Aircraft Works in Progress

I haven't gotten much time to update my aircraft as I had been busy working on other projects. I should be posting those stuff up here in a few days' time.

Meanwhile, here's a test render of my aircraft. Rendered using mental Ray.

As you can see, it's still in the development stage. I'm still creating the textures and shaders for this plane. More later :)

Norman Georgio - First 3D Character

Norman Georgio

This is my first try at modeling a 3D character. It's a school assignment and it's still works in progress. I had not drawn my character out before modeling, but I pretty much had him in mind. I wanted to model an exaggerated American African. I was inspired by Samuel Jackson from the movie, Pulp Fiction.

So anyway, I started out with a NURBS model, acting as a guide for my final model. After shaping the shape of my head using the NURBS sphere, I converted it into a polygon and redrew some of the edges to make it completely quad. I started with the eyelids, then the nose, lips and ears. I plan to re-model the ears though.

I had to show my works in progress today so I smoothed my mesh and applied a subsurface scattering skin shader and rendered a few images for my presenetation.

And here's a quick turntable I made of Norman. It was rendered in two passes - beauty pass with subsurface scattering and the other with ambient occlusion.

I should be refining the character further. I do plan to add an Afro hairstyle, but then again, I may not. Don't ask me why I came up with the name Norman Georgio. I think it suits him :)

More to come later.

Underwater Concept Artwork

I had to do a concept artwork for a school project I'm working on. We are doing this 3D short film on fish and I'm in charge of the underwater environments. For this concept artwork, I had to make a scene which looks like an ocean scene from a certain lighting set-up and yet it can look like an aquarium from a different lighting set up.

I went to the library and borrowed a few books on aquariums and oceans. Using that as a reference, I went into Maya and modeled two structures that look like reef or coral structures.

I made these structures from sphere. For the first one, it was mere extrusion of faces outwards incrementally to create the step structure. For the second one, I extruded a few holes inside. After smoothing these two meshes, I converted them into a soft body and applied a turbulence field. I played through the timeline until I felt that the meshes were displaced enough.

Next, I went into Photoshop to create a seabed and coral textures, which I would be using as a bump map.

Once I had my assets and textures ready, I fired up Vue and started placing my assets in place and creating the textures. Of course I have to mention that the program crashed many times during the process of creation. The hardest part was the lighting. I made a few test renders:

This lighting set-up was to give a very ocean-like feel to the image.

This kind of lighting set-up was to give an aquarium feel to the image.

Once I was happy with the balance of two, I rendered the final image at high quality, but not a very large resolution because of the time constraint I had to deal with. This is what the final image looks like:

Hope you like it. Comments and criticism are welcome. Do visit my deviant art page if you are interested to comment on it.

Weightlifter on CG Background

Well, if anyone is curious...

This is one of the assignments I had to do for motion graphics class - though I think it has nothing to do with motion graphics but more to do with rotoscoping and visual effects.

The weightlifter was keyed out from his background. It was still too untidy at this stage because of the watermark BBC text that was superimposed on his body throughout the 15 seconds. So I had to mask out all the untidy edges. He still isn't 100% clean though. Oh well..

Next, I had to place him against a background. I wanted it to be original, so I created the background in Vue and placed the weightlifter on the rock. The camera in the weightlifter footage was moving, so I tracked it and linked the background footage to the track so that the weightlifter wouldn't appear to be floating on the background.

Finally, I touched up both the elements until it looked as if it was one whole scene rather than two elements composited (hopefully I was successful at this). This included color correction, adding the weightlifter's shadow and the classic vignette. out the sequence at 720p resolution.

The final rendered clip is below. Hope you all like it. Comments are welcome.

Legrand-Simon LS-60 Model Almost Complete

I'm more or less done with my Legrand-Simon LS-60 aircraft model. I continued from where I left off yesterday. I modeled the wings, the landing gear and the tail. I made a temporary glass material to see through the glass windows. I have not added any interior detail yet, but I plan to later on. I feel happy with my workflow this time - it's like I finally know how to be organized when modeling.

After I've added in the interior details, I plan to shade it and light it up and it will be good to go for a nice render. Till then, here are the snaps of my current aircraft. Enjoy :)

Legrand-Simon LS-60 - Modeling

I felt like modeling something so I decided to model a small aircraft. The blueprints were given to me. But I felt that it did not show much, so I went onto the net to find some reference images:

Once I felt that I had enough reference, I loaded up the blueprints in Maya and started the modeling process. I started with the front part and slowly built my way behind. This time, I was careful enough not to add too much resolution to tighten up the edges in the early stages as how I had done on my BMW car model. I completed the rough body blocking first. It was pretty tedious, ensuring the four-sided quads and things like that, but I managed.

Once I was happy, I separated the pieces. I made the door and detailed it, followed by the windscreen. Then I moved on to modeling the propeller. I kind of feel happy with this model because nothing has gone wrong yet (touchwood!!). I just have to clean up a few edges to blend in the pieces together nicely and tightly. Been working on it for the past 5 hours non-stop. This is what the result looks like at the moment.

It's 3 am now. Think I'll go sleep and continue the rest tomorrow =)