http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/ eloosive's gallery of images en-us 120 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/640627

A fantasy collage constructed from various images I've had shot with an SLR camera. Inspiration came from previously seen S. Dali work. Post production work included color/gamma/level correction, and lots and lots of masking and adjustment layers.]]> Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:25:41 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/630248

Here is a motion test of my final robot character design; a walk cycle done on a rotational disc. After doing pose-to-pose key framing in clamped and stepped animation settings, I had converted to splines, and edited curves in the Graph Editor to increase smoothness in the character's movements.]]> Sun, 11 May 2008 04:11:48 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/630497

Here is the final robot character, shown with smooth textured materials, and the wire frame mesh for evaluation.]]> Mon, 12 May 2008 04:06:11 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/625252

The main body components; the chest-thorax, abdomen, and pelvis showing worn paint, rust, grease, general distressed state of the robot's alloy surfaces. All textures had elements drawn in Illustrator, or painted in Photoshop. These assets were combined in Hypershade with a car paint shader, layered shader, as a .psd network (color, transparency, bump) and applied to UVs.]]> Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:44:51 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/628556

Here is my robot character's bones, or rig. Nothing fancy, the design of the rig follows the movement requirements of the character. The hands are fully rigged with individual finger movements, as are the articulated feet; the arch, toe, and heel have inputs. I'd been wary of rigging initially, but I've found it as fun to do as texturing. The handles placed on the rig correlate of course to the body components that are exclusively meant to have rotation and translation values. The rest of the joints have locked and hidden values. Forward-kinematics was used for the arms, Inverse kinematics for the legs.]]> Tue, 06 May 2008 05:47:28 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/625257

Shown is a medium shot of the robot. This is the final design for the robot character project (see development drawings in my gallery). The robot was textured using layered shaders which combine .psd networks and a custom car-paint shading network. The majority of all body parts on the robot have UVs that have been re-projected using unfold, automatic, and other operations to achieve close to distortion free, authalic mapping for texturing. Cutting, sewing, UV point translation was necessary for all maps.
My objective for this project was to go beyond the common ubiquitous simple designs of robots the large animation studios like Disney usually go with, typically employing primitive shapes for appendages and bodies without elaboration. Similarly like what you'd find in Futurama- Bender who is mostly made up of cylinders - full marks for consistency, and simplicity, but a little flourish of detail, splashed in on some bits, is nice.
Although there is certainly nothing wrong with this "simple is best" / "Less is more" approach, I personally do not find the resulting designs as interesting, regardless of how advantageous and optimized they ultimately end up being for animation and rendering, I don't believe that 'KISS' is always the best policy to employ along with creative pursuits.
In sharp contrast, I appreciate the designs of the recent Transformers movie, this would be the far 180 degree extreme opposite whereas complexity of form is concerned.
I wanted a more realized, detailed model form, so I chose to be more emulative of the robots found in Anime (Kikaida, Robotech, et al,) the ILM-Starwars franchise, and other Sci-Fi genres, even toys like the '70's Mego Micronauts (Acroyear designs), where designs tend to appear more complicated, or effective visually in suggesting function narratively via the forms. I wanted it to be somewhat cartoonish only in the face, the primary area dedicated to emotion.]]> Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:53:15 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/625255

Large closeup of robot]]> Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:49:26 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/625242

Close up of detail of the robot's head. ]]> Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:27:59 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/625244

Close up of robot head, alternate view. ]]> Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:29:36 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/625334

Back, neck of the robot.]]> Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:30:44 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/625241

Calve and foot detail of robot. The ankle area is actually quite simplified. It's part of the shin and calve, as you'd see in the video of the character in rotation. I textured the area and had drawn in or painted what would seem to be mechanical elements such as struts, actuators, or beams that would presumably be associated with locating and supporting joined mechanical parts. It was more economical not to model these parts individually, and just put an illusion here and imply the mechanics in a painted UV texture. From far away, it appears just about right. Of course, close up, there's something odd, but I'd planned to capture the robot in action from farther away wide shots, or in medium to close up from the waist up. ]]> Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:26:26 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/625256

Top view showing details for above. Shoulder details would be visible (deltoids) especially when the arms are down, for example, in a walking position.]]> Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:51:58 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/606368

A Photoshop painted version of the final design.]]> Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:01:15 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/604582

This is the final for the assignment. It's more of a combination of two of the ideas.]]> Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:47:40 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/603273

