Some Updates (Text Animation, Textured zTrex, and Buki)

Let me sneak in a little update here and see if anyone notices. xP
First, my first text animation in After Effects:

As you can see, it's literally a "text" animation. =P It plays the second time with motion blur applied to the frantic zoomed-in shots of "text". I've been exposed to After Effects for the first time this year, but it is such an awesome software. It's amazing what you can do with it. There is another piece I really want to post here that I worked on in After Effects, but that is for another time. Next up, it's zTrex, finally textured...?

The zTrex you see here is actually an updated model of the one I posted over a year ago. As for the texture, apparently, some people are angry with me that he is purple. What? you've never seen a purple dinosaur before..? =P Err, not that zTrex is a dinosaur...

And, finally, introducing Buki! First, the 2D turnaround:


And the 3D turnaround:

Who's Buki, you ask? Well, he's the character of a short animation I'm co-directing with Howard Cheng. Among other things, I designed, modeled, and textured the character. I think it came out fairly okay, haha. I would say we are over 60% done with the animation. Meanwhile, you can follow its progress on the Prickly Pachyderm Productions blog, or the "Bukido" ("Buki" was already taken. xP) blog... whichever is more frequently updated. That's it for now. Thanks for sticking around! What I meant to be a little update turned out a bit longer than I expected. Eh, well, expect more frequent updates from now on. =P

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)

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.

Introducing... zTrex!

Well, it took a little bit longer than two days, but I finally am content enough to reveal my character, whom I have named "zTrex" due to him resembling a Tyrannosaurus Rex (pronouced "zee-trex"). Considering that he is my first 3D character, I don't think I did too bad a job. =D Here is zTrex rendered like how Vypac renders his models. =P

Several people remarked that they like how I rendered my headless model, so here is zTrex, now with his head, rendered in the same manner.

And lastly, here's zTrex with a little texture, though this is probably not representative of how the character will look when completed.

I may end up adding a few more features (wings, spikes), but this is my character as he stands now. It's past 2 a.m. Time to finish some things and go to sleep. xP

Hoverboard

After struggling about what NURBS object to make for my character, I decided to go with a hoverboard. It's a blue hoverboard with cool glowing parts. I might tweak it a bit more later on, but who knows.

As for my character, I'm fairly content with what I have so far. But there are still a few things I want to modify before uploading some renders of it. If all goes well, my character update will happen within the next two days. =)

Video and [vague] Character Update

I thought I would try uploading a playblasted video this time. This was a lighting test I did a while back. The lighting's a bit too bright and there's no sound, but I wanted to post something before September ends.

Additionally, my character now has a head and is looking pretty good overall, but I'm still tweaking it. I'm not ready to completely reveal the character yet, but this picture I rendered last week should give a vague idea of how the character looks now. I'll probably post some clear renders next week, but until then, enjoy. =P

First Character

I've started working on my very first character in Maya. So far, the character's headless as I've only completed the body, and I thought I would have some fun applying shiny materials on what's completed so far.

The bottom two were rendered before I added the toes:

And the character with completed toes:

Of course, the character, when completed, probably won't look so pieced together nor nearly as shiny as the renders above. Stay tuned to see the character after he's found his head. =)

Floating Glass Ball

Another update with 3D stuff. I should really get busy building and sharpening my skills in 3D modeling. This was a scene basically to test textures and lighting. Yeah, it's nothing fancy, but I wish I had a glass ball like that... That'd be cool. =)

Plane

I thought I should update at least once before I have even less free time. The following images are quick renders of an airplane/jet I designed and modeled using NURBS in Maya. Admittedly, it needs a lot of work, but this should be better than nothing. =)