A day's work

I'm still working on finishing up my final retakes. After that, hopefully, I'll be able to do my internship. I've sent out several application letters with my updates portfolio and art reel I made about a week ago. So far I've only received two replies of which one invited me over this week. Exciting!

Today was a regular Gamelab day so I worked on props because that is what the 'game' needs. I can't say much more about it but I guess I can show off a few quick ones. Used a hipster post processing effect and a little depth of field. Also, I realize I forgot the hammer for the gun. Will add next week!

I also re-uploaded my art reel as both Vimeo and YouTube seemed to have issues with the .mp4 h.264 codec. The issue was explained on one of the threads on the Vimeo forum. Whereas most formats are simply accepted and altered according to the YouTube and Vimeo processing system, anything using the h.264 codec is cut in both brightness and darkness directions. So if your videos covers a 0 to 255 white value the processing system will cut 16 values off of both ends and stretch the newly created graph to the maximum values. In other words, it washed out the whites and the blacks when it's fully processed. So I rendered it to a 22gb .avi with a YUV-60i index and it turned out way better than I expected. Hardly any color difference, no white balance issues, sharpness is up to par with the original video and the frame rate -although cut in half- is still quite acceptable.

Kind regards,

Pim

Demo Reel 2013

Threw this together last night and spent the rest of the night uploading it to Vimeo. I also uploaded it to YouTube but the compression makes it look crappy and blogspot won't allow me to change the size of the embedded video when I directly input it from my YouTube account.

So here's the Vimeo upload.

Kind regards,
Pim

ps. Also spent the night updating my portfolio.

Red Skull - Game Ready Character

After finishing the topology for all the different meshes and baking all the textures out separately I of course ran into numerous issues like ultimately forgetting to actually bake the laces to the mesh and adding volume to the aesthetical be-hind of the character. The eyes were also not amazing so I brutally moved some vertices to get those the way I wanted them. Less almond shapes; more actual eye shape.

What I did eventually was model the laces out individually and bake them down to a single plane, which I subdivided over the length of the boot. This turned out to be a little bit tedious to get right but was totally worth the effort as (in my opinion) it actually looks better than baked down laces.

After I finished the character for my course I did a quick polypaint and baked down the vertex information using xNormal to the individual assets my character still consisted of. Below is an example of the polypaint. For the tattoo's I made several different alpha maps which I used as stencils in Zbrush. Quick drag and drop.

Screen snip from the Zbrush viewport.

Quick render from Marmoset with some hipster post-processing effect.

T-Pose Turntable

The turntable above is the one I posted to the Lunchcrunch facebook page. Didn't get any feedback, but that's okay. I got 6 likes. Worth it.

After fixing some of the issues related to the mesh and textures I went back into Maya to create a small IK rig to pose the character in a few characteristic stances. Skinning was a little harder than I wanted it to be as I was experiencing a lot of stretching and errors while posing. In the end I decided to simply pose the rig and paint out the stretching and twisting that was occuring. I like to think I managed.

For each pose I made one or two renders and a small turntable. Mostly because it was part of the assignment; partly because I thought it was fun to play around with some of the functionalities Marmoset Toolbag has to offer.

Red Skull at attention.

 At Attention Turntable

Red Skull looking at the Life cube he has to carry around all day.

Michael Bay co-produced these  images.

 Life Cube Turntable

For this image I couldn't lift his leg all the way up since the stretching would be too bad.

Second image of the marching pose.

Marching Turntable

That was it for the long blog post. I'm off working on another project and that one also needs a lot of work.

Kind regards,

Pim

ps. Apparently I'm doing this blogging thing for a year now. Sweet. Also, I tried this out in Verold.