rendering x3

This week really WAS rendering x3… we have a production assignment due tomorrow and all week I have spent lighting separating into layers and rendering a scene in 3 shots in 3 passes… object layer, shadow pass and ambient occlusion pass.  I finally got everything to work on all the settings I needed *jumps for joy* I don’t think I’ll ever forget how to render in passes again but really, what gave me he most trouble was caustics!  It’s supposed to be simple: get my key light to emit photons and turn on caustics in the render editor and wait forever for the render to happen because caustics make everything slow… but it refused to work and I asked the teacher on Sunday but he couldn’t get it to work either >.> and none of my classmates could get it to work… so the teacher taught me ‘fake caustics’ which is apparently what most people do anyways because it’s so much faster… so my scene is rendered with fake caustics heh.

Now I just need to composite it all together and add some music and some credits and it’s all good!

Now, in other news, we got to learn how to do some facial rigging in animation class!  I will take screen shots and post them up when I can…

I have also mostly finalized my demo reel idea, I have talked to my teachers about it and now I’ve decided to do a Napoleonic themed demo.  My 3D design teacher said he’d never seen a demo reel with Napoleon in it so that actually sounds a whole lot more doable than the Russian revolution because I know more about it.

-Sharon

trouble with wordpress and demo panicking….

well yes… I had some trouble with wordpress…. wasn’t accepting my password for some unknown reason and then the ’email a new password’ wasn’t working… after checking the forums I realized that I was not the only one suffering from the same ailment… it took me a few tries on a couple different computers and finally I have gotten back in *whew* and now I have forgotten about what I was originally going to blog about that time -_-

Now, on to the second part of my title… demo panicking, now, how I can I panic about demos when it’s barely 2nd semester? Well, I want my idea finalized so that I can really start to work on it… and also my friend in the April group are demo panicking…

I think my original idea with the rhythmic gymnast isn’t going to work around what I built around it (funny that) kind of like how ‘devil may cry’ started out as the next ‘resident evil’ but deviated enough that they didn’t want to use it as an ‘RE’ title and made a new franchise instead of scrapping the idea… SOOO, hospital room and hallway and outside of building, along with a patient, a nurse and 2 russian revolutionaries… the references for the building and environments will be taken from Dr. Zhivago once I get a hold of a copy and I shall run this idea by all of my teachers.

-Sharon

Ambient Occlusion (aka, shading)

Well today in production class we learned all about ambient occlusion and the benefits of rendering objects and shadows etc. in different layers and NOT just for saving time! Now I also know what ambient occlusion is and how it is different from ‘shadows’… and a whole lot of other technical stuff that surprisingly makes sense! I’m not going to talk too much more about that as that would be like… rewriting all my notes >.>

*gee I didn’t realize this didn’t publish when I put it up.. must have pressed ‘save’ instead of ‘publish’ so anyways… this was written on tuesday and really should come before the previous post XD

Who’s and crashing maya…

So I finally found some pictures of Hyde I could use as reference.  The side profile isn’t perfect but well, as the design teacher says “you aren’t always going to have perfect reference”  So I started on the eye but maya crashed grr >.<

Then today I went to see ‘Horton Hears a Who’ and well lots of ‘squash and stretch’ and ‘exaggeration’ and I especially loved the feathers on ‘Vlad’ the vulture with teeth (he talks like Dracula hehe I love vampires) the fur was very good when it showed… like, for most of the movie the animals were all pretty ‘stiff’ in terms of fur but every so often there were parts with wonderfully animated fur with all the ‘follow through’ and all.

Also kudos to them for having a misunderstood and quiet emo kid.

-sharon

making heads…

ok time to update this blog! I realized that most of the public will probably not be able to find this thing as I never put ‘tags’ down there on what my posts are about… and that\s fine by me I think XD nothing worst than a flame war under work meant to be professional.

Now, back to my actual post.   This week in design class we started faces yay! the eye and the mouth and then connecting them minimally by the outline of the nose/bride of nose.  The teacher said he wasn’t happy with his head models until his like, 6th head or so… and so I’m going to take initiative and make more head models hehe ^_^

I have been looking up reference photos of Hyde from the band L’arc en Ciel because, well, I figure if I’m going do things on my own I might as well make a head I enjoy looking at!

In animation class we are doing rigging… it’s rather technical O.o but it’s not too bad.

