Troubleshooting

Good evening,

Up late working, resculpting the butterfly / dragonfly hybrid ornament, had some difficulties that made me have to come back and do it again, so this is a word to the wise, so no one makes the same noob mistake.

Within Zbrush I was working and imported my mesh, by a combination of accident / habit and sucky tutorial videos I pressed Make polymesh 3d, which so far as I have been able to deduce, destroys any pre-made UVS, so that meant that my work in headus was all for naught, and it turned my mesh into something horrible that yous aw in the previous wips, so here's a quick update of progress, the first is my uvs that I created, nothing fancy, second is the destroyed uvs and the planar tiling from when I tried to save it, and the third is just a screenie of what it looks like at the moment.

Regards

Francis

Southern Sun Massage Parlor

Well, first of all let me say that i'm not happy with it, I know that I can do much, much better than this. But unfortunately time was a limitation and they didn't actually give me anything I needed to do the project, nor did they know what they wanted. In the end it's nothing special, but I gave the client what they wanted and they said they loved it,

So yeah. Recap- I don't like it, I gave them what they asked for, end of story, deadline was about 2 and a half days.

I like this whole freelance thing, and I hope to continue doing so, though I do hope for clients in the future that tell me what they want, and a better time limit so I can actually produce something better.

Oh yes, this design is going to be on the 32nd floor of the Southern Sun Hotel in Durban

Rendering was done in Mental Ray, just cause I can.


Hope you like it

Regards

Francis


P.S. And before you max classmates of mine butcher me with sticks, I just did what they told me D:

Drumkit re revisited (The last time I promise)

Something was bugging me in the image, not sure what, this is what I decided on in the end, Probably the last time i'll use this project, actually submitting it to Celldweller at fixtonline hoping to score a spot in the new Wish upon a Blackstar album. Hope you like it, Won't touch this project again except for final year animation.

Regards

Francis

P.S On another note, pretty happy, got my first freelance job tomorrow, designing a Massage Parlor room, hoping to get some nice cash from it.

Wild 9

Prepping for showreel at end of year, going to have acharacter presenting the title, like, 'Tada!!!!'

Decided on a character from a game that is an all time favorite of mine, on the PS1, called Wild 9.

Probably the greatest game i've ever played and will ever play, all rights go to the company of course but it's a whole lot of fun to make this character. My way of relaxing while working I guess

Hope ya like it

Regards

Francis

Japanese Style Room

Yes, yes, I know i'm a week late, for all those 3 people that watch this blog. (Me, myself and I)

Rendering problems up the arse, but managed to get through and learn a lot.

Hope ye like it.

Well, Onwards and upwards, Time to start a harder project.

Regards

Francis

P.S. Going to experiment on depth of field with the sword shot so may update again sometime on monday.

Drum Project

Hey there.

Finished up a project, inspired by my favorite band Celldweller, here are some Wips and where I left the project, as always there is a lot more I could do to the project to improve but I'm growing tired of it and would like to move on.

Onwards and upwards I suppose.

Regards

Francis

And another thing

Here's a bathtub (earlier project for lighting from our lecturer)

Light and Furniture

 Having some internet trouble, hence the lack of updates. Here, have some furniture and light. 

First project

Ello there.

Wrapping up my second week of studying, we're finishing up our first render, learnt about different types of modelling and materials and the rest. It's a simple scene, indoors with vases and Chairs and all that fancy stuff, having great fun, and here is what it looks like so far

Also in good news, my tablet arrives tomorrow so I can get back to digital painting, horah!

Studies and...Buddies? pt.2

Lo again.

Wasn't quite finished with studying for the day so I have a whole bag of goodies to show to those who may be interested (Not you Steve.)

Started a study in how to do lighting and shifts in a day / night scene.

Things I learnt this lesson were thus

Part 1 (daytime):

•Use a Daylight system to illuminate scenes set in the daytime.

•Set up illumination based on the scene’s geographic location, orientation, and time of day.

•Use the Sky Portal object to gather skylight and apply it to the interior of buildings.

•Adjust scene exposure.

Part 2 (nighttime):

•Place photometric lights in a scene and adjust light color.

•Set shadow parameters so lights cast shadows properly.

•Change the exposure for a nighttime scene.

•Use a bitmap image as the scene background and adjust its output to compensate for night lighting conditions.

And there ya have it :D the following are just the images from 9:00am, 14:00, and 17:00 respectively.

The night works are renders of the Wip while I was adding in and working on details.

And for nighttime

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Music - Celldweller Own little world - we will never die remix

Normal Bump Mapping

Been busy busy like a bee today with studying, completed a study in Normal Bump Mapping.

Apparently what I did yesterday was known as Regular Bump Mapping. After some digging about I managed to find the explanation of why the two are difference in a bit of text I skipped over in my morning haze. (Too much work and not nearly enough caffeine) They explain it as follows:

"Normal bump mapping is a technique that lets you simulate high resolution surface detail on low resolution polygonal models.

Normal bump mapping is similar in some respects to regular bump mapping, but it conveys more complex surface detail. Normal bump maps store not only the depth information used in regular bump mapping, but also information on the direction normal of the surface, to produce more life-like results. "


So in general this task was to do the following:

Normal bump mapping involves two objects: a high resolution, polygonally detailed object as the source for the normal bump map information, and a low resolution target to receive the map and use it to appear more finely detailed than it really is.

And what I learnt in this task was the following:

•How to set up the map projection using the render to texture controls.

•Define diffuse, normal bump, and height maps, and bake the resulting texture onto a destination object.

•Preview the baked result in a viewport.


The first image is the information from the diffuse map only. The height and bump maps have been put in to the texture (They call it baked) of the plane but are not visible at this time.

The second image is the completed render, simple yet convincing.

And the final image is just a render of what they gave me to work with and as you can see how mapping works, taking something huge and in depth and simplifying it down and tricking the eye.

In other news, working on some sketches that i'll post soon enough



-Francis

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Music: Apocalyptica - Path