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