The Time of Reckoning Fast Approaches

So.... with only a few days left, it is very unfortunate that I have so many assignments to do this week. Including writing a speech, an After Effects project, and silhouettes for my next illustration project.

This is to be done in the same time that I try and crunch out my characters/animations for said characters in record time. With Tuesday(today), Wednesday, and Thursday being the days that I conceivably have to finish(maybe Friday morning too? though unlikely in the extreme).

So here is the final rig over which I have lost so much sleep as of late.

Wait....I can fix that! I can TOTALLY fix that....

*Ten Minutes Later*

Though I think the Grand, Stretchy-Armed, Groping Groin-Grab of DOOM! would be a very effective fighting technique for him, it would have caused cohesion problems with his fellow actors :P
Ok, so I think I've frozen everything's transforms, zeroed out all positions, checked all the orients, etc, etc....

The one thing i'm still worried about is the spine. I've never used one like it before and i'm kind of nervous about how it will work out.

Here he does his voodoo dance of anti-life induction(better known as "death").

Ok, so now that that's done. Tomorrow i'll make the Knight, though it was supposed to be done LAST week, the rig obviously delayed me quite a bit. So these time constraints obviously also mean that i'm going to be transfering over animations between characters. Though I do have the Skeleton model sheet done too, so hopefully I can get a version of those in as well to make up for my tardyness.

Now i'm off to bed, in order to get 5 or so hours of sleep before getting up to do my other projects, animate this little sucker, go to school, do my After Effects project, and then go home to do more game work. At some point in the day i'll also have to write and rehearse my speech :\


P.S. I realize that he doesn't have eyeballs OR a sword. I also realize that his frontal silhouette is weak, but luckily he won't be SEEN from the front. With that, i'm off to bed before i pass out in my chair xP

....and now back to our scheduled programming....

Well, it seems I failed miserably in keeping this thing regularly updated with progress.

Since I didn't get the internship, I decided to spend one more summer in Bulgaria. This turned out to be a generally poor decision. On the plus side, some may say the generally poor experience built character. I am inclined to believe this, if only because it would explain the 5 or 6 different voices in my head as recently built characters.

In other news, I have been conscripted for a quick little project with a fellow student in one of my classes. This project requires from me that I animate several characters. Whilst this is very appealing, there has been some stress in trying to compress any of this activity into my schedule. Not only that, but our lack of a dedicated modeler leaves the work to me.

The positive outcome of all of this is that I get a bit of experience, and all of this work is work I can generally fit my preparation for into one class or another. So that puts a big, stupid, toothy grin on my face :D

So hopefully i'll have made it through all of these rigging tutorials on my list by the time i'm done with the model, so that I can plunge straight into rigging the damn thing. The one issue with this is that I had planned to get the model done some time around....let's see.... today!!

Unfortunately I was delayed significantly by another project i'm working on, an animation desk. But more on that in a later post.

Anyways, here's what little progress I have made with the model. I plan on punching out the rest on Tuesday morning, and to hopefully magically finish a rig too.

I borrowed the new Intuitive Animation by Gnomon from a friend. It has me quite inspired, and hopefully i'll be able to produce some kick-ass animations for this thing.

Oh, right. Here is the blog of the project's designer. It's quite the entertaining read.

Hmmm....it's an interesting futility when I, possessing a blog with fewer readers than his solitary reader(me), am making a referral to his site.

More Stuff

To prove that I DID actually do SOMETHING during the semester, I'm uploading a bunch of the stuff I did.
First one is my first ZBrush model I made this semester. If it's not readily apparent what it is, i've failed miserably.
Then I have the monster i've been working on as of late, which is nearing completion.

This gives a sense of the relative scale of the legs and head to the body.

Here the shell normal maps are more visible.

Here is the final shot, showing the skinned rear leg. Most of the detail is from the normal map i painted in photoshop.

Everything else that's worth mentioning was previously posted, and I hope to have a finished version of the creature posted shortly.

Catacomb

Here's my catacomb submission....

Wish me more luck....

Well, needing a place to post some kind of work to show for my internship application, I decided that this would suffice.

First up is my WIP for my Maya modeling class. This will eventually become the head to a much larger alien, of which I plan to post shots as soon as I can get back on my school computer(tuesday). I plan on taking this into ZBrush on tuesday to give it a nice displacement and normal map set.

Here is a shot of the alien head comparing a few slight modifications in shaded(above) and wire(right) views.









This is my own interpretation of the Parthenon. More recent image soon to follow. I have yet to decide how to do the tiles on top. I don't have the desire to send the poly count up another 100k just to add tiles, but I know not of any implementation for parallax mapping in maya, which would be great. I'll probably just create a displacement for it, if I don't find anything. If anyone happens upon this humble blog and does know, please do share with a comment.


Lo and behold my second ever head model. The nose needs some more work, but his main purpose was to make some blend shapes. Though this has been put on the back-burner until my semester is over.

Here's an eyeball I made to complement the head. Once school's out I hope to give him proper skin too(SSS woot!).

Now to prove that I do at least know of the existance of color, here's the first dirty iteration of a shield, one of hopefully many props which will populate the Parthenon. I decided to mess with Maya's procedurals to try and make the leather, which I think has some potential.


Hopefully you enjoyed my stuff, more to come soon.

If only, if only....

If only I had started working on this project sooner, like the beginning of the month, as opposed to a few days ago.... If only I had anticipated that I wouldn't end up competing in the Pan-Americans....

On the plus side, I'm definately having fun with this project. Though the deadline for the Gnomon catacombs challenge is in.....very few days.... it has gotten me to work, as opposed to just fiddling around with small experiments as I usually end up doing. The reason i'm actually posting this is so that I can ask everybody I know how bright this looks to them, because apparantly my monitor's set relatively bright. Hopefully this will allow me to better gauge what people will be seeing. I also hope the final image will be something I can be proud of....I guess we'll find out in about a day or so. Wish me luck!

More Eye-Candy

Ok, it's been a while since my little rant on graphics. Let me clarify a few things that I don't think came across quite right.

1. The main point was that having a consistent art style, and clean graphics is what's most important. For example, Prey was touted as having amazing detail....but the people's faces looked rubbery, it made them look less like humans and more like moving manakins. I feel it would have been better to sacrifice the detail provided in their normal maps in exchange for proper specularity, or some other such trade between resources.

2. Graphics should be advanced as much as possible. I merely mean to say that they should take a back seat to the game itself. As I mentioned, I kept getting lost in various areas in Halo 3; the reason being that they were adding so much detail that few things really stuck out as saying "Go Here". In the earlier games, any glowing and/or transparent box denoted a power up of some kind. In Halo 3 I witnessed various objects with these same properties....but they did nothing.

3. If physics is actually implemented in the GAME( not just in terms of what you see, but in terms of what you have to do to get through the game), then they deserve just as much attention. I recall reading an article that said that there was only one programmer who did all of the physics in Insomniac's Resistance: Fall Of Man. On the other hand, I believe I heard that there were 4 or 5 for Doom 3.

4. To elaborate on Van Gogh's Self Portrait, and to defend my slight feeling of contempt for modern/modern expressionist art and their correlaries.... it employs a vibrant use of many colors in a way that would be difficult to concieve of for anyone not well versed in using color(the eyes have around 40 colors in them, I hear), it shows proper form/proportion, and uses not only variation on light, but variation in color to give a sense of depth and life.

5. I hope to get the opportunity to do some graphics or at least be involved with art direction at some point, so I am in no way saying that art is not important.