Sunday, May 31, 2009

Weekend Work

     So this is basically what i got accomplished Saturday. Not all day Saturday, but from start to what you see in the renders is maybe 3 hours (i spent a lot of time learning how to 'Sculpt' geometry and then wasted about half an hour trying to paint it...which never worked).
     So this little 'Island in the Sky' is called Rho (Greek letter for "R"). And i've been using it in my story forever, i just never got around to making a good enough model of it.


     There's a whole long reason why it's floating and why there's a 'shaft' coming from it, but i won't go into it now. But the bridge (if you couldn't tell that's what it was) was built because the people of my story's world believed Rho to be the Land of the Gods (similar to Olimpus; able to be located, but no mortal can ascend to the top). This whole scene is incomplete too. At the end of the bridge there's supposed to be a few mountains to which the bridge connects to.




     This is a rendering of the underside of Rho (if it was hard to tell from the render). When i finally finish an acceptable model (as this on is a bit too long and not right in it's overall hieght (when placed over the reference drawing i made a couple posts below, it didn't quite match up...) I'm going to paint it and apply some nice layered texturing (which i also learned friday). It's basically going to be grass on the top (along with more geography like mountains and maybe a small water source), and grass hanging over the side a little bit. Then dirt and soil for a bit, and then it'll transition into real hard rock and earth.
     I'm gonna try and make another model of it next weekend or something, now that i know quick ways to deform the geometry to how i want. Today i'm gonna go learn about Particle Effects:

*Next Up: A Rocket with Particle(smoke) Trail. I might even composite it into the rho scene as i will eventually be using rockets and such in it for good ol' fashioned destruction.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Cheating Mod Hack

*Note* Does not open new window....just directs you to image...

Just a little something for DJ to show her the awesome cheating power of Maya's Paint effects Brushes. Each stroke (like a tree or feather, grass or basic building shape) can be further refined and tweaked to suit your needs. Like if you wanted to create a small city without actually making each building by hand (say you were taking an arial view or something from far away) you can set the number of buildings to appear in between each "step" (like in Photoshop some selection tools are made to put a marker after being dragged for so many pixels), you can set the variations in height (so if you wanted them all to be the same, then both numbers - max and min - would be the same). You can edit the texture so they all look like victorian houses or something. You can even set how many sides, roof details, things like that. Then just click and drag.

Image above contains red down feathers, 1 type of tree, 1 type of grass, a stone path, and some houses. I could have done more, but i just wanted to illustrate a point - so to speak

I'm Gonna Comp Me Some...

     So this is my first attempt at compositing something i made a 3D model of into a real-life photo i took. More to come....and hopefully better.

And so you can see what i was holding on to, or whatnot, here are the two layers i used to make the composited shot above. Basically, in order to make the keyblade render in the correct pose, i took the original photo (of me) and imported it into Maya so that when i look through the Perspective camera, it fits the image to the film gate (so no matter which way the camera moves....the picture stays with it). So just just moved the keyblade/camera around till it looked like they two of them would work together, and then i rendered the keyblade with an alpha channel so it would composite easily.

Key To My Start

     So these are just some perspective renders of the untextured model of the keyblade i made last weekend. There's still some minor things i need to add onto it before i texture it, but for the most part it's done and ready for use.


Iron Mad...

Just a joke for DJ from one of her pictures of Tony Stark....the darker side anyway.

Testing, Testing...

     So i was playing around in Maya last weekend trying to learn some new things, and these are the test renders for the few things i learned and will retain without needing reference in the future. The first pic is of the Maya physicalSun and physicalSky settings for rendering. It's basically an extremely accurate recreation of the lighting effects of the sun and blur/shaprness of the horizon and sky. The 'Sun' is a 'Directional Light' (so it can physically be manipulated lilke any other light in Maya) and based on the rotation (so the Aim of the light) it will adjust the color of the light being emitted from the sun (so early morning blue light = 0-20° or something. Sunset reds = 150-180°.

     So the first picture is me messing around with that and Final Gather, which simulates the way real light bounces off surfaces and provides reflected light.

     The secong image is me messing around with a Maya brush (cityMesh) and combining it with Sun/Sky and Final Gather. For some reason, when you use Mental Ray (a renderer for Maya) it's default texture has high reflectivity - so that's why you can't easily distinguish all the buildings and edges. I didn't feel like changing it because it was just a test for the brush stroke.

Summer Projects: Avatar Rebirth

     So the summer is starting, and it's time to shake the cobwebs off and start getting into the swing of modeling again since i'll have a pretty intense Maya course during the upcoming fall semester. So during the summer i'm going to be doing two things in Maya to freshen my overall skills:

--> FFS: The Final Fantasy/Sonic crossover me and my friend DJ are working on...details in a few posts below.

--> Avatar Rebirth: I'll be trying to model some of the big-scale things from the video game i'm working on.


          So for both projects, i'll be the only one doing the 3D modeling and pushing my skills in as many areas as i can:
Texturing (including 3D paint and UV mapping);
Lighting
Environment Modeling (terrain, trees, grass, clouds, things like that);
Character Animation (which includes modeling, rigging, Inverse Kinematics...*shudder*, and animating);
Rendering (using multiple passes to achieve desired rendering)
Special Effects (like particle effects and such).

