aware fill

2010-09-15T21:59:00.001-04:00

i had a long ass day at work today uving and baking maps, setting myself up for a dream day of texturing tomorrow. i have been putting cs5 through the ringer and really found a great use for the content aware fill function of the program. cleaning up the small imperfections of your ao, normal, and any other bakes you may have done! select the small bits that processed incorrectly or parts that the cage missed and hit the content aware function. it fills the spot in with near perfect results! i am typing this from my phone in bed so i cant really show any proof, but it works great. a little blurring of the edges and your projection errors are a thing of the past. nighty night, its another early day tomorrow!

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hair update

2010-09-13T23:15:00.000-04:00

working out the hair sculpt, round 1. not too happy with where it is going, but it will come around in time. dennis and i are starting work during lunch sessions on tuesdays and thursdays starting tomorrow, so i'll post another update then.

sweet lounging/sculpting setup

2010-09-13T22:24:00.001-04:00

i rearranged my studio so i can kick my feet up and sculpt with the cintiq right in my lap. pretty comfortable!

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the quest for technique may have come to an end

2010-09-08T22:26:00.000-04:00

been putting off peter's hair for a bit mainly because it is intimidating. i'm not exactly sure where i want to go with it or how to get there so i spent some time tonight playing. i did some quick test sculpts in zb4 to rough in a "look" which aren't great, but were a catalyst to figuring out what technique i will be using on peter. as you can see in the jpeg, i have an image of a render of peter's hair, one with a normal map and one with a bump map. the normal map reads a lot stronger than the bump so i will probably go that route. this way, i can get a nice sculpt in zb and bake it down in xnormal to apply to peter. this should work out well. i will do an animation test tonight with the normal map applied to make sure nothing gets funky.

zbrush 4 first impressions

2010-08-27T00:40:00.001-04:00

standard practice from pixo this time around. add a few new features, break or maim others. zbrush has added the ability to animate in a limited quantity, inside their hi res sculpting application. let me repeat that. high res sculpting. yes, i know the point of adding a thing like that to test deformations and stuff, but to completely break the layers system using the same technique. zbrush's layer system sucked before, but it was limited to sculpting only, and on 1 layer per mesh. only on 1 subdivision too, but it didn't suck if you could manipulate it. polypainting had no layers. now polypainting has layers, so not only do you have to sculpt but also polypaint on a layer with all of the others activated. here is why this is a problem for me. sometimes i will jump ahead to the tertiary detail phase, like in the practice sculpt above, just to start seeing some more detail than is actually there and by doing this i am sculpting and painting at the same time. now if i want to go into another layer and start working up the secondary forms some more, i like to hide the noise or pores and sculpt and smooth bigger forms. now i can't sculpt without having zadd or zsub activated, and my pores layer obviously has it on, so i can't sculpt with it off, build up my secondary forms, and then add the layer back on after i've smoothed to my liking. so zbrush forces me to smooth out my pores in order to further sculpt rather than just hiding the layer they are on.

i did have fun. the new hard surface stuff is pretty cool. here's a TT of a practice sculpt i did in about a half hour.

i'm gonna keep playing w/ zb4 for a bit more. i may just be using them all wrong...

sorry dennis old boy, no texturing tonight...

2010-08-25T20:20:00.002-04:00

we got zbrush 4 at work today and i have taken the installer home and will be mucking with it tonight. i am quite excited. will post impressions and possible sculpts later on.

Peter Goodwin Texture WIP - 001

2010-08-22T13:23:00.000-04:00

render finished

2010-08-19T02:32:00.000-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=Kpm76lIy3FU

we all live in a yellow sulzerine

2010-08-19T01:03:00.000-04:00

well its been a damn long while since i put up some art, but its summer and after the iAnimate gig i needed a bit of a break. i've started texturing peter, since then, and am starting to get a pretty cool skin result. this is still obviously WIP (no spec, temp bump, not final diffuse) but i am mixing texture maps with procedurals so i can get pretty close with the camera without loss of quality. they still need tweaking, but its a cool idea to go forward with. i am also diving into composite materials, which are the shit.

check out these quick images.

i've also made a few custom brushes in p-shizzle, for things like freckles and pores. check out a freckle brush. its properties are scattery and opacity pretty simple.

some topics i have been thinking about and discussing with my artist friends are:

the pros and cons of base characters

3d.sk as a modeling resource = bad

i will elaborate on both of those topics in the future when it is not 1 am.

good night!

write about when its not 1 am on a workday

testing... testing...

