PCC2

My first project for the month was working on a Demon Horse as a group project with a few other students in class. I produced all the textures for the model and lit it for my own turn in. I will post an image of that later.

Towards the end of the month I picked up my original PCC project and started working on it. I just finished it today.

Ended up tweaking some things, thanks to a few critiques by some good friends. Plus I wanted to do some more work on it anyway, because turn in wasn't for a few days. So here's the tweaked version, not too much has changed, but it looks a tad better anyway :]

PCC1

Working on my first asset for my demo reel. I had a friend model an organ for me and I shade and lit it. I'm still working on the comp and trying to get it rendered, but here is an image.

I plan on having the whole scene rendered by the end of this month and put together to go on my demo reel. Here's hoping I get that goal accomplished!

Software Technology

Almost forgot about this class, which I have no clue how I could have! One of the first classes that I stayed up multiple times for over 24 hours straight.

The premise to this class is to throw the students into a new program (XSI - Soft Image) and have them use their previous knowledge of the main program we use Maya, to create a short film on any subject. In short it was like we created a small production studio.

I ended up being project leader and gathered a team of five classmates. We tossed around a bunch of ideas and decided to go with a flower who doesn't think it's pretty and ends up blossoming in the night more beautiful than any other flower in the garden. So we created story boards, drew up concept art and assigned roles to all the group members.

We did not have a rigger in our group, so I took up the task! I, of course, would have rather textured, but I also like rigging, so the challenge excited me. Rigging in XSI was a lot of fun. XSI has a lot of features and tools that differ from Maya and can make things easier, depending on your workflow. The colorized painting weights tool was a better advancement in my opinion. It was easier to tell where the joints were and what they were effecting. I also liked the fact that you could string joints along a curve and create a spine in that fashion.

Now in the end, I'm sure my animator wanted to strangle me, because I didn't know rigging quite as well as he would have liked, but for my first time in XSI and my first project as a rigger, I thought I did a pretty good job.

After rigging, I helped the texture artist, the environment modeler, and the animator get their tasks finished so we could start rendering out passes and bring them into Nuke for the final Composition. We had a few issues with some of the layers being slightly off and not inputed correctly, but at 7am the day before turn in after staying up the whole weekend, we decided it was good enough.

So I put the title sequence on the front and added the credits and called it a day.

All in all we got a really good grade and they were very impressed with our turn out. I was just glad our instructor, Rei, stayed up until 7am with us!

So without any more blabbering, here is the final product.