     So for right now, since the above drawing is the only thing i have to work with that's detailed enough for me to work with in Maya, i'm going to be working on this over the weekend and should have some WIP renders soon.

     As soon as i've got some good sketches for the FFS project, i'll start posting stuff for that on here as well.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Shadow of the Colossus

     So like my friend DJ did in her last post "A Gray Day" (btw....she mis-spelled grey - or rather spelled it the acceptable way while still being wrong), I took those greyscale art markers and went over some images (this is only one of them...others include the crystal in my blog's header) to further define the shapes and form of the subject so the eye has a bit more to look at then an extreme 2D image with no value. Maybe more later...

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Fix Or Repair Daily

     So Friday night, when i was at He Brews for the Karaoke night since it was the last day of school (here anyway), I somehow managed to lose my keys (and not just one....cuz otherwise i would have said "i lost my house key, or i lost my mailbox key). So i looked all over the place; under the only chair i ever sat in, in all my 10+ pockets, all throughout my car, on the ground leading from my seat to my car....everywhere.

     The only place i had visited after exitting my car was the Justice Court to fax some paperwork to my school for verification. So since i was leaving around 8:30 PM, naturally, they were closed for the weekend. So i had no way of getting my car home. No biggie, right - i'll just use my grandma's and get my keys back on monday. Turns out they weren't at the Justice Court....they weren't anywhere (Eddie even looked through the trash from the friday night to see if someone had thrown them away by accident; no luck).

     So there's this whole deal about figuring out what to do and having my car towed home. And then today - Tuesday - i get a spare...replica key made and almost have another incident. I go to Wal Mart to try and find a keychain or one of those things that go around your neck, and almost get locked out of my car. Turns out the key they made, for some weird reason, will start my car, and lock the doors from the outside...but it just won't unlock them. I'm just lucky i had that spare key that unlocks the car but doesn't start it...otherwise i would have been hard pressed......hehehehehehehe

     It's really dumb tho, cuz the key that unlocks my car was the one they used to make the copy of...so it should have made no difference whatsoever.

     Oh well

Sunday, May 17, 2009

What A Fucking Sabbatical

I can't believe it's been 3 whole months since my last post. There's been a shit load of stuff that's happened since then. I got a girlfriend, finished the spring semester, and a bunch of other little things (like starting collaborations with DJ and her friends).

So i guess i'll start with my girlfriend, Crystal...Naw. I'll make that a whole seperate post once i've got some good pictures of us to include in it (and now that i don't have school i should be - and i know i've said this before - more regular with updates). But since i'm going to be working on a few things this summer - mostly Maya related - I hope i'm better at making regular posts so the people who need to know what i'm doing can see it at their leisure.

So the main thin i'm going to be working on this summer - mostly after the middle of june since i need to make up some art assignments to get a better grade in my Figure Drawing class and not have to retake it - is a collaboration with DJ that involves taking Final Fantasy 7 characters (just a few of them as the project isn't that big; it's just working on a kind of teaser trailer) and translating them into Sonic characters. DJ is going to be doing the conceptual drawings as well as character layouts (defining certain features in great detail so that i may create better models with ease) and storyboards once it comes time to render the trailer.

We haven't, as of yet, come up with a plot for the whole thing. We might just leave it as a trailer and never come back to it, or we might make little webisodes since we'll already have all the characters made. u we're probably going to have Sephiroth, Cloud, Aeris no way am i ever spelling it with a "th"), Reno & Rude for comic relief, and maybe a secret antagonist. Who knows, we might not even have Sephy in there at all...could be some new enemy - screw Jen, Seph, and their stupid Kaddy. One thing that'll translate over kind of effectively is the Materia into Chaos Emeralds. Materia can be a pretty common thing in the realm of FF7 - kind of like cubic zerconias in the real world - they're pretty but nothing special as everyone has them. But like the end of 7, there were the Huge Materia you needed to blast apart the meteor...and of course the Black Materia used to summon it.......which lead to the Holy Materia used to destroy it.

So if my memory serves me, there were 4 pieces of Huge Materia, 1 Black, and 1 White...which makes 6 extremely unique pieces of materia. In the Sonic Realm, there are always 7 Chaos Emeralds (and depending on the timeline or story, 1 Master emerald). So it'll be no problem to translate the materia into emeralds if i wanted to...so if i wanted to retell the events of FF7 as Sonic Characters and Emeralds....i totally could.

I think i'm going to eventually name them - the emeralds that is - because you're either always going to refer to them by the location they were found ("you know, the emerald found in the such-and-such stage") or by their color...which isn't a bad thing by any means....but it'd be nice if they had names - even if it were something like "The Emerald of Power" - of which Red is an Archetype for......why do you think Gannon's triforce piece was red?

DJ said she had started a collaboration with her friends using RPG Maker 2003 (a bit outdated, but still just as good as anything if you want to achieve that 'old school' feel) and asked me - if i remember our convo right - if i wanted to help out. So i said sure because i think it would be nice for me to get out of the directive position and be delegated to for once. I'm just surprised they didn't do this a long time ago because i had RPGM2003 a long time ago and tried messing with it myself, though it didn't get very far because my understanding of games and their inner-workings wasn't as good as it is now.

So i guess i'll leave this post where it is and go work on the Sonic Collaboration.....in which i'm about to disucss with DJ since she's calling me right now....Lates.