2010-08-18T22:03:00.001-04:00

testing the blogger droid app with my favorite whiskey

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things on my list

2010-07-22T00:35:00.000-04:00

the jose model for iAnimate is done.

i am working up some props:

female haircut - WIP
old woman haircut
aviator sunglasses - done
cool sunglasses - done
reading glasses - done
cellphone - done

i won't post any images yet because i shut down my tower w/out saving jpegs because i am a moron!

anyway, once this is over, i want to check out the marmoset real time artist's toolbag. its only 40 bucks and it looks awesome!

http://www.8monkeylabs.com/tech/toolbag

the blend shapes have begun

2010-07-12T23:49:00.000-04:00

well i know it's been a while since my last post but i'm a busy guy, so come on!

anyway, the blend shapes for jose have begun. i am using zbrush to work them out and having a pretty good time with them.

my blend shape process is as follows:

in zbrush

create a layer for the blend shape
model out said blend shape
export as obj
do a smart re-sym on blend shape to mirror it across model
store a morph target in zbrush
re-load the base obj for the head
use morph brush to "mirror" morph on the other side
export other morph as obj
hook up in max
voila - morphs in an instant

i've been tweaking them quite a bit in max as well, cleaning up the curves and stuff. i also need to do progressive morphs on the eye blinks.

btw, this process will be ultra fun w/ carmen.

so here's a few shots of him in progress.

Jose

2010-06-02T00:23:00.001-04:00

I am working with Jason Ryan (http://www.jasonryananimation.com/), superstar animator extreme, on this animation test character "Jose."

I sent him the first drop tonight, there's a few nights worth of work in him so far. I have to un-stub the fingers a but as well as make some refinements to the feet, knees, and head. I will send him another drop before week's end with further refinements. He also wants seams for a shirt and pants as well as a cool accessory kit to go with this model. I'm pretty damn excited.

never posted a finished render

2010-06-01T23:01:00.002-04:00

poses and renders and ghosts in my basement

2010-05-20T02:12:00.001-04:00

here's a good render that i like. there is still a bunch left to do, but i am so juiced about this character.

i need to bring her in to dennis tomorrow to do some final skinning tweaks. he skinned her and posed her in the original pose represented in the concept but i altered it a bit to be a bit more playful. i need to add a bunch of western guilding to make her feel more "leadery" as well as add the hair, but she's close man. whooo boy!

and here's some test shots as well as the max setup.

and here's the final polypaint

i am not tired at all, but i gotta force myself to go to bed or i will be a zombie tomorrow!

DITCHING texture maps

2010-05-18T00:04:00.000-04:00

i ditched the maps i started painting in favor of a more stylized polypaint. this is also my first attempt at an expression. shabadabing

conference over!

2010-05-16T18:09:00.000-04:00

well i am in the ft. laud airport waiting for my flight to come about. the conference as a whole was fucking awesome. i learned a bunch of good zbrush and UV tips from Hanno's character talk and also from Teagan's environment talk. i stumbled upon Jason Ryan (animation god) who was really excited about Peter, Carmen, and staged and we will possibly be collaborating on something soon which is very exciting. i also got to know the owner of evolve and i am going to try and get involved to spread the love around the northeast and maybe get down there again next year to help out.

fausto's talk was very inspiring. his workflow is very simple, but very well executed. i took extensive notes on a lot of things. i will process them all and do a better and more eloquent update soon. it is time for me to get my ass on a plane and fly on home.

conference day 1

2010-05-16T03:12:00.000-04:00

well so far the conference has been excellent. i got a bunch of good tips from the envrionment modeling talk by teagan from naughty dog which is great. tonight when i was working on my character, i decided to go down to the bar for a vodka/redbull around 11:30. i ended up talking with jason ryan (a supremely excellent animator) who brought me outside to the entire speaking crew and organizers of the conference itself. needless to say, i didn't get to finish what i was working on. i ended up talking and going out for drinks with a bunch of really awesome artists and people and have made some very good and promising connections. jason and i may collaborate in the near future, who knows. he really liked what he saw of peter and carmen for staged and is really into it. dennis will be excited to hear this! anyway, i doubt i will finish the texture for dakota in time for the deadline on monday, but whatever. i am here, networking, making friends, and that is way more important than some arbitrary deadline.

anyway, this show has been way worth it so far. tomorrow, i go to breakfast with the evolve crew and speakers then hit up fausto's and hanno's talks and fly home. can't wait! here's a shot of where i am at w/ dakota. big thanks to dennis for rigging her up!

evolve3d

2010-05-15T00:32:00.000-04:00

well i am in ft. lauderdale at the evolve3d conference. tomorrow i hear some awesome talks by some awesome people and i am really looking forward to it. in the mean time, i have my laptop and dave's intuous 3 and spent the evening after a lovely dinner baking my normal maps and starting work on my diffuse. the contest ends on monday. i don't know if i will make the deadline with the level of polish that i want, but i'm not too worried about it. we started with 25 or 30 entrants, or at least people with interest, and now will probably have 5 or 6 show. its been fairly rewarding seeing the growth in people i didn't expect. our cinematics artist is doing a hell of a job and he's not even a modeler! anyway, i don't want to get into it too much, so here's a quick jpeg of where i'm at. i'm pretty beat from work this morning and traveling all day, so nighty night!

