Hands Up!

     So the world is now upside down, black is white, cats are dogs, and the internet is a place of intelligence and peace. I never thought I would say this, but I may be actually understanding 3DS Max. I thought all 3D programs were alike and that they all knew how to play nicely. You know, all showing me meshes the same kind of way. For those of you who are new to the lovely world of 3D modelling, Meshes are the structures of quadrilaterals, or four-sided shapes (also known as "quads") or often triangles (also known as "triangles") that make up every 3D character, environment, or effect you have ever seen on TV. Thats right, Mr. Jake Sully from Avatar was just a bunch of triangles, and so was that squiggly thing in his awesome ponytail. Every shape, no matter how curvy or soft-looking in 3D is made out of hard shapes in a "Mesh".
     So, I, in my infinite naivete, thought that if one program showed all of the edges between vertices (corners), then they all do! Well well well, that came back to bite me. See, Mesh data is like any other data, we can't see it unless a program renders it for us to see. This is true with everything from text files to music, we can't read binary, so we have the computer do it for us! When you have a mesh object in say, 3DS Max, the program is just rendering it for you, and you have to tell it the proper way to represent that mesh data, ex. turning tri data and connecting vertices to form shapes that you can actually see. This makes using this program about 1,000 times easier, and possibly even a bit... ... ... No I can't say better yet, it still has to prove itself to me for that one.
     In any case, better or worse, here is my most recent project, a hand!

     So some of this is better than the rest (mostly the palm being significantly better than the back of the hand) but I believe this to be a small problem. You may notice for one the freakishly deformed fingernails on the pinky and thumb, something I had quite a problem with but on which I will hopefully get some help in class.I also noticed some strange speckling across the texture. It is most noticeable in the last picture, and I don't believe that it is the mesh flipping since it should be double-sided and I did not do any transformations that would have caused that, but it may be the material since I used Mentalray's fancy SubSurface Scattering Skin material. Only problem with this material is that it makes the skin ridiculously shiny for some reason, I had to turn that down to preserve my sanity. As a whole, I think that it turned out pretty nicely for my first attempt at organic modeling.

     What would happen if one day I actually started liking 3DS Max? That would be awful...

I Was Having a Little Trouble...

     ...With 3DS Max (so rare, I know) until I reread the instructions and found step #3: "Sacrifice a small village's worth of the elderly to appease the 3DS Max gods so they will actually generate meshes properly." Aha! I had missed a step! And only a few hours later I had cleaned up and started back to modeling to see the improvement. Turns out it still sucked.
     The fruits of my labor did produce something I was happy with though, and here it is: My lovely Snowspeeder:

     I like the way it turned out, and I finally learned how to properly apply Ambient Occlusion to models. It is one of the dumbest ways I could conceive of doing it, but I figured it out nonetheless. Also, everyone, this is not made to be an exact 1:1 copy perfect realistic movie-identical indistinguishable from the movie magic copy, so please do not respond telling me that "Your control scheme doesn't leave much room for de-icing nozzles, and without repulsorlift engines, that hull modification would drive it right into the ground!" BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW.

     I'm only one person, you know?

          -VV

5 Things I Love About 3DS Max

     1. As a student, I get it for free.
     2. Ran out of things to say while writing number 1.

     Now if you love ridiculous folder hierarchies, an aneurysm-inducing UI, and nearly inaccessible meshes, you'll LOVE 3DS Max!

     (Ahem) In any case, I have been able to struggle through its many menus and finally come up with something beveled that was more or less how I wanted it to turn out. My original design (which came out very cool for a while) was a Smart Car. It was pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. It was made entirely out of cubes intersecting cubes, no manual mesh editing, nothing. Just simple, delicious bevels. Now, this was true until all of a sudden, just when it felt like it, 3DS Max would spitefully bite chunks out of my mesh and refuse to put them back. Now I thought I was clever, and I just clicked, "Force double-sided" which should have made it work no matter WHAT. And it did! I was so happy. I continued to work, when before long I noticed whole faces missing from my mesh yet again. Force double sided? Yes, it was on, 3DS Max was now removing faces altogether!
     And that is why my awesome smart-car looks so much like an easel. Simply because an easel is easier (easelier?) to make with the bevel tool.

     May god save my soul for putting that awful stucco texture on the wall. Do you see what happens when you give 40 drunk nine-year-olds a bucket of plaster?? Oh but I drew that painting on there, I think it looks pretty neat. It distracts from the rest of the room with the stuff in it...

     Damn nine-year-olds drank all the vodka...

Posting In My Modelling Class

     So I suppose this is what happens when you don't post at the appropriate time.

     More to come, at some point.
          -VV

Blowing Things Up With Class

     This project was very similar to the one before except with more advanced lighting. I had already apparently gone above and beyond with my previous render, so I decided to do a little extra. I thought to myself, what would a crazy, potentially murderous bomb maker want in his isolated hovel? Why, an antique lamp, of course! I made a little lamp of my own and added it in. I think it looks nice.

