Helmet Painting

I got inspired by the Lord of the Rings armours and costumes so I decided to paint something related.

I browsed through the net for some reference pictures. Of course at this stage, I want to practice my digital painting. So I came across a good picture reference and decided to replicate it by painting. The image below shows my progress so far:

I'm pretty slow at drawing and painting, so I decided that I'll take my time to do this. As you can see, I've drawn out the rough outline. It's not traced - I placed the reference beside my canvas and tried to copy the drawing exactly. I shall continue tomorrow with this, or whenever I get the time.

Temasek Design School - Promotional Video

This was assigned to us as a final assignment for motion graphics class. Everything was created in After Effects, except for the textures at the start and end of the clip - they were black and white originally, I modified them to give them their colors that you see.



If viewed here, the quality of both sound and video would be very bad. To view in higher quality, please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcYC7t0mIOI

Once there, click on "watch in high quality" at the bottom right of the video.

Enjoy! :) Do rate and comment on it. Thanks.

Lighting Tests

I decided to work my lighting. I hadn't touched Maya for quite a long time. I went back to my old scene of the living room. Since I had problems rendering it, I decided to export the models out and re-import them in another scene. I made the 4 walls, only this time, they were each a separate object. So the walls were made up of 6 planes.

Since I was doing lighting after a very long time, I decided to go slowly. So I imported the coffee table and the long sofa first and rendered through mental ray with global illumination turned on.

I thought this was a little bit dark so I adjusted the settings and re-rendered the image, this time with the side sofas included.

I textured the ground with the wooden material and made it slightly reflective. I also changed the settings so that the reflections would appeared blurred, as if the wood was newly polished.

It still remained too dark for me. So I textured the walls white and re-rendered the scene.

Too bright I suppose. Well actually, I'm really tired. I want to re-model the sofas because somehow they don't give me this feeling of comfort. Oh well, I shall try some other time.

Cliffs - From Concept to Completion

I was looking at my 2D landscape that I had painted earlier on:

I decided to make into a 3D environment. So after analyzing the painting, I jumped into Vue and started sculpting the cliffs on the left. I used my Wacom tablet to do this. I made a depression for my waterfall, but sadly did not add it in simply because I haven't figured it out yet.

The Cliffs Sculpted

I had to spend a lot of time doing the layout and placing the camera. For some reasons, I could not get the perspective to be exactly the way it was in the painting - maybe the perspective in my painting was wrong. So I moved onto texturing. I placed ecosystems on all the terrains except the distant background one. I spent a lot of time texturing the water too. I was going for a realistic look.

Then I moved onto adjusting the atmosphere. Most of the time was spent here because I could not get the look I wanted right away. I tried many different kind of settings for clouds, sun, fog and haze and when I was happy with the settings, I turned on global illumination and rendered the image. Rendering time: 2 hrs 10 min at HD 720p resolution.

Feel free to comment on this art. It's uploaded on my deviant art page at www.digimator.deviantart.com.

Deviant Art

Hello folks,

I've set up a page on Deviant Art:

www.digimator.deviantart.com

All my complete works, static of course, will be uploaded there. This blog will still be active :)

My first work in Vue

I was playing around with Vue since I love nature. I formed a simple composition with the terrains and then played around with the ecosystem to get my forest and grass. This took a long time, for I was not used to the kind of numbers to use on different scales of scenes. Once I was happy with the textures, I adjusted the clouds and lighting and turned on global illumination for rendering. I added a cube and gave it a misty texture to give the ground fog as you can see. I rendered it at 720p and rendering took 1 hour 10 min. I wonder what's going to happen when I start animating in Vue.