Face Plate Design (Final Concept)

After a bit of thought, I decided to use the concept for the face plate of my robot that I drew a little while back, mainly because it's the only skull concept that I feel works for the bot. I also got to actually coloring it using Sketchbook's gradients. I may have to switch to Photoshop at some point though, as the gradient function won't work properly on some parts of the face plate. I might also redo the entire face in Photoshop depending on whether or not it looks sloppy. Here is what I have now.

Skulls are fun...

Today I worked more on trying to draw a skull (I'm kinda disappointed with the one I drew) as well as giving the robot's face plate a second try (which, being skull based, came out better than I thought). The face plate is only a rough sketch and I'm not entirely sure I'm gonna end up using it, but it's here anyway.

Backplate for Robot

Got to mirroring the chestplate and emptying it out, and added some detail to the back. I feel like something is missing, but I'm not quite sure what. I'll get to looking at reference images so I can figure that out.

Chestplate for Robot

Before thanksgiving break I started working on the body of the robot since I'm still having some trouble making the actual head. I decided to work on the body one piece at a time and ended up with this.

Unless I come up with something better, I think I'll be using this to make the chestplate (and the shoulders, apparently) of the robot I'll be making. I'll also likely just erase the details on the inside of the chestplate, leaving only the outline and things that will be mirrored on the back of the robot.

Multi Point Projects

I worked a bit more in Sketchbook. Instead of working on something I had already did, I worked some more in the different perspective settings. Here are the things I ended up making.

I decided to include the images with guidelines since the final results seemed a bit boring.

More Progress

Not too much to say here, basically colored the mask I drew two classes ago. I also drew a skull in SketchBook since I currently don't have a way to scan my work for my major project. The skull didn't come out the way I wanted it to either, so I colored it blue since I thought it kinda looked like an alien head (from AVP). Here are both of said works.

I need to post here more often...

I haven't posted at all last week because I was on Fall Break, but the week before last I didn't post much either. I also didn't post anything on Monday....

Anyway, this week I have worked on both a app idea project (which I will not be showing until I present it) and working with another program: Autodesk Sketchbook. To get used to the program, I did a bit of messing around with the tools. This is what I did.

Not exactly top tier work, but it helped me understand the tools in the program a bit

Halloween Octopus

Now that my drive is actually working, I can show off my octopus project! Woot!

The eyes and mouth I finished up using a red/orange gradient, and I made the tentacles using the pen tool and the object-expand function on the darker copies of the tentacle and exact copies of the original. Using the copies, I used the intersect function in pathfinder and made sure the result lined up well with the original tentacle to make shading. Once I finished the octopus, I created a black/red gradient for my background and created striping for it using rectangles and transforming them so that they became inverted (they became narrow in the middle but widened out toward the ends).

Panorama

Last class I was assigned a small project in Photoshop to make a panorama from a series of small photos (all of which had some sort of overlap). You were to select the images and use the Photoshop-photomerge function in adobe bridge, which would give you this result.

 Once you got to this phase, I merged the layers and cropped the resulting image so that you could not see the checkered background on the top or left parts of the images. After that, I used the magic wand tool to select the checkered background on the bottom portion of the image, then used the edit-fill function to fill in the empty space with water. This was the end result.

I also finished the octopus thing a while back, but I keep forgetting to upload it. Now I have to wait until my drive stops acting up so I can upload it the next time I get the chance.

1st Quarter Reflection

Throughout the quarter, I have worked on a few different Adobe and Maya projects, some to develop technical skill within each program, and others to experiment with what I am capable of doing (or putting up with). These projects include the first levitation project, a handful of experiments with PSD networks in Maya, two "emblems" which i made using skills from freshman year, a robot in Adobe Illustrator, and the Illustrator octopus I am currently working on.

The first levitation project was rather easy in my opinion, though I admit that I could have probably done better. The shirt of the guy in the image could have been brought down more so that it looks like the shirt is hanging rather than it looking like it's being stopped by an invisible wall. I'm not too sure how difficult the second levitation project will be (if we get back to it), but I don't think it will be too much harder.

The PSD network projects I think I learned the most from, learning how to manipulate the layers of the network to produce different effects. I still need to try out other functions of the PSD networks, and will likely be doing that in the near future.

The emblems were... interesting. Since I'm not particularly skilled with a drawing tablet, I had to draw the images on a sheet of paper, scan them, put them into another layer in Photoshop, and then scale them down until they could fit on the 128x128 pixel border. After that I had to use several layers to do the outlines, colors, shading, any effects I wanted, and any text I wanted. Shading was probably the hardest part, since the emblems were incredibly small and adding any sort of color had a much more harsh effect than on a larger image.