-Sharon

Traditional Artwork

Ok so I also talked to the program head today about including some of my 2D artwork in my demo.  I asked about what he thought of my drawing and design skills and all that jazz and well, he said that they were ‘solid’ but he’d need to see more of my work too.  So if I want to include my conceptual artwork for the stuff in my demo reel, I can and should bring them to an instructor for feedback before sticking them in my demo and if I want to include other artwork then I should make prints and have them separate from my demo but send them in the same package.

Also today we learned about cover letters and how to write one properly in career prep class.   We had to do research for a company and write a cover letter targeted at that specific company.  Mine is on Koolhaus games and one of their positions available in their postings is “concept artist” which is what I eventually want to end up doing.  3D is still fun and all but honestly, my initial goal was to become a character designer when it came to games.

I also see that a lot of companies are using 3DS max isntead of Maya or XSI… like Ubisoft and Piranha… and I thought Maya was what most places used!  I guess I thought that because it’s the program that is used for the Final Fantasy games hehe  but in the long run, I hope that doesn’t cripple my ability to get a job too much.

-Sharon

movies and their cg

Yesterday I went to see ‘10,000 BC’ and well, I thought it was an excellent movie but, for something that just came out, I think the cg felt a little ‘out of place’ especially the part with in the village with the saber tooth.  I could tell when the cg was up on screen and like it says in my book ‘digital lighting and rendering’ “CG is like fish… if it smells like fish, it’s not good fish… so it is the same with CG… if it looks like CG it’s not good CG”.  Not to say that it’s ‘bad’ per see, but could have been better… there’s another saying though: “never criticize when you can’t do better” and I most definitely can’t do better at this point.

On another note, a classmate brought in the movie ‘Spirit’ by Dreamworks for a background while we work (we always have something on in the projector… it just makes a better atmosphere I think)  Apparently the movie was made in CG… with the sort of cel shading thing… I could pick out the CG parts maybe once or twice but in general it was superb for something made in 2002.

The part that really made me really go ‘wow!’ during the movie is the hair… the hair animation was amazing! Top notch! I quote another calssmate “…that hair must have been a b*tch to animate” and I wholeheartedly agree.

-Sharon

Meticulously organizing glorified previous experience (aka. resume writing part 2)

So that’s what we did this class… continued to work on our resumes.  As the teacher says: “Resume writing is mostly psychological”  I have now cut my resume down to 1 page and am quite content with my results.  I’ve always been told that I should have a 2 page resume and explain my old jobs starting with ‘responsibilities were…’ and now I learn that I shouldn’t do that!  Well, as the teacher says, ‘even though you may have taken a career prep course in high school, those tend to be out of date and don’t teach very good skills’  and well, yeah, everything I knew about resume writing before last week was shot out of the water >.>

I also received my  marked biography back from the teacher and saving for some minor notes (2D/3D should have a capitalized D) my bio was great hehe, and now I’ve posted it up.  Maybe I’ll put up pictures of myself next… I’m confident in my looks lol!

That also reminds me… Friday I looked up tutorials on photo editing in photoshop.  It’s amazing what’s possible with today’s technology especially when one looks at the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures done by professionals on celebrities… like, this one woman looked near anorexic and SO DEAD!!! with hollows in her cheeks and bony upper arms… in the after picture the saturation got cranked up and her limbs got filled out and all that jazz and wow O.O she looked WAY better… like GLOWING with health and all that!  Everything gets smoothed to plastic perfection from wrinkles to bags under eyes to cellulite dimples…. they are people too and everyone just has to remember they also have a whole team of people doing their makeup before they are ever seen in front of a camera.

-Sharon

my 3d hand

well it seems there wasn’t much happening this week >.> except that I spent all of thursday night making this 3d hand hehe. I used my own hand as a reference and honestly I found this assignment to be loads of fun! The most difficult part of this assignment was making the knuckles and cleaning up the geometry in the back of the hand.

we were supposed to make it good in low poly so the finger nails aren’t as pronounced in smooth version as I’d like.

un-smoothed, with wireframe

hehe, I managed to make the back all 4 sided! I think my only tris are between the fingers

smoothed

On another note! I found out that the ps3 can get an update that makes it backwards compatible! Alex said that it’s a software rather than hardware and so it’s better than the hardware backwards compatibility in the earlier ones *whew*

He also mentioned that a Nintendo DS is the same price as a ps2 so… >.> maybe? lol, might be a bad idea though… DS’s are still rather new and I dont’ need distraction like that right now! but I still gotta remember to balance work and play *nod nod