Forgot the Spec

Totally did not notice, her spec maps had somewhere along the pipeline got disconnected. How I did not notice till now amazes me. It also means our short was rendered without her spec maps as well... crap... Ah well, live and learn right?

Last One I Promise...

Just had to try a couple more...

Rendering Experiments

After my last post I felt like taking another stab at lighting, which I'm not too great at. This time around I lit Marie with three lights, one blue (side), one orange (back), and a slightly red main light source (front). Somewhat happy with how it looked I tried it again messing with the focal length of the camera and depth of field. Which resulted in a neat upshot I thought so I put it up here as well. Now I know that presentation wise it's best to put the model on a 50% grey background, but I'm a big fan of Chiaroscuro and having the black background is just kind of an aesthetic I've grown to like. Although the lights are far too bright here to achieve the proper effect haha.

In other news, I'm sporting a pretty powerful new computer, it's been kicking some serious a** in all my 3d applications. (It did cost me a pretty penny though...) Got these renders with extremely high settings all checked-on done in like a minute each. It's been night and day compared to my old computer. My old one served me well, but if I'm going to make this art thing a career I needed a better workstation.

Also big shout out to our Rigger Mike Swann, for rigging all our characters for First Contact. Went to hell and back getting our characters to work, my hat goes off to him. All that fancy rigging code and script is all black magic to me haha.

Red Light

Found a render I did of Marie while cleaning out some folders on my portable hard drive. Figured I might as well load it up. I think I was playing with rim lighting in Maya when I did this. Not much else to say haha.

Tree House

Now for some more recent work. Here's a shot of one of my homework assignments for a class this quarter. Based on the concept by this guy http://deevad.deviantart.com Ignore the leaves they're kinda lame cause I'm not really up to speed on zBrush's fiber mesh functions like I am other areas of the program. It was fun to do though, not really used to stuff besides characters, which made doing this pretty slow, but I got it done more or less.

PACIFIC RIM

First of all let me say, Pacific Rim was the greatest movie of all time and Grown-Ups 2 should of never of beaten it. Anyways, while waiting for a guest speaker to show up at our school, I tried to sketch out Cherno Alpha from memory (This was before the movie came out) I kinda had the right idea, the nuclear smokestack was far too narrow though. So sad that it *SPOILERS* dies so quick, it was favorite Jaeger.

The second image is a scan of what was to be my entry into IGN's Design Your Own Jaeger contest, but I missed the deadline. My fault for trying to get this done on the last day of submission haha, I wished I got it finished. My theme was tall and narrow with like some sort of bladed armor. It would fight normally of course but it's armor let the Kaiju maim itself as the fight wore on. (Which I though was a great idea after seeing the movie.) I will congratulate the winner of the contest though, his submission looked pretty cool.

Espacio Pistolero

I think this was a quick sketch during one of the many burnouts I suffered while working on our Production Studio short First Contact. Again it was Marie but no face mask this time around. I think I was trying to figure out how her face would actually fit inside of the helmet. Much to my dismay when I tried it in 3d, they didn't line up haha.

Doing these little sketches every now and then between all the hard work all most of my team was doing was probably the only reason most of us didn't lose it. Probably that and lots of angry car rides home...

I'll be sure to post a link to the short when we fine tune it some more, which should be soon hopefully.