Up to Speed (pt. 2)

So in my very first post I talked about how I got into 3d animation and how I got into Ringling. Due to a lack of new and concrete artistic developments, I thought I'd take this time to share a few of the projects I completed in the time between submitting my art school applications and the next fall.

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of Futurama. However I rarely have a chance to make my love of photography public (go on, check out my facebook albums, indulge me, I spend a lot of time on that stuff). That and my love for technical experimentation lead me to this toy around with HDRI's (High Dynamic Range Imaging) and capturing an environment.

In this experiment I photographed a table in my room, then took a picture of a reflective sphere at 3 different exposures. This allowed me to create a panoramic HDRI. I then dusted off my bender model, redid his materials and threw him in a scene with the hdri panorama. Thus the lighting and reflections were practically identical. This was also the first time I really toyed with compositing on my own.

I can accept that I didn't make sophomore status, my tradition work needs a lot of work and even now I'm too embarrassed to share my more recent pieces. Still I must admit it's frustrating when I hear about some of the sophomore assignments and it dawns on me that they're doing things I'd done months, in some cases, years before and just for fun.

This piece was a promo I did for work one weekend. It was one of the only animations I've done for Stage 3 and (outside of the modeling the exterior of the tire) I'm lucky enough to say I handle all aspects of this piece. Taking a different approach to setting it up, I was also extremely happy with how fast it came together, this turned out to be a weekend job.



The next piece, a more obvious bouncing ball-type project, was an experiment I did with multi pass rendering while on the clock at Stage 3 (hence the stage 3 branding). The idea is to be more efficient by rendering out different layers such as the color , reflectivity, shadow and so on. The layers could then be comped in Combustion to make a lot of imediate tweaks(as you would in photoshop) as opposed to rendering, adjusting, re-rendering, re-adjusting, etc... Additionally the background is only rendered once and the motion blur can be added in post, instead of boosting render time.



Again a weekend project that came together surprisingly quick. I've got a few new comparable projects on my scope. Hopefully I can get them to come together as painless as those.

Finally, I'd aways been a goal of mine to create Hobbes in 3d. After toying around with fur for a potential tiger bid, I decided to modify it to fulfill that goal. Additionally, I took screen shots during the process, so I leave you with the modeling of Hobbes in 3ds max: