Friday, December 19, 2008

Rancor Again!

Another final completed! This was a long haul, but I learned so much. I am still not thrilled with the quality of my painted textures, and I will work on them more later. But for now, I must rest. Finals are over! I also need to fix the reflectivity of his eye! Creepy. Over all, I am astounded with what I learned. I also discovered why riggers get payed so much-because it is HARD work. I struggled with the rigging, but not really with painting the weights. In the end, when I could pose him and animate him, it was well worth it. We were required to render out a vectored wireframe turnaround as well as an idle animation, so I've posted those, too. Hope you like it them!

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Rosie the Elephant

Well, here's the last model that I did for our senior BFA class this semester. Her name is Rosie, and the character design was done by Rebbaz Royee (a viz dev student in my class). The modeler's assignment this time around was to choose a character design from one of the previous assignments of the semester and then model, texture, and light it. I chose Rebbaz's elephant because I thought that she had a lot of personality and was in a really cute pose. I also really like the way her trunk is designed and the pose it is in as well. I do love animals, thus I chose an animal to model! I had a lot of fun with this piece and am pleased with the way that it turned out.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Steam-Powered Helicopter

This has been one of the most fun models I have done so far. It is based on our most recent project in which we created an alternate universe in which Da Vinci's inventions took hold along with alternative fuels. Once again, this was designed by Anthony Ashton. I really feel like I am starting to get a hang of the UV texturing and like how this turned out. Plus, it was just plain fun to model something so creative and out there.

Rancor!

Still very much a work in progress! I am still working on the painted UV textures, but we did Zbrush him (my first time using zbrush) and I am happy with how the bump maps turned out. Right now we are rigging and painting weights, but I hope to have the final posted by Christmas.

Hippo Circus Car

Again, for the same project: Water for Elephants. And again, I modeled this off of a drawing that Anthony Ashton did for me. I was still in the process of learning UV texuring, so I combined Maya shaders and UV texturing for this model. I still laugh at the hippo hiny on the back side!

1929 Popcorn Machine

I modeled this for the same assignment as the phone. However, it was purely for the assignment, not for the animators. The project was based on the book, Water for Elephants, and we were required to pick an artist's style to emulate with our models. Anthony Ashton designed this popcorn machine for me in the style of Willie Real, taken from an image of a 1929 popcorn machine. I know it looks wonky, but I had a whole lot of fun with it and enjoy the wacky shape. There's always one piece per poject that I get really jazzed about, and this was the one for this project.

UH 60 Blackhawk

This is the second model that I did over the summer. It took me about two weeks modeling from orthographics I found online. I modeled a car about a year and a half ago, so I wanted to model another vehicle to counter the organic nature of the treehouse.

Treehouse

This is a model that I did over the summer based on my concept work from viz dev. (see previous post). I had a lot of fun with this, and puting it into 3D was really satisfying and helped me figure out my shapes better. I'd say that modeling the tree was the hardest part for me because I am used to polygonal modeling, but wanted to re-familiarize myself with Nurbs, so I did the tree in Nurbs.



Treehouse Concept

This was my favorite piece that I did for my Viz Dev class last semester. I liked it so much, in fact, that I modeled it over the summer (see post above). It is based in the 1960's and was built by three twelve-year-old boys.

Just some figure drawings


This is a mixture of short and long poses.

Kangaroos!


Bears!


Elephant Model

This is the my first model ever! I did it about 2 years ago, and am still astonished that I pulled it off without knowing what I know now. It is based off of a scultpure that I bought in Oregon a while back, so it is supposed to look like that! When I first started it, I remember that I just pushed and pulled individual vertices, and even made them overlap. It almost gave my teacher a heart attack because it looked so bad! So I had to start over and since I didn't know anything about sculpt geometry or soft mod, I moved every single vertex into place. One by One. Painful! But I'm happy with what I ended up with, and with the knowledge that I gained. You can't learn Maya without doing, so I'm glad that I jumped in feet first.