Kool-Aid in mah spaceship

OH YEAHHHH.

Finally decided to use my laptop to make a post. Since my laptop is where all the shiny things are.

This is digital/3D stuff from the last two months, in chronological order. My bitterness towards Autodesk Maya has decreased significantly, but I suspect she and I will never get along fully. She's too fickle, along with a lot of other things that aren't polite to say.

The second-to-last Model Creation project was for us to use reference and create a high-detail 3D model of an arcade machine. I chose Need for Speed: Carbon, but there were like 10 different types and no consistent reference... so I just mixed and matched. It took me a long time to learn to love that class, and it shows in how long it took me to get up to speed. I passed the class, but I could've gotten a higher grade (instead of a mediocre B) if my head hadn't been worse off than it is now. It's okay work, but I can't say I'm proud of it.

And no. You will never see my 3D Foundations work. I may have passed that class with a B, but that doesn't mean the work was anywhere near quality. It ain't even average. It ain't even decent. It will never see the light of day.

Next up is the MCR final, which I worked harder on and I think I did passably well on: 

Had a small scare with a clerical error where I got a pure 0 on the final, and combined with a failed lab project and poor performance on the rest of the lab projects, I failed. Luckily, I had a high B on the final.

I'm shite at UVing... or, I was until someone actually taught us what it meant and how to do it, so the UVed stuff is pretty crappy there. UVing... I'm not sure what it actually stands for (google it!), but it's basically creating a map of the surface of an object so you can add an image texture to it. You need a map so you can work with a flat surface that will then wrap back around the object and look right. You can use a native Maya texture, the checkers, to check how the seams look and to make sure there's no stretching... but as you can see, I kinda screwed that up. Dead in the middle of the camera, too.

The purpose of the project was to entirely recreate a reference image. Catch is, they each had a different camera lens, which means though the space looks large, it's actually not that big, so we need to create the illusion of space while still placing things without floating objects or severe clipping. There were three tiers - a high-detail, complex-object Tier 1, a medium, balanced Tier 2, and the gimpy Tier 3 where you just had to match larger shapes... I fell into Tier 3, but I did alright. In retrospect, I should've arranged my objects a bit better, since they're clipping into each other, and the chairs aren't soft-looking enough, and those throw pillows look like sacks of... something or other. I don't have a sufficient analogy. I'm proud of that lamp, though. Them leaf decorations, dude.

My favorite class so far, aside from the traditional art classes, has been Shading and Lighting. Aside from the lab instructors being dead-awesome (HI AMBER), I actually felt like I learned a lot. I wasn't just overcoming the learning curve of working with Maya, I actually began to understand what I was looking for in a high-quality image. Here, we had pre-modeled scenes and we had to light and texture them, or add materials. Here, we had to work with the standard Maya materials, which are totally lame and insufficient, but they did the trick. In retrospect, the reference we were using was much softer, more delicate, warmer, and more inviting. Mine's much scratchier, dimmer, more like a really old picture than a happy room. And those goddamn ottomen were hell and don't look right at all. They don't even reflect and refract the light properly. ;_; Still I'm getting a sense for color and light in 3D work here.

This is where we start using MIA Material X, which is AWESOME to use, and really fun and easy to manipulate. We had to recreate a setup with the gradient in the back, and the light and reflections based on a photograph taken specifically for this project. The lighting and reflections are based on an IBL, which is a spherical imported image that makes the subject matter look like it's in an actual environment.

Retrospect: very noisy. I think I missed increasing my shadow samples for raytracing. Whoops.

The Villa. We had everything, including the depth of field, set up for us; all we had to do was light and texture the bottle, glass, tablecloth, cutting board, cheese, knife, and bread. I like my bread, dude. I'm proud of that thing. Just never look at it from the back because the UVing is a mess back there.