     It really adds that touch of personality to the piece, something that I feel was missing before. Now you can really connect with the murderous rage felt by the bomb maker.

     Now one has to wonder why there are bars on his windows? It seems like with dynamite right there he would either like to protect it from rain or just people reaching in and taking it. Why, crazy bomb guy!? Why must you torment us with your ill-formed logic!

          -VV

A Generally Explosive Personality

     Although sort of a strange scene, this is supposed to be more or less the hovel of a bomb-maker, or perhaps the hovel of a mere bomb-collector, a bomb-connoisseur of sorts, living in his bullet-ridden shack of stone. What a majestic man...

     In any case, here it is:

     So the scene itself was not made by me, but most of the textures are custom. Once you get a hang of the material hierarchy, it isn't so bad. And apart from just not being able to select anything for about 20 minutes, everything here went pretty smoothly. Although I grow to dislike this program more and more as I use it, there are some neat features that are easily accessible on here that are not on similar programs, like color temperature and presets. There are, of course, nice to have, but they are not really necessary. Its like having four cats in six buckets in stead of six cats in four buckets. Its still frustrating, but at least you have two free buckets.

     You could use all that room for... more cats or something.

          -VV

Iconic Moments

     Today the post shows two of my recent school works. The first below is a design for my 3D Modeling and Rendering I class to design a logo for something, or whatever my heart may desire. Following my ever-increasing ego-maniacal trend, I did a logo for the most important thing I could think of... me. So here it is for all to see, the VV Productions logo:

     So as you can see, it is teo very fancy cursive V's that when put together, make a W (for Cavin Weber, if that eluded you) for my someday provocatively famous production company.This was done in 3DS Max, my FAVORITE program (/sarcasm), with the bevel, rectangle, and text tools. I am still not too sure about the color, as color is not precisely my forte, but I think that it is in itesel pretty identifiable and would be easily noticeable when going, "WOW, that was the best thing I've ever played/watched/seen/experienced/felt/tasted! I wonder who produced it! Oh, why it was VitaVolpe Productions!"

     Next is a picture I did in my Digital Painting class, all using selections and gradients and the like, no brushwork. The idea was to have kind of a cell shading look/comic-booky feel. I like the way it turned out.

Updated 9/24/10

     Once again, I did not do the linework, that was provided for us, I only colored it, but I think I did a pretty good job on it anyway. It is not yet finished, there is a tiny bit of detail I need to add in, plus all of the hugely incomplete parts of it such as the guy's face and the water, hands, explosion beam etc... But in the meantime I will ignore that because otherwise I wouldn't have anything to post.

     And it also taught me that "KA-CHOOM" is probably the most awesome onomatopoeia ever.

          -VV

"Primitive Robots"...

     ...Is an interesting term. But apparently it makes sense in 3DS Max. The assignment was to make a robot (or robot-like creature) completely out of primitive objects. This was extremely easy for me, mostly because I don't know how to do anything but make primitive objects. If the project was called "Robots made from subsurfaced hi-poly fractal vector curves" I would be pretty screwed. Thank God for YouTube tutorials. Here it is:

     The idea was a sort of post-apocalyptic data-entry/management bot to keep track of all human knowledge. It turned out to be a triangle with a bunch of other triangles attached to it, but I was pretty close to my vision. 3DS Max is to me like the scratchy side of velcro is to your neck on that helmet you used to wear when you were little because your parents were SO insistent that you keep it on because the bike has a broken training wheel and it keeps falling off whenever you take a left turn even though you've asked your dad three times to fix it. ...What I'm trying to say is it rubs me a little the wrong way. I've used Blender for almost seven years now, and I expect to just be able to move around and make stuff and not start crying trying to change the viewing angle, but ya know whatever. I suppose its just one of those things that takes practice.

     Practice like that bike... I still can't turn left...

          -VV

Garrus Vakarian...

     ...is a total badass. Autodesk Mudbox helped me realize that. This was my first little adventure into this program, I had only ever sculpted (rather poorly) in Blender, which has a fairly good multi-resolution sculpter, but unfortunately has nothing on this.

     This program does quite well for itself with its few humble crafting tools. It feels very organic and natural to build up and control the mesh and eventually tweak it how you like. I made this piece based on Garrus with a few changes of my own, there are not a lot of good reference pictures of him out there, so I figured I would just make a lot of it up, which I did, and I was very pleased at the result. I started out with just a sphere and subdivided everything to how I wanted, ending up at 6 divisions (or about 1.5 million polygons) and geeking out at the fact that my computer was still handling it lag-free. I still may work on it from here, but that just remains to be seen. If I am feeling especially fancy one day, I may just paint it too. Until then, I'm afraid it will "look like chocolate" as the lovely lovely posters on DA have pointed out to me many times. Thanks for the art critique, DAers...
     If you are having any problems with the video or you just want to see some stills, check out the folder in my DeviantArt page at http://www.deviantart.com/#/d2y6h4m.


     It doesn't look anything like chocolate... swine...

