Okay. It’s been over a year and a half since my last post. I apologize. BUT if you cared enough to visit this site during that time, then you are probably a person I’ve talked to since then. I certainly hope so. If not…. well, you’ve probably long since given up on me and aren’t going to bother coming back now. I am a terrible person.
Lots of things have happened. I doubt I’ll write about any of them, with one exception. I just moved to San Francisco to work at ILM. Kacey and I took a road trip to get here. You can read some details, ramblings, and fabrications about it on our blog thing, and see a bunch of pictures grouped by location on flickr. We still have some posts to make for the last few days of the trip, and we are dating them according to when the events happened. So in addition to possibly being slightly confusing in the text, I don’t know what impact that will have on aggregator/feed type things. And we are going to continue posting on there as we do stuff around San Francisco, and future trips.
Oh also… I tried to change this site a little bit, about two months ago. At some point I fixed the old gallery for about two days, then something happened with execution time limits and I haven’t dealt with it since. Considering my schedule is about to get rocked like a hurricane (I start night shift in about 17 hours), hopefully my impending nocturnality or insomnia will allow me the time to migrate the content to somewhere/something whose upkeep will not be in my hands. The same may happen with this text stuff you are reading.
See you soon?
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So I just started what should be my last semester. Things seem kind of squared away for graduation. I just need to pass a math class I’m taking, which shouldn’t be hard, but will require more attention than I’d care to give it. The original idea was that this class would prepare me for computer graphics, but I took that class last semester and I don’t imagine I will receive greater insight this semester. It’s just kind of this box I need to check before I’m done. Of far greater interest is my independent study, in which I will be making some 3D models that will ideally catch someone’s eye when I’m done. I’ve started work on a skeleton to complement the self portrait I did last summer, which will also serve as the basis for humanoid models I will create in the near future. Right now I’m doing research into what kinds of models to make and what skills to polish, and trying to develop an overall focus. I will be putting some images online as I go along.
This is it.
Oh yeah and perhaps a bit of a recap is in order, in case anyone actually pays attention or cares after 4 months of inactivity. I got a decent grade for my summer efforts. The computer graphics class turned out well. I didn’t work as much as I would have liked on the creative project, but it took a bit of an unexpected turn and is even more appealing now. It is just hard finding time to work on it.
And lastly, the gallery is currently broken. I will fix it… soon.
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I haven’t found out yet what grade I got for my efforts this summer, but in the meantime I thought I’d post a movie of the three different variations on the model I made.
What else is happening? I am taking computer graphics and that seems pretty cool, but I am a bit behind and there’s a test Tuesday. I took a gamble on a half.com/eBay seller with almost no feedback and lost, so I don’t have a book for the class yet. But hopefully the test will turn out reasonably well. There are some other test/assignment things currently looming, but they don’t seem like too big of a deal. Ideally I will have some time this semester to spend on a creative project with an esteemed peer, and to do some personal stuff as well, like pushing the self portrait and zBrush stuff a lot further.
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My head hurts. There is a pressure congestion thing happening. Hopefully this is the last day of it.
White water rafting was cool. The water wasn’t all that white, and it wasn’t all that rough or intense, but it was fun and I had a good time jumping between rafts and throwing people overboard. Unfortunately it may have contributed to the current illness I am experiencing.
The brush size thing was resolved. I burned what I thought would be the definitive CD of my work from the summer to show for a grade, but that went in a slightly unexpected direction. So I am putting a bit more time into it this evening and hopefully all will turn out well. Or at least reasonably well. It will probably be another thing in the “at least it is over; too bad I’m not happy with it” category. That will probably be on my tombstone.
Carry on.
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Fingernails are currently the bane of my existence.
And a brush that is bigger than it is told to be.
And a falloff curve that is turning out differently from what I expected.
It should have been nostrils.
A more thoughtful post would have been nice. I suppose this was rather impromptu. I have maybe two days left. I have the beginnings of some sort of orc thing , which is not what I had planned. But it may end up okay.
I wonder what direction this will take. Somehow I believe it will be just fine on paper, but in my brain things are grinding to a halt.
This was perhaps one of my more unintelligible posts to date. Maybe if I had more time to write. But if I had more time, I might not feel the need to write this post.
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So I “finished” my head, then I “finished” the body, then I started some other stuff and scrapped it, then I worked on the hands and now I have a nearly complete head and body . By “finished,” I mean locked down the model and planned to make only texture, rigging, or displacement changes. I realized, and I should have sooner, that this can be a bit more flexible than I was thinking. As long as I get a high-res displacement map out of zBrush for a model with similar UVs and proportions, I can have some differences in topology. If I just bring in the new model, apply the displacement map, and correct any issues that arise where the topology is too different or where the map detail is insufficient (which will hopefully be rare), I should be good to go.
So where am I? I can probably call this done even though it has no textures and is not posed. I started a base mesh from scratch and also messed around with my fatbody for a while last night for the monster , but part of me wants to be crazy and push my self portrait around until it matches. Especially considering I forgot the monster has ears. I was tired last night. If I do use the self portrait base mesh, I will have to employ the technique mentioned above of using the same displacement map on meshes with different topology. So I will add geometry for the tail and the horns and put them into an undisplaced spot in the map, then add their details in zBrush. I really hope this works… because I haven’t read any direct mention of it and I am banking on it rather heavily. I have a tendency to do that it seems. Maybe there is an easier way.
