3D Human Head (and Glasses)

Hola, chicos. I think it's time for me to update. =P Some of you know that I've been working on modeling my brother's head, but I didn't have any decent renders to show until now. I think I've spent a little over 30 hours on this project, and for now, I'm calling it "done" because I have other projects to work on. =/ I'm fairly content at how my first human head turned out, so hope you enjoy it... First off, it's the ambient occlusion render of the smoothed head geometry:


Next, the unwrapped UV and the painted texture, along with the wireframes:


My brother also wears glasses. I decided to model it thinking it would only take me 2 hours at max to get all the details down... it took me over 8. -.-;; Please look at all the little pieces that I painfully modeled. =P


The final rendered images with my reference pictures for... reference. =)


And this last one's just for fun... I decided to place my bald brother at the Bryce Canyon. I think it looks kind of real...?


Thanks for visiting. I guess I might as well say my turkey holiday greeting now since I'm sure I won't be updating until December... So Happy Thanksgiving and Feliz Navidad! =P

3D Zippy

Surprise. xP


Yeah, I know some of you must be scrambling back to your seats after having visited my blog just because, expecting nothing, and upon finding a new post, fell off your chairs. Oh, you didn't? Heh, a new post nevertheless. As you can see, it's a 3D version of Zippy. The render above are the orthographic front and side views. The one below is ambient occlusion renders (?) of Zippy more or less in the neutral pose I tend to draw him in.


Some of you may be wondering if Zippy's also rigged. Eh, kind of. If you look carefully, some parts seem kind of weird... That's because I semi-rigged, weighted, and posed Zippy within 2 hours, so it's nothing I could animate with, but just thought to do it so Zippy doesn't look so stiff. =P The render below is how I've always colored my character.


Does he look weird with these colors? It appears people have been assuming Zippy's supposed to have no colors, a weird concept to me who has always imagined his character in green. Hm, I don't know... Maybe I could make better choices for color. xP Anyways, I guess my 3D character post wouldn't be complete without me making things look shiny, so here ya go. =)


Oh, noez, it's the meeting of the Zippys! =P Thanks for visiting. =)

P.S. Imaginary prize for anyone who could point out a certain change in the character design for Zippy from the last post to this one. =D Addtionally, check out Naturally 7 and their "Vocal Play" (Video linked for a limited time only. =P)

"Zippy"

This is it. This is the video you've been waiting for... or couldn't care less about. =P A special thanks goes out to Howard whom I tortured for his time/energy/resources to try to finish this in time for the finals. The character in the animation is "Zippy", who looked quite different when I first created him back in 6th grade. There is no special meaning underlying the story, which is also not much of a story at all. This was purely created for experimenting/fun/grade/maybe portfolio. Some of you might remember a little portion of this animation was the first thing I posted on this blog... Hope the end result doesn't disappoint you. Maybe I'll revisit this one day and fix all that I don't like about it (e.g. sound effects). Anyways, without further ado, I present to you... "Zippy". =)

Are you a fan of Zippy yet? Hmm... maybe subliminally making people familiar with him might increase Zippy's popularity... Presenting Zickey! Mwahahahaha. >=D


Okay, well, maybe not too subtle. Heh... I guess something about Zickey sounds icky. Cheer up, Zippy. I won't do that to you again.

Mickey Mouse

Whew, update. xP Sorry it took so long. I wanted to sort of clean this drawing up a bit before posting it online because my inking was horrible, so I casually started cleaning it up on Photoshop here and there... and ended up taking far too long. -.-;; Anyways, here's a Mickey Mouse comic strip that I made that plays a joke on... well, take a look and see. =P

I had always wondered about Mickey's ears since I was a child. I didn't realize until this semester that it was intentional. I also found out that most people never give Mickey's ears a second thought. Still have no idea what's wrong with Mickey's ears? Take a look at Mickey's ears when he's facing forward and when his face is turned sideways... it doesn't rotate like it should in a 3D world. I guess that's the magic of Disney. xP