I had a lot of fun texturing this one. It was getting much, much easier for me, and I was actually told not just that I could take shortcuts, but how. That way, I wouldn't need to waste time and UV space texturing the bottom of the tablecloth when no one would ever see it... or the back of the bread.

In 3D, objects are there, whole, even if you can't see them. You can't just NOT make it like in 2D art. You can half-ass it if no one's gonna be looking too closely, but it's still there, it still casts a shadow, it still reflects off of other objects, and it still needs a texture. At this point, though, I was getting a better grip of how to divvy up my UVing. The bread, though, is an exception... I just took a snapshot of the bread from this camera angle, so the map was technically flat, but it's sort of like I'm painting over that part of the image rather than actually painting the surface of the bread. And you know what - it looks fine from this angle, so that's all that matters!

There's also a cookie in the spotlight. A cookie is like a projection that you insert in front of a light and you can see the shadow against the objects you're lighting. Here, for instance, the projection is imitating a tree shadow.

I won't lie... I'm pretty proud of this. There's technically another project between the Villa and this one, but it's sort of useless, so it doesn't matter.

Here is the final project. We got a choice between 6 or 7 premodeled scenes. We had to find the camera angle, the depth, the composition. Then light and texture. Easy enough, except that whoever modeled THIS one was an idiot. But, I corrected what I could. I took inspiration from a rather clean, beautifully materialed final project of a former student. His was from a high angle, sort of removed, very clinical. I wanted to get into the Aliens-like image, like you're crawling across the floor, trying to escape the creature that got on your ship.

Funny story about those pillars on the wall - there are two of them smushed together for each pillar. The idiocy of the modeling actually saved my grade and I didn't even realize it until the day before submission when I was making my final corrections. I textured only the front pillars, the ones you could see, to save myself the trouble, and only added a material on the back ones. Well, adding a transparency map to indicate where you would see rust and where you wouldn't... actually made my pillars disappear in some places, leaving the back pillar to actually be visible through the rust. So it looks like one pillar... but it's the rust from the front pillar and the material of the back pillar. I don't know how much sense that made. No one's noticed so far, though. Cool. :D

The blood was actually two materials stacked on top of each other - not easy to do on one surface. I had to have a surface shader, with a layered texture. Each layer of the texture had a surface shader plugged into it, and a material plugged into that. The bottom layer had the floor texture and material, and the top had the blood.

Up close, the blood is very pixelated, and would be no matter what because the angle is so close. So I did a depth of field to hide that. It simultaneously gave it a coagulated look, and pushed the "horror" of the mood of the image.

The glow of the alarm lights was done in post-processing. I ran a separate render for the glow and adjusted its strength in Photoshop. If I'd rendered it with everything else, firstly, half the time it didn't even render, and secondly, if it did, it was obnoxiously bright.

I'm glad I did the super-textured idea, even though I had to retexture it all about three times before I got it right; the instructor apparently is biased towards heavily textured images rather than images that focus on well-made materials. Not sure why, but I OD'd on the texture, so I think I'm safe in terms of grade. XD It wouldn't have changed my project even if he weren't biased, but it was a lucky break.

So yeah. That's been my 3D stuff so far in the last two months. I can't believe it's only been like four since I got down here. I've definitely learned a lot, and am learning more still.

I miss New York a lot... I'm starting to realize my parents chose really well to move to New York when we moved to the US. It's a great place... except that it's also a bubble. I don't really mesh as well with people outside New York City. I don't get some of their views or what they accept as standard interaction. So I come off as a little... awkward.

Anywho. I should be getting my acrylic paints in the mail sometime soon, and I'm excited, because I grew to love acrylics last year. I treat them a little like watercolors, so when I paint with them, they're not layered super-thick or dense, but I love the opaqueness and the paste-like nature. They dry quickly, so I don't need to wait like with oils, but not as fast as watercolors, so I have time to change thigns. and I'm painting plumbing pipes... which is something I did last year, too. Hopefully, some of the things Mr. Casey said will stick with me. XD

Have teh moozik.