So what’s next? Probably adding some geometry for the insides of the mouth and eyes (again), then making a bunch of UV groups… I was thinking I might just use sets because I don’t want to actually lay out the UVs right now, but a) I don’t have to actually lay them out (although somehow it will be tempting), just put them into separate UV tiles, and b) any added geometry has a decent chance of finding its way into the right UV group, whereas I think it would have to be manually added to a set. And I’m going to have to do stuff with UVs later anyways. Parentheses abound.
So… add cavity and eye geometry, make UV groups, turn myself into the monster without a tail or horns, generate displacement map, add tail and horn geometry in maya, detail in zBrush. Assuming the base mesh can hold up, that sounds feasible in the next few days maybe. I hope.
And then? Decide whether I’m going to rig one or both of these, turn the self portrait into the painting portrait , make a new model, fix up the frog, rig the slugs, or what. I’m thinking it will be painting portrait, new model, or rig these suckers.
One last thing. I probably should have dove head first into zBrush a while ago instead of relying on Maya for so much detailing. The idea is that when I rig a model, the more carefully crafted base mesh will speed up or otherwise simplify rigging than would a more generic or boxier base mesh. I don’t know if this is true. It probably has to do more with me being somewhat overwhelmed with the additional freedom that zBrush offers. It is kind of too easy for me to screw up a model. I guess the more time I spend, the less true that will become. Hopefully the next few days will be valuable, because the last few times I tried anything in zBrush the results were somewhat tragic.
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So that’s over. The finals I mean. It went pretty horribly, but architecture ended up better than I hoped, so that’s good. I’m not going to bother getting into details. Because no one reads this anyways, and I don’t need to record for posterity my anxiety about my grades, which will be resolved in four days.
So I’ve been working on a self portrait model. The idea is to make a 3d version of the self portrait I did for painting last spring. But I am also kind of wanting to make a completely realistic texture and everything. I only have until the end of August to work on this 3D stuff to resolve the incomplete from spring. I’m not sure what direction it will take. The goal was to finish the head this weekend, and I’m kind of close… it needs ear detail and some tweaks around the nose and mouth. And I want to add more eye detail like tear ducts. Maybe that amounts to one efficient night’s work. And I am supposed to spend this week making the body for the self portrait. I will probably end up just going straight to the distorted body instead of first making a realistic body as I had planned. Perhaps in the interest of time. Because I am a tweakaholic and if I’m going for realism, this self portrait is the only thing I’ll finish (if I finish it) this summer. Then it’s on to two more models I can hopefully finish each of the next two weeks.
I kind of want to do some cartoony stuff… Bring some characters to life. But at the same time I want to make cool detailed monsters. I suppose I am nowhere close to either goal. I am just very pressed for time…. I need to make a nice bunch of work before next spring so I can get an internship to get my foot in the door. Spring is a thousand years away, but I have just seen what a semester’s worth of non-3d classes can do for 3d productivity. Which is to annihilate it.
So I suppose you can see one of the most recent pictures of the self portrait . The texture is just a modified planar projection for testing purposes, which is why the hair in the back of the head is slightly nonexistent. I have been struggling a bit with perspective/orthographic issues and made some (slow) progress when I finally decided to take some physical measurements. I suppose people develop an eye for this sort of thing over time, but just starting out it’s kind of crazy to think of making a likeness from a few images when I can barely get a resemblance staring at myself in the mirror for hours. Hopefully this doesn’t mean I’m simply not cut out for this stuff, but rather that I just need practice. And hopefully I’ll have the time to practice and improve in the coming months. I’d like to maybe do portraits of some friends or family members, or maybe some interesting-looking celebrities. And caricatures. And the list goes on… because I want to do anatomy-based rigging and cartoony facial animation and general animation exercises… To some extent, the sky is the limit. But to another, February is. Because that’s probably when I need to have something to show if anyone is going to take a chance on me.
It has become apparent recently that I sort of wasted the last 4 years of my life. Hopefully this trend can be reversed.
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They’re like tasty morsels of… finals.
I made a little progress with 3D stuff. But I won’t get to do much of it this week because I’ll be busy limboing under my expectations. But afterwards… man. You better watch out.
This site has degenerated into something so shoddy that it may actually be representative of the real me.
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The PC is up and running. The art is not.
The summer is full of classes and work, and not a great deal of art creation. This will have to change, not least of all because otherwise I will have an F on my transcript and have to repeat Senior Thesis if I don’t make some 3D stuff by the end of July.
There are probably two weekends in July when I won’t be focusing on 3D. There are probably also a lot of days dedicated to homework and the like.
I hope I can pull this off. Meanwhile, I’m avoiding doing an assignment for my databases class.
One day I’d like to post something thought-provoking. Or at least something that takes some thought to write and isn’t just an expression of anxiety about the future and an acknowledgement that I haven’t written in a while.
I’m going home this weekend. All seven members of my immediate family will be together for the first time in something like four years. I am looking forward to it. I promise.
I guess I’ll end this before it becomes even more of a rambling and nonsensical post about nothing.
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