oh i still need to bake the normals on the gun as well as finalize what i am doing with the hair/eyelashes. she's 8300 tris right now.

they called it the ship of dreams

2010-04-28T23:17:00.000-04:00

started working on the pistol. did a rough model in max then took it into zbrush to try my hand at the zbrush hard surface pipeline. it's been fun but it crashed twice and i'm goin to bed.

project runway and the point of view

2010-04-19T22:45:00.000-04:00

my wife and i enjoy watching project runway. not only do they make some awesome clothes, but it is the only reality show that i feel i can relate to on some creative level. this group of people, all focused on getting to fashion week and then winning the competition, pour their heart and soul day in and out in the pursuit of the mastery of their craft. i have been watching the show from the beginning of the series up until this most recent season. there are always the designers who are there for their personality and then those who are there because they are bad ass at their art and will push the medium forward. i'm not sure how many of the winners go on to be fashion greats and i honestly couldn't care less because this post isn't about fashion, it is about the similarities between all the designers on every season. that similarity is their point of view. they all talk about this point of view and who they are as designers and what they have to offer the fashion world. i've been struggling with this idea of what i've got to offer the art world for some time. for the past 4 or 5 years i have been working, basically, as a digital printer. i get a concept or some piece of reference and i make it. in my spare time i have offered to help dennis with his film so again, i get a concept or a piece of reference and i make whatever that is. so at work i am getting paid to realize someone else's vision and in my free time i am working to realize someone else's vision. i feel, with staged, that i have had a good amount of creative input, not just in the design of the characters, but in the story and presentation etc, but it is ultimately dennis's film. don't get me wrong, i love working on it and it has been a great experience for me. but is it something i would do on my own without dennis? probably not. i love the style we've got and i love seeing the characters come to life through dennis's skill as an animator, but would i want to tell a character driven story like this? i don't know. would it be in the style that it has evolved into? i don't know. i am getting to a turning point, however, because i feel like my process for creating art in the medium i work in and love has gotten more and more refined. i am pretty much an expert in the software packages i use, i have a decent knowledge of the human figure, i understand color theory, composition, and can make pretty much anything anyone puts in front of me. but the latter is the part i need to break. i don't want to have to rely on what other people put in front of me to make. i want to have a point of view. just today i was talking about building a robot out of all the computers in best buy and sending it on a destructive rampage throughout the hunt valley town center. i was having fun thinking about that. is that something i'd like to realize? probably not. but i want to have as much fun making the art i want to make in my time as i did thinking about the possibility of creating a giant robot out of computers and tv sets. what happened to art being fun? my buddy dave and i talk all the time about artists who make art because it is fun to make. being able to reproduce anything anyone puts in front of me is the first step. the next evolution in this angry polygon is to find out what the hell it is i want to make and to have fun doing it. my friend og is another example. he's working on moon town, his comic which started out as a 3d animated short. he had a story he wanted to tell and a medium that was getting in his way. he catalyzed his telling of this tale by putting pencil to paper and making it a comic. it looks like he's having a helluva lot more fun doing it. he's getting the results he's wanted and is doing what is important to him, telling the story of moon town. its not like he's not a great 3d artist, because he is, its just that getting the story of cassandra quinn and moon town out there is more important to him than 3d animation and i respect the hell outta that. he and i have been meaning to have scotch and cigars and talk about life and creation and story telling and being an artist, it just hasn't happened yet, but i definitely will pick his brain about the evolution of moon town.

the bottom line here is this. i have been helping others realize their vision for a long time, and i will definitely continue to do so at work and with staged until it is done, but i am starting to feel the need to figure out mine. i don't know what it is or how to get it out there, but i am starting to feel the need for a point of view. there are plenty of demon lords out there. i will leave with a quote from tim gunn of project runway "work hard, think harder."

snickers wrapper

2010-04-17T00:17:00.000-04:00

still plugging away. we got a 3 week extension on the contest, so i will be able to push her even further. not much to say tonight, rather introspective.

i tried out a zbrush render

amazon giftcard

2010-04-15T00:56:00.000-04:00

it sure has been a while since i posted last. i've just gotten past a pretty stressful point in my life and am now back to creating art. i tool tonight and really started putting the finishing touches on dakota. i still have 3 good nights worths of work before the hi-res is complete. good thing is, the wife works until midnight tomorrow and friday, leaving me alone from 7 to midnight, which are perfect sculpting hours. proportion wise, i made her a bit more petite and also shrunk her arms a bit too to accentuate the style from the concept.

and my inspiration for the night. on the right is the latest dakota pic that daniel landerman had on his website. she has such a meaty and robust face, it is fucking stellar.

