Also, since I'm thinking about my blog right now - I just wanted to post this quick image of Meret, seeing as the last image I posted of him was before a bunch of changes.



Textures are not final, and this pose isn't even very strong.. but I wanted to get something up here that wasn't the old model.

Since I can't really post any thesis stuff, here's some new figure. December crit on Friday - who's excited??

The first 2 are 1 min, the last is.. 2 hours?

Website

I'll probably still be changing some stuff, but it's done as far as this week is concerned.

Thesis Story Progression -

I was going through my work for portfolio, and I found all of these "Hero Shots" drawn throughout last semester. Interesting to see how my story changed.. It started with a little girl who was afraid of germs that had to clean a bathroom, then changed to cat trying to protect his 'temple' from a frog in Egypt, then out of Egypt to a patio somwhere and then a completely different story about a cat who wanted to play with crickets that the frog kept eating (animatic I passed with).. and now it's different again (went back to the patio situation)

Dear Traditional Media,

I missed you.

Love, Cat

Cat Learns a[nother] Lesson about Planning.

I figure blogs are all about sharing as you learn - not just posting really pretty finished pieces - so I'm going to share with you all the story of my Meret model. It's a long and twisted tale of poor planning and knocking your head against a wall repeatedly (figuratively, of course..)and it's not over just yet, but I can still share. Here it goes.

Meret was originally intended to be a graceful, neat (tidy) cat - the reason behind him being a cat, in fact, was to contrast the cool, graceful motion of a cat with the clumsy, bouncy movements of the frog. In my current animatic, however, I seem to have forgotten about all of that. On the first day of CA I also decided to make him into a quadruped.. without any planning whatsoever, and I got this awful looking model:



So... it was bad. Then I played with it for awhile, but I still couldn't seem to make it look like any sort of concept I had of Meret:



...and made a lot of different versions of it because I didn't like it:



Then, it suddenly occured to me that there was absolutely no way to make a bipedal cat look graceful... So I decided to change it. I made another, pretty rushed turn around to fix him:


And I'm including this because I think it's funny:



I got the body to a reasonably good point:



But I'm still not happy with the face - SO- Tony showed me this really cool paint-over method. You take a screen grab of your model and just paint on top of it in grays in Photoshop - cleaning up your shapes and whatnot until you like it. Then you pull it into Maya as an imageplane and get to work making your model look like it.



So, the point of this story is to a) keep story in mind. What does your character need to look like in order to best support the story? Without a graceful design, I had destroyed all reason for Meret to even be a cat in the first place. b) Plan well. I could have gotten to the point I'm at a lot faster if I had simply sat down for awhile and drawn out some more variants before going into Maya... which is a lesson I've learned many times before... but I may have to learn a few more times, it seems.

~ Cat

Thesis is scary.


ALSO! I just remembered that I'd intended to post this awhile ago. It's a card I made for my bro's birthday. If you don't get it, go here:

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Macquettes.

Letsee how much work I can churn out in the next day and a half.

Medal:

He's on to you.....



(only first pass lighting.. )

Facial!

Expressions for the captain- I still have more to do on them though.. I can't push most of them enough because of the teeth and mouth pocket.. Textures still need work too - the teeth are glowing.

Meret and Frog Facial Expressions -

These are from awhile ago, but I felt like posting them because I like them... These are my thesis characters - Meret and the Frog.

Good news! I figured out how to set this thing so that non-members can give me comments! So please, comment away!

Now I just need more content.

Navy Captain -

And this is what I'm working on at present. Our company is making a boat sim sort of video game and for fun, at the end depending on how well you do, this little captain guy pops up and either shakes his head at you or gives you a medal or something.. so I get to make this guy! I should have spent more time on the design.. but I didn't. Also, this is a project that had been canned immediately after I started it, and then just recently picked up again. I would say I spent about 18 hours on this model? Minus lunch and talking...

Angle Character Library

As most of you know, I've been working this summer at a place called Angle, inc which does visualizations for companies trying to win government contracts (i.e., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman). My first and largest assignment was to build a new character library for use in their simulations - so my job was to update an old model - or well, pretty much completely rebuild it, rig, weight and texture it. I had to make different ethnicities (black, white, asian) outfits (coveralls - or "poop suit", officer coveralls, officer khakis and a work uniform) and accessories (baseball cap, hat, hair options, float coat - the helmet had already been modeled)

I finished it awhile ago (except there were originally going to be different height options and that part sort of got forgotten/abandoned) and I threw this picture together tonight to stick up here to show the different outfit combinations - and that I rigged them as well - although you can see a bit of spottiness in the weighting...