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 =)

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.

Z-brush Creature

I was inspired those hyper-realistic creatures from movies like Lord of the Rings and Spiderwick Chronicles. Thus I decided to try one of my own designs. I had no design in mind initially. I jumped into Z-brush straightaway and decided to experiment with the program. I started with a sphere as a base and started sculpting from there. I used a mouse as I don't have access to my Wacom tablet at the moment. This was my first time using Z-brush.

Digital Painting Continued

I continued working on the digital painting where I last left off. I made it into a widescreen ratio.

To make the cliff more grand, I made the horizon line higher and shifted everything upwards. I felt that the water had too much green inside. Thus I color corrected it. Next, I went onto adding my main focus - the waterfall. Finally, I added more foreground cliffs with forest and vegetation details.

Painted in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet.

Digital Painting

This is my first try at digital painting. It's a concept I'm working on as part of my school assignment. Basically, I'm supposed to create a background for character animation to be fitted in. Since I love landscapes and oceans, I decided to paint that. This is still in concept phase. It's not complete. I still have to add a waterfall from the cliffs on the left and make a few more changes to make it look more dynamic.

Done in Photoshop CS3, using a Wacom Intuos 4 x 6 tablet.