Another version. This robot is probably more C3PO like.]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:45:08 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/603274

Here's another version. This design seems more humanoid of all three.]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:46:07 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/603272

Here is a series of three sketches for a design of a robot to model, rig, and animate. These sketches were drawn with pencil, scanned into Photoshop, cleaned up, printed out, and finished off with water color, pen and marker. I realize I can also do this manual illustrating in Photoshop - digitally, but then, that's my illustration background; doing some things by actual hand. From all three concepts, I will settle on one and begin model sheets prep for Maya.]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:44:06 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/640618

An After Effects class project. The assignment was to familiarize with the basic toolset functions and work flow properties in After Effects. All assets used were either built in Illustrator, or reference materials gleaned from the web and heavily modified in Photoshop. I chose Ice Cube because he's one of my favorite hip hop artists. I wanted the aesthetic to be somewhat a "ghetto-fab" bubblegum stylized combination. Not sure is I've succeeded. It was fun to work on though. I'd likely change this video to speed up and be better synced in the future.]]> Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:59:47 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/632014

The idea around this project was to use filmed footage and produce a 10 second rotoscope style animation using the footage as a base to paint over. Each of the frame stills were painted in Photoshop. It was a painstakingly long and tedious process, it's the nature of the production; every frame is mostly repainted. It could have been easier in Rotoshop, but the nature of the production would not have been changed, just streamlined. Stylistic influences were Linklater's Waking Life, Scanner Darkly, but the project was open to interpretation as to the look.]]> Fri, 16 May 2008 02:45:50 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/632006

The idea of this project was to take an existing Southpark style 'rig' in Maya and customize it by implementing our own audio dialog, (topic: food) and character/visual design. For my piece, I put in six mouth phonemes mapped to planes, and synced it to the audio. The artwork is hand drawn, color pencil, pen, watercolor, and marker, scanned into Photoshop. The project also focused particularly on the use of the connection editor in production, along with utility nodes, modifying existing or creating new input and output relationships to enable the toggling of visibility for each of the different mouth pieces used in achieving the synced up, stepped animation. The big-picture concept to grasp was that many studios doing so called 'analog', stop motion animation are actually producing in robust software packages; Maya, as in my example, being one of them. On a grander scale you have animated feature length films like Flushed Away by Aardman Studios; a perfect example. It's not clay, it's 3D, proving that you can carry over the aesthetic and art direction of the medium into the digital realm.]]> Fri, 16 May 2008 02:14:54 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/632522

The objective of this project was to design a room scene using a preset model template consisting of five nurbs planes and several nurbs columns in Maya. The exercise is relevant in that a similar approach could be used in adding this as a matte background with additional elements for a scene in a film, or taking the result for use as an environment in a video game.
The model itself in Maya is simple; but the nurbs surfaces were mapped out for UVs using the Paint Tool in Maya to locate texture details unique to each plane. All textures were painted in high detail in Photoshop. For each plane, a color map, bump, and transparency map were separately assigned. The column geometry was used as the light beams as opposed to being architectural, load-bearing elements. I assigned a surface shader to the geometry with a ramp connected to the transparency. The art was painted from the camera's vantage point so it was a bit of a challenge to paint texture details while estimating perspective.
I chose a Mayan theme because I appreciate the magnificent artwork this ancient mesoamerican culture produced. I had also once visited a Mayan seaport in Mexico, Tulum, and was very impressed with the scale of the architecture, and detail of every piece. Although the Maya belief system was polytheistic and had a bit of a flair for the macabre, it was also quite sophisticated when it came to astrology. This unusual melding of beliefs was reflected in their artwork or language and had resulted in incredible feats of sculpture and rendition.
Both facing walls show stone reliefs or carvings from possibly different periods, but I chose to use these particular pieces because I thought they were some of the most interesting examples I came across doing reference research. I'm not trying to be factually correct but artistic license was used on this piece.]]> Sat, 17 May 2008 04:55:14 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/632525

]]> Sat, 17 May 2008 04:57:56 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/633062

Larger view.]]> Mon, 19 May 2008 03:40:14 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/609603