And I know there are those of you who expected this update would be something else. Well, that's coming next week. I just wanted to get this out of the way first. =P

Animal Drawings

It seems everyone is putting up their animal drawings on their blog at some point, so I decided to put mine up as well. It took a while to adjust the composition and color to get a somewhat uniform feel throughout the image, but I've finally done it. =D These drawings were done on field trips to the Museum of Natural History, Centennial Farm, Equestrian Center, and Los Angeles Zoo (3 times!). Most of these were done in charcoal and graphite pencils, but a couple were done using a brush pen. Anyways, have fun tiring your eyes out scanning over my depiction of living creatures... Talk about quantity over quality, eh? =) Oh, and these are life drawings, so... a warning to minors: Beware, this contains nudity... animal nudity. No, I'm serious. =P

Little Red Riding Hood Illustration

A new post to keep a constant flow of updates going again. =P This is an illustration I did recently. It was a group project and each person was given a scene to illustrate. I was also in charge of designing the Wolf, which I think is pretty successful. I don't know if I was supposed to also design Red, but I took the liberty to do so. Well, enjoy. =)

Time to Start Updating Again

Well, it's certainly been a while since the last update. Blogger recorded that my last post was on October 8, 2007, and today is February 21, 2008, so it's been... a little over 4 months. Geeze... Some of you have asked (or screamed at) me to update, and since I need to update the blog links to the right, here I am. =P

A lot has happened over the last four months... ended a semester of school, went through vacation, started another semester of school, bought a new computer, bought new peripherals, played, slept, and ate. The new computer is great (more details below if you're interested), and it's heck of a lot easier to work (and play...) now. The downside is that I blew most of what I saved for the last two years or so, but the upside is that my computer seems to be faster than the systems at school (handling models and rendering scenes in Maya, to be specific). =D

So now onto updates on art related stuff. I've been meaning to retexture zTrex (textured it once but I didn't like it) and upload some renders for those who wanted to see, and I still haven't gotten around to it. =P I'm sure I will soon enough, but for now I'll present a render to advertise my weight lift test animation (huh?):

I will be doing a weight lift animation using the Moom rig. It will undoubtedly be really short, but I think I have an idea that'll make it fun to watch should I pull it off well. I had a certain look in mind but spent a few hours trying to figure out how to do it in Maya. Basically, I wanted the look of those Apple commercials in which characters interact in a completely blank world, save for the shadow. The issue for me was in figuring out how to get real time shadows to appear on a completely white background... and I solved it. What appears above may be deceptively simple, but it took some googling and tweaking to get the look above. Excluding the text, nothing was made/retouched in Photoshop. For anyone up to the challenge, I would like to see how you would approach this. There may be a simpler way to do it than the way I did it, but I would like to know if any of you know a better way to get this look in Maya. Until then, I'm content with it. =)

Well, that's it for now. I will try to be more frequent in my updates. Thanks to all of you sticking around. =)

*For those interested: I bought the computer customized at AVA Direct. It's great if you have the know-how and time to build your own system because you could save big bucks, but if you don't have either, AVA Direct's a great choice (just check out their reviews on ResellerRatings). I probably paid about $200-300 more than I would've had I built it myself, but for the 3 year warranty and prompt customer support they give you, it may be well worth it (they make sure there are no hardware conflicts, rigorously test your configuration for stability, and gave me a free game upon my request =P ). I spent less than $2000, but these are the specs for my new system:
- Intel Q6600 (SLACR G0 stepping) overclocked to 2.7Ghz.
- eVGA Superclocked GeForce 8800GT
- G.Skill 4GB (2x2) of RAM
- ASUS P5K-E motherboard
- Western Digital 150GB Raptor (booting drive)
- Western Digital 750GB Caviar SE 16 (storage/backup)
- Windows Vista Home Premium Edition x64
Computer is very fast and responsive. Because my OS is 64-bit, it makes use of all 4GB of RAM and because it's Vista, it makes use of all four cores to render. =)

**Non-active blog links have been removed.