2010-04-03T00:36:00.003-04:00

the plan

2010-03-23T20:58:00.000-04:00

retopo clothing so i can get more sculpting fidelity with less subdivs
sculpt hands and forearms
refine clothing to look better than ass
sub-d earrings
refine hat
sub-d belt to look better than ass
do some crazy hair tests to see what the best way is to go about getting her hair to look ff13 quality

give the max hair sim to baking on planes process 1 or 2 solid nights of experimentation.
if the hair sim is less than stellar, paint the hair like a champion

retopo to 6000 tris
bake
texture
render
done.

final update for the evening.

2010-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

still feeling really good about this model. worked on the hands mostly tonight. if i were to estimate, i'd say she's at about the 30 hour mark. tomorrow night or thursday night, i'd like to get the hat detailed out a bit more and then this weekend hit the clothes hard.

wife passed out, cintiq packed up

2010-03-22T23:48:00.000-04:00

this is what happens when my wife gets home from work. this is the signal that she needs to go to bed and i need to go make some art. understandably, nursing wipes her out.

this is the sad sight that is my desk w/out captian cintiq.

i went from beautiful widescreen action to having to work like this on a single 24 inch monitor. life is tough... i am so damn spoiled. anyway, sculpting is going great actually. i thought i'd be semi-fucked and have to adapt to not sculpting right on the monitor, but its just like old times.

back to the roots

2010-03-22T22:04:00.000-04:00

my cintiq will not power off, therefore it has to be sent to wacom for repair. i couldn't have had a better customer service experience with them, the guy was so helpful and the process has been smooth so far. it should take about a month for the whole repair to go through, so fingers crossed! for now, i must use this 6x8 intuous 3 my buddy dave lent me. it is sad, but it is better than nothing! the tool doesn't make the artist. i'll update later tonight after the night's worth of work.

lunchtime update

2010-03-09T13:20:00.001-05:00

dakota shaping up

2010-03-08T18:54:00.000-05:00

i have most of her working now. next up is to start working out the final details and then take a finishing pass on the face. hair is still temp, but further along at least.

quickie

2010-03-08T00:09:00.000-05:00

sliced dougas

2010-02-17T23:01:00.003-05:00

i made some large proportion changes to the face, mainly by widening it. i am really liking this model so far. tomorrow and the next few nights will be posing and detailing the face. i have gotten it to a point where i really like it. i will show it to a few folks tomorrow to get some feedback as well. i am also going to send it to the daniel landerman, the creator of this character and the concept i am working from, to see if he's got anything to offer as far as critique goes. the bottom image is a few max renders i tried out with a decimated version of the model at 300k.

new in max 2011?

2010-02-17T19:20:00.000-05:00

zbrush central

2010-02-16T23:38:00.000-05:00

i posted my first post on ZBC tonight. it is dakota in progress. once i get carmen and peter to a more final state, i will put them up too. i am nervous as hell for some reason. its just weird putting your work on a forum you frequent so much, seeing all the great content that is up there and putting yourself out there for judgement by the masses. feels almost like shipping a game ; )

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=82233

swing by there and rate me highly (only if you think it worthy of course)!

a mighty wind

2010-02-16T23:19:00.000-05:00

after a crit from the mighty dave today, here are some results. i also did a super quick "expression" pose

abe lincoln

2010-02-15T19:25:00.000-05:00

just a quick update w/ the start of zsphere hair. i haven't gotten too much of a chance to post due to the 5 feet of snow we've gotten and mass effect 2, but i'm getting back and focused so there should be more frequent posts in the next few days.

14 to 41

2010-01-26T02:36:00.000-05:00

here's a quick start to the basemesh for the character i am working on for the contest. there are proportion issues, rough areas, and all kinds of weirdness, but it is underway. i crunched tonight at work and will be crunching until wednesday night, so i'm not sure how much i'll get to crank on this, but i hope to work until about 2 or 3 each night on it. i'm getting really pumped for this to come together. once i get this sculpt worked out further, i will begin to costume her, but that's a few nights away.

contest at work

2010-01-25T00:38:00.000-05:00

for the modeling contest we're having at work, i will be modeling this character by Daniel Landerman (www.ArtDL.com). Her name is Dakota Rawhide and I dig her style. I e mailed him a few days ago asking for permission and he responded positively. i will be posting updates as i go along.