Digital Painting assignment. The objective of this assignment was to produce a concept painting, of any sort of scene, using Photoshop. Additionally, create an alternate version of the scene showing a different time of day, season, or condition. This painting is of a city during dusk or early evening. I thought that both paintings of the same scene could have distinct character by way of color. This dusk version of a bay-side city shows mostly warm to hot colors. The noon version shows mostly cool colors. Textured brushes, with their various settings were used along with the Wacom to paint the natural objects, whereas the lasso, brush, eraser, and pen tools were used to draw and paint the man-made objects. ]]> Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:29:38 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/609605

Here's the alternative time for the Digital Painting assignment showing a noon-time scene. Inspiration for painting a city metropolis near water came from my old home town and city where I was born, San Francsico, CA. "The City by the Bay." The time of day depicted here is noon-time, there's some overcast skies, but a high sun breaks through in some areas. It looks like a storm might be moving in from the left.]]> Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:32:34 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/593545

This is the first project for Digital Painting class. For this assignment, it required taking a photograph and recreating it as a digital image in Photoshop. The theme was assigned; fruit or fish, or both. Frankly, I'm not much interested anymore in this sort of still-life style imagery, much less fruit. At least the fish could be somewhat the beginnings of a monster-creature concept. If I had my druthers, I would have painted a futuristic city, robot, or vehicle of some sort. Overall, it was enjoyable to reacquaint to Photoshop in a creative way, as opposed to simple gamma/color correcting for print production. This painting was fun to work on once enough color and shading went down. I utilized some of the textured brush sets in the program, along with gradients, analogous and complimentary color selection. The painting has been altered very little from the original photograph, although I attempted to add painterly artifacts and creatively licensed touches to make it look more like an airbrush and gauche paints had been used.]]> Sat, 09 Feb 2008 01:31:32 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/587984

The objective of this class assignment was to model and texture a 'still life'. The finished composition was to include a few mandatory elements; such as an object of glass, a flower, and a fruit (an exotic fruit if possible; I chose a dragon fruit). The fruit, flower, and table have textured UVs, while the glass has a shader we learned and implemented in class. The entire scene was rendered with MentalRay with a three-point lighting setup. I initially had difficulty adjusting the many settings that you can adjust in the Render Settings, but enough trial and error, advice from the instructor, resolved the issues.]]> Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:42:22 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588303

Another variation of street art styled logo. See black line-art model sheet image for full description.]]> Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:38:23 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588625

Here's my original 2D concept for the logo, influenced by street art, otherwise known as graffiti. One might say what they will about this form of art as far as negative implications, since some in mainstream society equate the practice with vandalism, but it is an art form. I settled on this design because there were dynamic aspects taking place where the individual characters start to interact; intersect. This was the only model sheet used when imported into Maya. The drawing itself was hand drawn, inked, and scanned in at 1024 px. Again, this was a class project. The focus was more on the modeling to get acquainted with the modeling tools in Maya, for example, Extrude, Split Polygon, and the usual translate tools. It was not necessary to texture it, but it does have a Lambert on it with four colored/tinted lights in the finished pieces shown in this gallery. Maya vector rendered version up soon.]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:37:38 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588302

Objective of assignment was to model a three dimensional version of a drawn logo which has elements of being three dimensional, examples of street art are accepted.]]> Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:34:10 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/600882

Of course, as an animation-3D CG student, it would be downright nonsense not to have the obligatory 'Head Self Portrait', or bust, in the 'ol portfolio. As far as the construction of the head is concerned, I was sure to pay particular attention to polygonal flow and count while matching up the sculpt to the front and side model sheets. The eyes, ears, and hair were modeled separately. This was an interesting (certainly fun) project because the head was modeled in, apparently, what today is, the "Old School" method. What with the advent of ZBrush, Modo, and Mudbox (now part of Autodesk), modeling organic forms in long established packages with polygonal geometry may seem less intuitive, but jumping back and forth between unsmoothed and smoothed versions is no big deal, economizing poly-count seems easy enough, visually. In building up the head, polygon by polygon is a sure-fire way to become intimately familiar with the intricate physiology of forms; topographical details that compose the entirety of the head. The more I learned through my instructor, and independent research I've conducted, this method is still valid and commonly used, although I should likely start getting some 3D sculpting application tutorials going sometime soon to round out the skillset. Maya Render Node Fast SSS Skin Shader was used, along with UV painted .PSD network attribute maps for the skin. Image was rendered in MentalRay with three-point lighting.]]> Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:06:49 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/600886

Here's another view of my bust.]]> Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:10:48 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/600884

