Cloud Hopper

This started as a simple fun doodle and then somehow morphed into a full fledged painting. After I did the sketch I thought it would be a good piece to practice some basic lighting techniques. The hardest part of the piece was getting the cloud under his foot to feel like he had just placed his foot there. I tried looking at people running through muddy water but that resulted in the clouds feeling too heavy, so I reworked it and attempted to make it feel more airy and light. I still don't think it's entirely correct but hopefully it reads well enough. Best part was the drooooool.

Studio Lighting

I spent some of my down time last week rendering out the car in a new setting. I was curious about achieving a nice studio lighting affect to showcase the car in a simple well lit image, so I picked one of my teachers brains about it and he provided a very interesting solution that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. This image was made with no actual lights and a few planes of geometry. Two large planes are placed above the car with a white surface shader applied to them and then final gathering turned on in the render settings. That's it! It took about 2 minutes to render out something that looked pretty good and then about an hour of toying with positioning of the planes and the color of the background.

Another Hamster - WIP

This is a little crop of yet another hamster that I've been working on and still need to finish.

Car Composite

Next step in the class was to model a background for the car, texture it, and then animate our cars in the environment. Here is a 3 second clip from what I have so far. The background is all built in Maya. The background is done surprisingly almost entirely with flat planes, even the trees and mountains are flat pieces of geometry with an image made in photoshop containing an alpha channel. Now that the environment is put together and the animation is done for the rest of the scene we are studying how to composite them in after effects and add additional effects if we wish. I've added a slight vignette around the edges and a hint of motion blur to the background. Once I'm done rendering the rest of the clips I'm thinking of adding a neutral density filter to the sky. I have somewhere around 6 more clips to render out and piece together into a full video. 

Here is a better resolution image since after posting the video I realize the quality is rather poor.

Almost done!

Still have to finish up some details such as the head lights and adjusting some textures but it's getting there! Learned about HDR images and how to use them to quickly get realistic reflections on objects. Worked out pretty well on these renders I think. Next step is animating this car in an environment I made. Hopefully I'll be able to put that up within the next month.

Porsche progress

Finished some of the body work and did the rims and tires over the past couple days.

Porsche 911 gt2 WIP

An occlusion and wireframe render of the car I'm modeling at school right now. Having a blast doing it.