ff13

2010-01-19T22:16:00.003-05:00

today, dennis sent me an article on kotaku about a naked final fantasy 13 character found on the game disc. here was the link to the article if you want it: http://kotaku.com/5451645/why-theres-a-naked-final-fantasy-xiii-character-model

i started looking at these images of their textures, which were awesomely displayed flat shaded, and started thinking about how awesome they are. i feel like they are truly the pinnacle of current gen hand painted textures. they have subtle ambient occlusion going on, which was painted over by their artists using great color work and color theory, not light and dark. if you look at the desaturated vs the saturated image, you'll see how even the textures are in value, but how rich they are in color, which lets the lighting do the light and dark. they're not photoreal, but the skin textures are noisy enough that it indicates texture as well as there are veins and subtle wrinkles happening around the arm pits. the costumes and hair follow the same principals as well. the hair is especially awesome, nobody can deny that. i would love to see a model breakdown of how the geometry is grouped on uv and what their spec maps and shader set up looks like.

here is an example of that same character in game with shaders and lighting.

a lot of times in games today, and i am totally guilty of it too, we rely too heavily on what renders can give us. ambient occlusion, crazy bump layers from our normal maps, and we don't paint them down or properly blend them into the surface we're trying to recreate. we rush through spec maps and treat them as an afterthought when really we should be putting as much attention into them as we do our diffuse pass because that is how we control how the lighting dances over whatever surface we're trying to recreate, but production schedules are demanding and we have to wear many different hats to get the job done, but it something i want to focus on as i move further into my own work for this contest. what sets these models apart from the rest of the stuff in the industry is because they aren't satisfied with what the rendered layers give us. a mental ray ambient occlusion layer looks fucking fantastic applied as a multiply layer over a grey texture map, but throw color into the mix and you have to treat each surface differently. add a custom shader on top of all that and you've got a whole new beast, but that is another post.

stay on top of your game

2010-01-19T21:35:00.000-05:00

woody batts, my video teacher from mica who has since moved on to bigger and better things, posted this on his blog today. it is dead on to how i feel about my art and craft and i couldn't have said it better myself.

http://blog.woodybatts.com/?p=473

Stay on top of your game

I received my Master’s degree in Digital Arts, you can tell by the nomenclature that this was in the early 00’s. After spending the first 4 years studying Fine Arts, I quickly immersed myself in the design and digital. However I quickly realized that i had jumped into a schism. Fine artist were rebelling against technology. print designers were eschewing web… and the web was populated by skip intros and horrible sounds on rollover. During a critique I referred to gray as #cccccc, my class erupted in laughter. At the time I did not understand why they laughed, but I began a debate that as designers we should understand the tools that we work with. They did not agree.

And to their credit they are partially correct.

To be a designer, artist, or any other moniker you do not need to possess any skills.
But to be a successful creative you do.

A moment to explain.

If you work primarily in print, you will out of experience, gain a knowledge of technical considerations. You will refer to gray as 10% in reference to using 10% of black ink. You will speak of things as gutters, margins and bleeds. If you work in web conversely you will refer to gray as #cccccc or #121212 and you will understand that you are not using gray such as #12123A because you understand that the gamma between monitors is different.

Insert car screeching to a stop. What?… and more importantly why do we even care what this means?

Competence
In this creative world competence is not just knowing how, but also knowing why. As a creative I can work in any medium Web, Print, Mobile, Video not because I know software ( though very important ) but because I take the time to understand the medium. Currently most of the projects i work on have to have a 3 tiered approach. The project has to work on the web, mobile devices and have video. All of these are achieved by knowing the capabilities and limitations of each medium then incorporating the proper technology.

Sounds easy doesn’t it….Well guitar playing is just putting your fingers on strings then strumming. Boxing is just hitting someone in the face until one person falls down. The paradox of competency is that it sounds and looks so easy. Do not be fooled.

Out of simplicity comes complexity. Competency is achieved at the deftness at which you can surf between simplicity and complexity.

Learn Baby Learn

Tutorials
Tutorials for any software out is on the web, just use the Google. From my experience teaching, one of the challenges is reading then doing. I highly recommend reading, then performing the tutorial, if it’s a video tutorial then watch, then perform a lot of times we get caught up doing, then miss were we were in reading, or skip a step accidentally.

Classes
Community Colleges, Online, and Universities offering Continuing Education courses are all great places to hone your skills. I highly recommend continuing education course for they normally have professionals who can teach based on work environment.

One of the best things I ever did was invest in a flash class taught by Joshua Davis of Praystation.com. It was a continuing Education Course offered by School of Visual Arts. I made a vacation out of it, came to New York and spent a week learning flash. A year later I was living in NYC and getting paid to design. Life changes that fast.

Experience
Give yourself a project. Nothing teaches like experience. This blog was created by me wanting to learn wordpress. This blog because I wanted to be a better writer. Etc. Etc.

Sounds easy doesn’t it?

there isn't much that i feel i need

2010-01-13T23:45:00.003-05:00

here's an update on carmen. i UVed her head tonight as well as made some proportion changes to her body per dennis.

i don't think this is her final UV as i still want to attach the inner eye to the eyelid as well as adjust the throat sock.

and a greyscale AO shot.

coffee out of a teabag sucks

2010-01-13T22:09:00.000-05:00

but my new desk does not. peep this.

offline for a few days

2010-01-12T22:04:00.000-05:00

i am getting the perfect desk delivered tomorrow so i will be offline for a few days while i get set up.

lunchdate

2010-01-11T12:58:00.002-05:00

let them eat BULLETS!!!

2010-01-10T19:53:00.000-05:00

here's a carmen update. she's been tweaked a bunch today. the model on the left is the original and the middle carmen is the updated one. i took her back into zbrush to easily update some parts. my wife is on her way home from work so i'm gonna save and close out for the night, but if she falls asleep early i may throw some quick color on as a polypaint in old zedbrunsch to see how she came together. they are in order from earlier today to just now.

some of deez iz pretty good

2010-01-10T19:13:00.001-05:00

http://www.3duniverse.co.za/forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=18

the real mr. incredible

2010-01-10T14:44:00.000-05:00

doing some research on the difference between pixar's male models and female models, i stumbled across this image.

bayonetta in motion

2010-01-09T12:55:00.001-05:00

http://platinumgames.com/2009/05/08/bayonetta-in-motion/

this is a decent blog post about the animation of bayonetta. pretty cool prototype video showcasing mainly the key poses rather than fluid animation which gets the combat across perfectly.

plugged in and ready to fall

2010-01-08T23:49:00.000-05:00

got about an hour tonight to work some more on carmen. i am starting to like her more and more. i do need to take her into zbrush 1 more time to see if i can fix the corners of the mouth a bit, flatten out the bottom of the nose, and generally give a smoothing pass overall.

tomorrow i'll take care of the zbrush pass and then send her off to dennis for a little spot check.

on a side note, at work i've been really refining my projection process for normals/ambient occlusion and i will post some tutorials later on as i work on the bust for the contest we're holding. there have always been parts of the 3d asset creation process that i've thought to be tedious and boring that i've kind of switched around to liking more and more. uvs and projection are great examples of that. i think it is especially gratifying once you get a really solid process down that consistently produces bad ass results. i'll elaborate further on this crap later, but i just thought i'd mention it for no other reason than shits and/or giggles.

nitrogen blues

2010-01-06T20:53:00.000-05:00

stayed late at work tonight. here's a quick update. she's not really matching the zbrush yet, gotta tweak out the model some more and get it to match. i went through the same process with peter and we eventually got him, so i have faith i won't completely screw carmen up.

carmen head is done-ish

2010-01-06T00:12:00.001-05:00

although i still need to make tweaks to certain areas like the nose, mouth, and some ear tweaks, carmen's head is done! i will be making these tweaks tomorrow night as well as UVing her.

here's a shot of the happy couple. peter's shoes are missing for some reason showing his awesomely detailed feet.

i am also taking the blog off of the invite only list and making myself known to the world. now it is time for a little bayonetta.

good merlinpene

2010-01-05T00:42:00.001-05:00

the tough part of the carmen retopo is done. 2 or 3 hours with wrap it and i have the more difficult parts out of the way. damn i love that plug in. carmen's head is going at least 3 times faster than peter's because of it. i'll finish tomorrow.

here's a shot w/out the decimated hi-poly mesh and just what i've retopoed.

a progress shot with wrap it.

real rough carmen proxy

2009-12-30T16:47:00.000-05:00

we're all pretty happpy with the head so today i did a once over on a rough costume for her. i am basically getting her costume ready for a sculpt pass, but i will also give this to dennis so he can work with getting her rig up and can at least do some animation with her while i'm working on that contest for work.

i will post further updates tonight, but i gotta roll!

2009-12-28T20:11:00.000-05:00

the reason for no update is...

2009-12-18T03:45:00.002-05:00

avatar. wow. decided to randomly go to a midnight showing of it in 3d and damn. damn was it good. i will update carmen at a later date. nighty night.

sultry fleshiness

2009-12-17T20:57:00.002-05:00

the head is about where i want it. i had a great critique with piero who actually did a bit of sculpting on the mesh which really helped it alot. i stayed a bit late at work today just putting the final touches on her and i'm really happy and so is ol' dendrils. i'm heading home now to get my body proxy mesh and continue forward on getting that fleshed out. here's my leaving work update and i'll post another later tonight.

success

2009-12-16T00:27:00.004-05:00

i think the experiments went well. 20+ more save iterations in z3.5r3 and no crashes. here's some shots:

this first round was mainly just going for the shapes. i took some close looks at areas of the concept that stood out as wrong on the model and really just pulled and pushed quite a bit. the only area i'm not really happy with in these shots is still the lip-ish area and parts of the bridge of the nose.

the second round of this focused mainly on the eye region sort of defining the upper lid a bit more. i'm still not crazy about her lips, but i'll keep cranking. not tonight, though, as it's already 12:30 and i gotta take out the trash and cap some mofos in MW2 before bed.