Another view of my bust. Hair was done with a .PSD network plugged into the UV map with attributes like specularity, transparency, and color. These shots are actually part of the preliminary tests, as the hair later had an enhanced with a more natural specular sheen to it.]]> Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:09:37 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/602467

View of wire mesh.]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:05:21 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/602468

View of wire mesh.]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:07:23 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/600956

Here we have the UV snapshot from Maya texture editor, shown with the painting done in Photoshop composited in. This was perhaps the part where you're less technician, and more fine artist. It does take some level of technique to account for distortion, but you can get what you want out of the tools. The bump map was also generated in the same fashion; cautious painting.]]> Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:21:38 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/600874

Here is the ear component to the head. I know, it's just an ear to most people, especially the pros out there. But, to me this was a small but significant accomplishment, since it was just a ridiculously arduous task to sculpt out of quads in Maya. Overall, I actually enjoyed the challenge. It was like a puzzle. I managed to get tris to the back of the ear flap. Upon attaching it to the main head geometry, and smoothing, all tris converted into quads smoothly.]]> Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:44:20 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/600877

Here's another view of the ear. Ears aren't particularly beautiful organs of the body, however effective they may be at channeling sound waves into the head, but they are detailed structures I'd guess most modelers might want to hide with hair. Perhaps I could have put a hoop-earring or piercing in the lobe or flange to make it more edgy and interesting.]]> Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:48:52 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/591487

My fully modeled, and textured eye for "head self portrait" class project. I decided to model my eye in anticipation for this project; so, I took advantage of my 3D World Magazine's CD with the tutorial on it from Alex Alvarez (Gnomon). A very well narrated walk-through. This tutorial was primarily focused on how to precisely model an eye; for which Alvarez references from the actual physiological structure of the eyeball. For a tutorial on texturing, I followed Krishnamurti M. Costa's (aNTROPUS) tutorial on texturing, however, I modified the lesson where necessary to adapt the techniques to Alvarez' modeling. Costa's texturing tutorial was outlined well for building a convincing iris pattern, and easy to follow. After constructing the model, I assigned a .PSD texturing network to both the iris and eyeball or sclera. Photoshop filters and brushes where used in the creation of the textures. Eye was rendered with MentalRay. Thanks goes to A.Alvarez/Gnomon & K.M. Costa/aNTROPUS for putting out great tutorials.]]> Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:28:23 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/591490

]]> Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:32:15 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/591494

]]> Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:35:43 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588627

This was a "Shoe Project" for class. The objective was to model a shoe, any kind of shoe - of your choosing, using Maya modeling tools, and MentalRay. I felt most shoe configurations were rather boring. I felt that a so called "old-school," 70's disco era roller skate would be a more interesting opportunity for the assignment. The original shoe had the same colors for the upper, but I did change the wheel color to a red. They're shiny because the new rubbery urethane wheels were shiny fresh from the mold. The metal parts were textured with a custom shader my instructor helped me to create. The upper is a combination of Lambert and Blinn for the yellow vinyl elements. The roller skate was rendered in MentalRay with an HDRI image-based lighting setup and no spotlights. I eventually made a turntable animation (will be shown soon) of this roller skate to show off its pre-smoothed geometry with the smoothed, rendered geometry.]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:46:40 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588630

Another view or the roller skate.]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:55:17 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588634

]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:59:15 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/597934

]]> Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:06:30 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588632

Another view of the roller skate. This view is the underneath showing the truck (rear axle) with its bushings, and the baseplate that is bolted to the sole.]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:58:02 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588635

]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:00:52 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588646

Here is a screen capture of the "Caveman Gibberish" assignment for Digital Animation class. The objective of this assignment was to use the animation tools in Maya (i.e., Graph Editor, Outliner, Dope Sheet, et al) and sync the chosen audio track to the customized action of the character. Timing, key poses, and gesture were important considerations. The character itself is a fully rigged, simple design with its own custom interface. It's named "SimpleGuy" (v135) made by Jeremy Cantor. I set up the environment to be a cave, and made a similarly designed pet dinosaur for the context of the animation. The scenario is the pet dinosaur tracks muddy footprints into the cave and his caveman master is upset. The animation will be posted at a later date.]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:29:54 +0000 http://eloosive.cgsociety.org/gallery/588647

Another screen grab of the animation.]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:31:34 +0000