Week 10 Train adventures on arm muscles

That time of the week again; it’s little blog island time! Hullo friend!

For some reason, I’m imagining you as a cloaked mysterious figure at its laptop, riding on a dragon, running on unlimited internet derived from a distant alien technology or something.
Yes. That’s what you’re really doing. (:

And here we go with my art learning journey…

Let’s go! Journal Time!

20th wed

• Train adventures! Hooray! I didn’t get to do any last week!

Starry music girl, pair of legs and a horizontally skewed profile of a bespectacled lady.

• Did 1.5 muscle studies of the arm, not finished my back view
  

  At least I finished the front view…my second attempt at the front view.

• • Went into the wonders (and navigational hazards) of ZBrush with Brendan‘s run through into more features of ZBrush. Didn’t get far with sculpting however because the session was too brief for my liking and the project has to get going too.

Here’s what the 2D version looks like though the colours didn’t work out in the end.

• Learned and managed to put my VIM illustrator logo & ad from last week’s post into maya and 3D modeled it. Beveled it miraculously. Animated the wind turbine too. No clue how to get it into holographic and composited form at this stage. But things worked out.

3D Modeled Billboard I made

• Exploration into veins

21st thur

• Train adventures continued

Bad seating position so not much drawing here! There was a couple talking via video camera phone in a language I couldn’t understand.

At the top features a lady and a decapitated man staring at a pair of dislocated legs. At the lower right features a tired commuter making the most of time by resting.

• Rendered out my turning billboard ad for Tonko to composite as a hologram
• Exposure corrected and re-added a shot for the alien invasion short film through After effects
• Continued arm muscles studies in the meantime

Arm musclessss…need to practice more

• Exploration into veins continued

22nd fri

• added a dog pun in the future mX newspaper as suggested by Victor

• a bit of train adventures continued

Didn’t manage to draw much people as there were no seats for me to be able to *not* draw the back of people’s heads all the time. Or it was too cramped to draw without being spotted.

• finished the head study started from yesterday and started a torso muscle study but haven’t finished it so shall post it when done next week

Sketched the back and front views of the arm muscles again once more. I was making studies based from Google images and I plan to do more. As these are all badly eyeballed drawings.

• Maya run through by Heath about shaders, IBL and finally put into practice about how to make HDR images from photos. (Nuke holographic effects & Maya smoke effects tutorials also happened but aren’t my areas of interest).
• spent a lot of the day struggling/playing with the shaders, render layers and IBL in Maya for the feature building

23rd sat

• continued working with shaders with somewhat long render times.

**Disclaimer: Note that my team members made the the live action footage and Tonko was the one who modeled the building based on the rough feature building concept (seen in a previous blog post or two) which in itself was based on Theo Pandolas’ greyboxed building model. Theo came up with design involving the two towers, orb, and bridge(s) between them and I developed it out more through my rough building concept art. For the building’s 3D model, the only credit I can take is in the material testing. Been testing out materials in Maya and trying to make it seamless with the environment.
Please disregard the mismatching camera angle here as another team member has got the camera angle set already so I’m not focusing on that. I do know that I need to get the camera angle off him.

Made it all concrete but it was too plain in some areas. Took 8 mins to render the key light layer.

Made it more glassy/metallic but then it was too tacky in some areas. (13 mins due to reflections)

24th sun

• gave more variation of shaders on the building as seen below, thanks to Victor‘s feedback (and then I got Jason‘s, Tonko‘s and Judy‘s feedback the next day who all generally gave me confirmation that it did need further detail and varation after all).

Added more geometry so I could make more material variations between concrete & frosted glass on the building. Not sure if I’m stuffing up the team’s workflow however (turns out I wasn’t as I wasn’t actually changing volumes). I’ve also changed the width of the smaller tower’s small windows since I the time I rendered this image so it’s not looking like a road pattern in the form of windows. (10 mins)

Latest Render (each layer took over 12 mins due to IBL & my laptop). It’s the same set up as the previous image but this is now at the right camera angle thanks to Tony Nguyen. There’s no live action background because I didn’t have it with me & the orb disappeared because I realised later that it wasn’t included; whoops. Look at that frosted glass and better looking concrete–I didn’t change much between the previous image and this one though. Perhaps it’s the angle that’s making the difference. Will have to render again later!

• veins continued
• managed to do some Loomis drawings while I waited for things to render; finally!

25th mon

• veins continued
• learned about another topic not creative related
• overview & introduction to mammal/horse/creature anatomy

26th tues

• review in anatomy as a whole; it is amazing!! Need to actually start drawing/studying now.

Reflection

The week was a mixture of uncertainty, technical building annoyances and progress.
But generally good! As I don’t look forward to doing the compositing/visual effects stage of the alien invasion film project, I’ve been trying to help out with things that doesn’t require Nuke and After Effects and focused on Graphic Design elements and 3D materials/shaders instead as you can see from recent posts.
Don’t think I can avoid doing it altogether this week (and I will post about what entails next week). It’s not my area of interest as mentioned before, but I will help out my team where I can.

The film will be made to a good standard when done hopefully while I hope to try to develop further my own drone designs…someday. I don’t know when, but I want to let it go for a while.

Thanks for looking kind reader!
And enjoy the Easter Break, if you have that sort of thing. (:
I’ll probably be busy learning something though.
Until next time,
Leonie.

(UUUinfinity aka TripleUinfinity)