my plan going forward is to step away from the face, truly block in the hair and get actual good base meshes in for that, the eyelashes, and the rest of the body, and then hit the face again when my eyes are fresh.

adios!

brace yourself

2009-12-15T22:29:00.001-05:00

i feel as if i'm being too conservative with carmen, so tonight i am going to go wild with carmen's features. i will post later updates.

home termina

2009-12-14T23:22:00.003-05:00

another sessionw ith carmen. i am pretty happy with how her face is going. she is one damn hard character to get right. i still don't think i am there but i need to move on to getting a better block in of her hair, some placeholder eyelashes, and a placeholder body, which will all be coming not tomorrow night, but wednesday thru friday as my wife is working nightshift those nights reparing kidneys and the like.

i am having alot of fun with the new zbrush. it has been crashing less and less on me, which is always good, and the tools in it are awesome. the dynamic trim brush is especially stellar as it creates hard edges that follow the curves of an organic mesh, allowing a lot of hi-res organic hard surface goodness to come about. it's also got alot of good new smoothing methods as well as a sweet polish brush. it can smooth better over poles, mimic the smoothing of sub-d surfaces, and even smooth crease which maintains the creases in a hard surface form. the polish brushes are excellent for putting a final finish on your piece, as it seems to even out the normals along both vectors other than the up vector and maintains your nice planar surfaces that you've got going while creating a sharper edge where two planes meet.

restless city

2009-12-10T23:27:00.002-05:00

i don't yet have her cheek/mouth area. i am very happy with the eyes and brow and nose, i think they match peter's face really well but still carry over the next door beauty of carmen.

today at work they announced a modeling challenge amongst all the modelers in the studio. since i was partly responsible for the creation and direction of this challenged, i am obligated to participate. i will be doing a character bust of an evil dictator or benign monarch. what comes of this i am unsure, but i've got the permish to post on blogs and on the net, so here goes nothin.

gud

2009-11-30T23:53:00.001-05:00

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=43&t=829479&page=1&pp=15

http://bluefley.cgsociety.org/gallery/467771/

update

2009-10-07T23:09:00.003-04:00

here's an update on carmen's face. i'm starting to dig what's going on. gonna get piero and dennis together tomorrow for a crit.

the body feels much better now, but i'll post that later. the hair mass that i've got on her has terrible sculpting topo, which is from the zsketch that i started with. in the next few nights, i am going to block in her clothing as well as give her some better hair and hair accessories. placeholder eyelashes are in order as well as ears. i forgot to extrude out extra topo for an ear sculpt, so after a few projection attempts from peter's ear onto her head, geo is in order. if only goZ worked in 3.5

i am still pretty uncertain about her lips/mouth area. it looks better than it did, but still not great. she's starting to get there though...

part of bein the boss is making the tough calls

2009-10-01T00:08:00.003-04:00

tonight i had my 8yr anniv w/ my wife (not of being married, but of being together) and it was excellent. great food, great coffee, great times! after dinner, she started watching her girl shows and i went downstairs to evaluate where i was on carmen and work on her a bit more. i decided to ditch what i'd done and start anew. the model in its current state (shown below) is pre-projection, meaning i haven't taken the time to project the parts i want to salvage from the previous model, which will save sculpt time, but i fixed some proportions, adjusted problematic sculpting topology, ditched the zsphere face, model a better sculptable proxy head, and now i'm gonna call it a night. i'll project all the details tomorrow and continue refining her base mesh. concept and model below. oh and screencaps now work as i've re-installed my videocard drivers and kicked my machine in the balls.

obviously, carmen won't be in her underwear in the short, the concept (by the great piero) is fully fleshed out and i will post it as i progress with the model.

hey this is awesome!

2009-09-29T22:03:00.002-04:00

when i take print screens on my home computer, they are black with white specks everywhere. great! that will really let me show off my work. damn this piece of hell!

a lot going on

2009-09-28T21:05:00.002-04:00

there's a lot going on in the old life right now. just finished a huge milestone at work, i have 2 models going on in the pipe currently (in addition to staged stuff), and i have been working on my drawing for a few nights a week. things, overall, are going slower than i'd like, but that is life. i am happy to be drawing again. i've stopped myself from caring too much about construction or structure and have just been going in and drawing what i see. my personal stuff, model wise, is focusing on two things. the first being projection texturing and hair and the second being tertiary detail in sculpts. i've stopped really investigating processes of other artists and started to really hone my own. what's good about what i do at work is it gives me a good vector on where i need to improve but with such tight schedules, i can't really take the time to experiment. the two models i'm working on outside of carmen are busts. they aren't really anywhere near showing currently, since i have been pushing carmen quite a bit lately, but i will post them at a later date. right now, though, i need to get carmen to a point where she can be simply rigged and dennis and justin can have at her and peter together to animate. more updates later on.

