Art1 HW5: Sculpting the Starfish

Here is my submission for homework 5.

This time around, I sculpted on a starfish base model. I set up the division levels all the way to 6 and started sculpting on level 4. I worked my way up to 6 and here is the result!

Very fun exercise!

2D/3D HW5: Final Simple Organic Model

Here is my submission for HW5.

This assignment was about getting a finished model into the Unreal Engine in a week. Basically, all the things I learned and did during the first 4 weeks, I had to implement in a week. This was a good, challenging assignment because it forced me to relearn the things I had forgotten from a few weeks ago. Very good practice. Here are some images from the Maya lighting demo:

I played around with the specularity values in Unreal and made it into a parameter for people to change. I made him a bit shinier since he's supposed to be in the water. Here are some pictures of my fish in his new home!

Art 1 HW4: Introduction to Unreal Engine

Here is my submission for HW4 for Art 1.
I made four types of places for this assignment. To the far left is a graveyard, at the top is a dungeon, to the right is an urban city, and at the bottom is a lake area with trees. I could not take more than one picture because the engine kept crashing my computer. Here is a preview!

2D/3D HW4: Final Cannon Prop

Here is my submission for HW4: Final Prop.

I updated the colors of the cannon to better match the colors of the fish pirate character. They are picked from the brighter parts of the character because I want the cannon to stand out a little bit. In Maya, I took a couple of screenshots of the cannon with lighting features and rendered in Viewpoint 2.0.
I took one of the smooth preview, wireframe, wireframe on texture, and texture.

I put the cannon into UE4 and made a separate 64x64 UV map for the light, which was done in Maya. Here are some screenshots of the cannon in UE4.

Overall, this was a challenging assignment. I had to go back to fix my UVs because I realized one part of the cannon UV had double faces after putting the cannon into Mudbox (the Mudbox error told me), so I had to fix that. Then I spent a lot of time recoloring the cannon and forcing myself to be satisfied with the colors. Putting it into UE4 wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, so that wasn't too bad. I learned a whole lot with this whole cannon project, and I am very excited to start on the next one!

Art 1 HW3: Modeling a Starfish

Here is my submission for HW3.

This was a cool assignment. I've never modeled a non-human character before so this was a little different. The modeling process was a lot different than what I am used to seeing too (I kinda start off with the box or plane-extrusion method). I was introduced to a lot of new tools and shortcuts that I am sure to use later on.

Here is some of the starfish's wireframe.

Here he is on smooth shade all.

2D/3D HW3: Holy Normal Maps, Batman!

This is my submission for HW 3.
This time around, I needed to make normal maps for the low-res cannon. I took the .obj of the decimated Zbrush cannon model into Maya and made a normal map out of that. This took me 3 tries to even get it decently right. The first time was horrible. The second time, I did the normal map on the wrong mesh! (I used the second Maya model with the extra edge loops). The third time took me a while too but I came out with one semi-presentable.

Normal Map

Cannon with normal map on it.

Afterward, I needed to make an ambient occlusion map. This was not nearly as difficult as making the normal map.

Next is the position/ramp map. Not too bad. The gradient shows up really well on the model.

And lastly is the coloring the model in Mudbox. This part was fun. This is the final result.

There is a gradient on it I swear! It's a little different in Maya, whereas the gradient in Mudbox is more apparent.

Art 1 HW2: Redesigning of a Videogame Character

This is my submission for the redesigning of a character homework.
I worked with Josh Frantz and Claire Rice.

I was in charge of creating the silhouettes for the redesign. We all decided to redesign Waluigi.

We all decided to go on with the Victorian-era Waluigi design (the 7th one). Josh did character design and values for the redesign.

I picked the color palette.

And Claire made the background theme for our redesign.
We wanted it to stay true to Waluigi's character by giving him his signature color palette and a cartoony, Mario-like look.

Collaborated with Josh Frantz and Claire Rice.

2D/3D HW2: UVs and ZBrush

Here is my submission for HW2.

This is a picture of my UVs. I've laid out UVs before so this tutorial wasn't too hard to follow. It helped me with laying them out and making sure the squares were relatively the same size.

Next, I put down more edge loops around the model to make it hold its edges in Maya. Here are four pictures of the "hi-rez" mesh in Maya.

After that, I put the .obj in ZBrush and started sculpting on it. I had a lot of trouble trying to get the "Reconstruct Subdivision" tool to work on my model. Apparently, ZBrush doesn't like triangles, and I could not for the life of me get my model to the base mesh. So instead of having the lowest polygon mesh as my "Subdiv level 1", my "Subdiv level 1" was stuck as Maya's level 2 subdivision button, if that makes sense.

Anyway, I continued and came out with this BPR Render picture.

Here is the decimated version of the cannon. It's not too much different from the BPR Render pass, but the amount of polygons are. From the BPR pass, it went from 6 million polys to 750,001 polys.

I learned a lot through this lesson. I had a bit of trouble with getting the subdivision levels to work in ZBrush. I hope that doesn't interfere with the next part of the project. ZBrush has a steep learning curve, but I think that with practice, I'll get used to it.

Art 1 HW1: Intro to Photoshop

These are the pictures I worked on to demonstrate my ability to use some of these Photoshop tools.