          -VV

Vector Graphics...

     ...is the snooty bastard in your class that is better than you at everything and every time you try to work with him he mocks you silently with his stupid, stupid face. Then one day, the teacher changes the seating chart, and of course he is now RIGHT NEXT to you, and you have to pretend you're not annoyed by the fact that he even smells nice. He starts to make polite conversation and you casually reply, and before you know it you're actually chatting regularly, exchange facebooks, and three weeks later you're the best of friends.
     This is the common progression for most people trying to use the mystical "pen tool" that you always mistake for a brush of some kind and then wonder why everything you're drawing is all curvy. Today in Digital Painting we learned how to properly use this clandestine tool of wonder, and I actually came up with something I like. The background is not mine, but the character is.

http://www.deviantart.com/#/d2xvrwa

     This is not yet finished, but I am happy with it in the meantime. As always, I'm looking for some feedback, let me know me know what you think. Unless its bad. Then don't tell me.

          -VV

Two posts in one

     Today will be a bit schizophrenic. Two things will be going on at once in this post. First and foremost, I must sing my praises to the amazingness that is Filter Forge: Destroying texture artist's will to live for almost two years. This is a program that allows you to create procedurally-generated textures of up to 65000x65000 pixels in full HDR, complete with HDRI dome true lighting, full anti-aliasing control up to (and now perhaps past) 16x, and now an amazing deep-shadow ambient occlusion engine all built in in this wonderful stand-alone or Photoshop plug-in program. The best part of all, is it can generate these textures seamlessly. Now, if you have never had to draw a texture for a 3D object by hand, trying endlessly to line up everything on top and bottom of the page and then left and right in a Pac-Man style mind rage to the death, this will probably mean nothing to you. But to the poor, poor souls who have had to stand this injustice, this is the healthy dose of morphine they have been imagining for decades.
     If that weren't enough, this program will also generate normal, bump, specular, metallic, diffuse, and color maps independently for each texture you create, and for all of the ones you download off of their lovely online repository (now standing at over 7500). Just as an example, here is one I did when I was first starting off called "Water Tile"

http://filterforge.com/filters/7582.html

     Now if you go to the site, you will notice that this can be easily changed with just a few slider bars to almost any color, number, and any other thing you could think to change this to. To get the professional version of this program (the only one worth getting, don't even look at the lower ones) is a bit up there at $400, but they very often have crazy sales of %40 off and more. A must-have for any 3D artist and photo-editor alike. Take a look at their site and give me some feedback: http://filterforge.com/

SECONDLY: My first foray into true digital painting happened this week. It was work from our class book Creative Photoshop CS4 by Derek Lee. It was an interesting project because all it gave was the very basic pen sketch that we were meant to redo in photoshop and then fully color. We only had about four hours altogether to do this project altogether, so I am pleased with what I did in the short amount of time I had, but I would of course prefer to have been able to work on it longer. Here it is...

http://www.deviantart.com/#/d2xtfmr

     For any more information just head to the link above to my Deviantart. Until I get back, I expect you to keep drawing, peoples. I saw what you turned in last week and it was terrible. I expect better. Don't give me that look, you know what you did.

          -VV

To start things off...

     Here is a piece I did two or three years ago but on which I spend quite some time. I was pleased with the output, but I see now some things I could change with it such as some of the seams by the keyboard mouse are too defined and one of them tapers. Models and textures all made from scratch.

     If you are too impatient to wait to see everything I am planning on uploading (and a few more unfortunately rudimentary pieces of work) then take a look at my Deviantart account: http://thecleverfox.deviantart.com/

          -VV

Inizi.

     I have been surrounded by art my entire life. My mother's side has been full of artists for generations, and my father's seems to have the bug as well. Without art, my life likely would have devolved into a cold, empty pit of rigid math or science (the same all of the millionaire software and math professor geniuses get themselves into) and instead chose the abstract world of art. The same world where imperfect, beautiful minds have produced strokes of color and lines that can bring the soul to the edge of every emotion, but never see enough money to feed themselves. The same world that put the intricate textures on the walls of shrines and temples for thousands of years and even defined what we see as "beauty". And the same world that is probably the only thing still keeping me sane enough to do the other stuff like math and science.
     Where my true passion lies, though, is where the brash, new technology of today meets the ancient and passive art of old. Our comprehension of art has changed little since the great masters laid down the rules those hundreds of years ago, but in an attempt to give us something to do, we came up with something new. Graphic Design, 3D Modeling, Photography, Movies, and Video Games all have their own new rules and theorems, math and art all finally coming together. Sure, we had the ruler before and that was nice, but the art people only borrowed that because it was nice and straight and it was something we could throw when we were angry. Now, we have anti-aliasing and Phong shaders, which is slightly harder to throw but much more useful.
     So far, no end in sight, and I am here to explore it all. I will bring new knowledge to the table and ask you to do the same. I always love to hear about the new technologies emerging in the video game and hardware world, so don't hesitate to drop me a link.

          -VV