long time no BLARG

2009-09-15T22:37:00.004-04:00

a lot has happened in my short absence. first off, zbrush 3.5 was released, followed immediately by zbrush 3.5r2. i've been working on carmen since my (now 3 year old) computer cannot handle the madness of Peter's textures. here's a bit of insight into her process. i made a quick basemesh in 3ds max (pre zbrush 3.5 and it's hot new zballs) based off of some orthos i made from piero's original concept. i then imported that into the newly released zbrush 3.5 and began working out some of the things that would have taken much longer to work out in max such as the hair. for this, i merged a zsphere as a subtool and did the newly added zsketch feature to block out the hair masses and shape. view the results below:

this worked out really well and i was able to mass out and pull a quick basemesh of the hair very quickly. i am most impressed with zspheres 2.0 at this point. so impressed, in fact, that i began to think maybe i should try and utilize this somehwere else, somewhere that's untouched, somewhere like the face.

so i merged another zball as a subtool and began the same process as before.

i'm not exactly sure i like how that process worked for the face. there are areas that i really like and could see myself utilizing this in the future, like the mouth area and some parts around the cheek and eye reigons, but overall i think it may have been too clunky. i can't blame the technique just because i'm new to it, but i feel i could have developed a face further along in less time had i not gone that route. i do have some face studies i did a while ago that aren't very good but i will throw them up later. i am going to take this to where i can pull a basemesh from it and then project it onto my body mesh, which is already topologized nicely for sculpting. since i already have a library of base body meshes that are topologized for sculpting, i can just make my zsphere armature as a subtool to that body mesh and then just reproportion the base bodymesh to match the armature, reproject, and it should work out really well. the other option is retopologizing the armature after i'm done massing, which will probably get cleaner results, but for what i'm doing with carmen right now, this will work out fine.

interesting stuff

2009-09-06T21:57:00.002-04:00

i'm watching coraline right now and just read this on wikipedia:

The film's creators used 3D printing technology from Objet Geometries. The Polyjet matrix technology allowed animators to create thousands of models to animate the characters and sets from the film.^[15]

Filmmakers used three of the cutting-edge 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models. The characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions

i don't know why i'm surprised that they used 3d printing to print out the morph targets and other props for the film, but it's a cool idea. makes me wonder if they did any lipsynch pre-vis in a 3d software before animating. who knows?! i just figured they hand sculpted all that stuff out of pride, but it makes alot of sense to do it digitally. hoo ha!

carmen shots are coming soon, she's coming along fairly well.

hardware limits and broken dreams

2009-08-31T20:21:00.002-04:00

i've been working up peter's texture for his head and my computer is just eating it. my machine is old, like 5 years old, and cannot handle the massive awesomeness of 4096 textures with more than 3 layers in any kind of reasonable speed or fashion, so i've discussed the dilemma with dennis the mighty and we decided i should move on to carmen for the time being, working on peter's textures at work occasionally and once i get a new machine, bust them out then. so for now, peter's mapping is on hold, but carmen's modeling shall begin. tonight, i'm going to be playing with some forms and getting a feel for her character, so here goes nothing.

help

2009-08-19T13:48:00.001-04:00

blend material - blends 2 materials with a mask

update for tonight

2009-08-17T22:52:00.000-04:00

a buncha test renders for all different things.

peter head texturing has begun

2009-08-04T22:37:00.005-04:00

i started playing with epidermal and subdermal maps in combination with overall diffuse coloration and got some pretty cool results. i think all the warmth that we want in the skin will come from a combination of these 3 rather than just 1 with colors in the other slots. i also have a quick spec and bump map on there temporarily to give some surface texture and control the sheeeeeen. once i get the feeling and color of skin down in the shader and mix of maps, i'll get more of the texture going, but right now the feel is way more important. anyway, i think it's looking cool (still a bit darkish and tannish on second look). but there is much promise on the horizon. my wife is in austin until saturday so i'll have free nights to hopefully finish up the head. no idea yet how i'm going to tackle hair.

oh and the plus of the plus with this epidermal/subdermal shits is that i can make those lower res than the overall diffuse coloration since they're scattering maps, not actual diffuse. at least i think i can. i hope it works that way. we'll see...

also, max 2010 has these awesome time saving parameters in their render window, letting me store geometry and final gather data so it doesn't have to calculate every time. i can make a change to the texture and have a preview in 15 seconds rather than a minute or more.

another update on things for lack of posts

2009-07-16T20:20:00.001-04:00

i finished peter's uvs and passed him off to den for rigging and animation but haven't begun work on the textures just yet. i am working on a secret model for a secret thing that i can't talk about or post, so that's where my time is going. it should be finished up soon so i'll get back on peter and posting soon enough.