I REMEMBERED I HAVE A BLOG!!!

So there's this steam-tree thing I've been working on...all Maya, lots of branches, and twigs, and other things. I'm going to try and play around with adding texture layers in AfterEffects instead of mapping the whole tree in Maya because it would take a ridiculously long time I think it will look kinda neat.
I should also remember to re-size my images in the future, but that's an entirely other step, and I have tea waiting...

Someone's been playing in Illustrator...

"Shi-mon! Let's drink THAT!"

Yeah, I've been keeping myself busy this week.


They really shouldn't make it so easy to change text around.



Or maybe I am just that dedicated to bad, nerdy puns.


And my personal favorite (and phrase that kinda started it all):


PS: Beer snobs, I am aware it's a sin to serve a lager in a pint glass. But on the other hand, I guess it's not really a lager? Also, not actually a liquid of any kind.

Worm Ghost

Why do I feel like I do the best when I'm not really trying?

Shiny Pt. 1

Someone's been playing with caustics!

There's still a few issues that need to be hammered out, so I'm making this a work-in-progress. Like those flecks that won't go away, despite increasing various quality settings. Everything else I know just needs tweaking, so it doesn't look quite so much like red Kool-Aid™. But that's for another day. Today I visit my family pt. 1: So My Brother's A Home-Owner.

Haunted Car

This project started off where I wanted to model a car. But, being the way that I am, I didn't want to make the ultra slick 'n shiny Camborariri or whatever. I see those all over 3D and CG forums, and I think they're as boring as slutty/'roided-up character models and occlusion-happy architects. Because this is a portfolio piece, I wanted it to be fun! Eventually, I stumble across this image by Ilya Varlamov from EnglishRussia which is an amazing site for photography and, I presume, Russian culture. I based this off one of those, and changed the car to a 1937 Buick Coupe, as I wasn't sure what the car in the original picture was, and needed at least 180 reference.

Some technical stuff: The grass is all Maya Paint Effects, my first real time using them. If I were to go back, I'd like to vary it up a bit more, now that I'm more comfortable with it. I tried using Mental Ray's dielectric material for the windows, but tweaking that to give it a dirty, scratchy look was becoming a problem. Since the refractions weren't adding to the scene, I ended up swapping that for just a light gray Maya phong. Take away the transparency a bit and bam! Instant dirty glass, at least from this distance.

I guess I don't want to give away all my secrets, or bore anyone with details, so I'll leave it at that for now.

AfterEffects

So I've been getting pretty used to AfterEffects pretty quickly. The transition from Maya is pretty natural, especially since I found the graph editor (sooooo beautiful...). For my practice assignment, I've been trying to combine Maya, some AE tricks I picked up, and my love of epicute, which might be my favorite of the Cheezeburger empire, but I just don't know if it can truly beat cats with poor grammar skills and eating habits. (These are the tough decisions I face.) WiP's are over here and of course there will be links to it all over my little corner of the internet. I may try and do a small explosion of sprinkles in Maya tomorrow, or move on to another, trickier project.

I got my business cards in! Be sure to pester me for one, but let me save some for free burrito drawings.

More fun times

I've finally caught a break from work (w00t!) so I figured I'd post again. I have a fun little render of my virus friend again, this time in a much more sterile environment. He was rendered with the final gather setting on, and no shadows selected for the lights, which gives the image a clean, modern look. I did have to render out the back separately; he was reflecting off the back edge of the dish in an ugly way. I did also blur out the shadow a bit in Photoshop.

In other news, I can't stop baking. I found a super-easy bread recipe last week, with delicious consequences. I'm going to need more yeast, some honey, and a bigger bread pan. I've also been watching a ton of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is pretty awesome to work to. It's distracting enough to keep me from getting too involved on one little detail, but the stories are simple enough to not require much attention. As a bonus, it makes me want to read and explore my imagination, flying twice as high as a butterfly! (I think you get the picture...)

So that's pretty much been my week: a tiny, fun little job; baking; Star Trek. I could get used to this.

Render Work

Just a quick little something that I threw together today. I've been wanting to play around with mental ray rendering a little while and I finally got the chance today! Hooray! Hooray for the little CFL bulb! Maybe I'll play around with it more a bit later. For now, he' s just gonna hang out. Altogether, modeled in Maya using polygons for the base and Nurbs for the tube-y part, and rendered using mental ray with Final Gather (no Global Illumination, though. Not enough colors to really make a difference). I had some issues with getting the background to properly bleed in the green color without disrupting the lights, hence the background matted out and re-made in Photoshop.





Not bad for a day's work, I think!

AfterEffects, Reels, and addictions

So I'm pretty excited. Turns out, I CAN afford some spiffy Adobe products! So, I'll be giving up Flash (for which there is no market for me, not knowing Action Scripting and all...) for After Effects, which means I can now officially do post-production work! AND I'll get to cut my reel.....again......yeay? I need to get some finances in order, so this week I'll be playing around with the trail version of CS4, bringing myself up to speed as fast as I can!

Also, I'm working on a separate reel showcasing just the work my associates and I worked on during last year's project. The current WiP can be found here. There's some really great stuff in there, despite the frame rate and image size (which are all roughly how they will appear). There's still a lot more monsters to throw in there, and I still can't believe I agreed to work on it. It was fun, though.

On another note, I'm thinking about easing up on my goal to be caffeine independent by Easter. Last week, between switching to 2 cups half-decaf from 4 cups regular, was just too much. Marketing and job hunting just take too much brain power.

My blog posts aren't very good yet...

First!!!

Yeay! So now I have a bloggy-blog. And a Twitter. And a portfolio account. And a Vimeo account. And by the end of the day, 3 separate freelance site accounts. And I will somehow keep up with all of this, while maintaining a steady brand, and an updated portfolio. I hope.
Maybe I should get a Linked-In account too...

If I don't start getting work soon, I'm switching to Hindu.