The robot I'm struggling with, as I can't get the merge tool to function properly. Every time I use it on the part of the bot I'm on, I somehow manage to lose my bot's legs. Rather annoying. Aside from that, the bot is rather easy. That said, there are some valuable skills that can be learned by doing this project.

The octopus is another particularly easy project, and I feel like it should be doable in one or two classes. I think there are one or two things I learned during this project, but overall it was more of a side project than an actual one for me.

Overall I feel like I learned a bit more this year than in previous years, and I have learned how to run through projects while keeping the "value" (for lack of a betetr word) of each project the same. That said, I may want to work a little faster, as I still have to do my big project, and I don't want it to end up being last minute.

Halloween Octopus of Sheer Awesome

So I put the Illustrator robot on hold, as I'm having some technical difficulties with it at the moment. However, I started the next Illustrator project, making an cartoon octopus. This would have already been done yesterday, but someone hit the switch on the power strip for my computer by accident. Oh well. I'm a bit behind now, but this is what I have

Basically I made the head by making a colored circle and stretching it out, and then shaded it by pasting on top (ctrl+f) the old circle, squishing it a bit, and then making the color lighter. The eyes I made using the polygon tool, and the mouth I made by making a circle, cutting it in half, using the polygon tool to make moer triangles, and then using the triangles to punch out the "teeth". I'm going to get to lighting up the eyes using the gradient tool (trying to make it look like candle light), and then get to work on the tentacles (where I was before the accident) and finish up my octopus.

Kinda looks like a peach...

I spent a little more time messing around with PSD networks in Maya, and now I have a new object

Instead of manually painting in the transparency, I instead made two black/white gradients, which made the transparency change as you moved around the sphere (ignore the blue lines, they're just rulers I used to snap things to the center without overlapping).

I also used an orange/red gradient for the color instead of making it a solid color, and then duplicated it four times and rotated it (similar to the transparency gradient) so that it didn't abruptly switch to another color.

Jumping Around

You may have noticed that I haven't updated this blog very frequently. This is mostly attributed to having to switch computers a few times now. Worst part is, the computer that I'm using right now doesn't yet have my drive (basically a "cloud" that stores my stuff) just yet, so I won't be able to update the blog today either. Sorry about that.

Adobe Illustrator and New Website

I apologize for not posting here Wednessday and Monday. Monday I literally couldn't get on, and Wednesday I simply forgot. That aside...

I have started a new project as of Wednesday, being the creation of a simple robot using Adobe Illustrator, and I also returned to a two year old project; making a robot in Maya. The Illustrator robot will be updated here, but for the robot in Maya, I will be updating it on a new website: http://phantompdb.blogspot.com/. I've got some editing on that website to do before I begin posting, but I should be done with that by next class. While you wait for that to be updated, I'll give you a look into the robot in Illustrator.

As stated earlier, the robot is fairly simple. That said, learning how Illustrator works while making this is a bit interesting,  as it functions differently from photoshop despite having similar digital art tools.

PSD Network Testing

I finally got to figuring out how to use the PSD network today, and I made some semi decent progress with it.

I basically colored in letters on the cube, made holes using transparency (basically placing white circles on the transparency layer, and gave it texture by messing with the noise on the bump map. To be honest, I don't like the result, but I'll likely go back and test other things in the PSD network as well.

Things I was working on last week

As previously mentioned, I had personal projects that I was working on last class while the rest of the class was working on a project I had already done. Below are those projects

These were made using a combination of skills I had learned freshman year, as well as a few skills that I had to learn along the way. The second was is still incomplete, but I won't be working on that one for a while.

Maya and PSD Network Issues

Sorry about the lack of posts last week. I was doing side projects since a lesson I had already done was being taught again. Unfortunately, I  did not bring a flash drive to show what I did exactly. I'll be sure to bring that next class. I also don't have anything to show for today, as I was trying to learn how to use Maya's PSD network function without any sort of guide. Huge failure. I'll be watching a video tutorial on that next time around. Sounds like a lot of posting for next class, doesn't it?

Fixed It!

If you look at my "Levitating Man" post, there is now an image to go with it. Woot!

Sorry about that delay. Something weird was going on.

Blogger is Being Wierd

So apparently I'm not allowed to upload images. Not sure what's up with that. I'll get the image for my last post as soon as possible (sadly "as soon as possible" isn't until next week).

Levitating Man

Like a total scrub, I didn't save my work to the drive on my last entry, so I had to start the levitating man project over again. However, this time around I have a few less areas that need work, so this could have been for the better. Here is what I have now.

Levitation Project Idea (We meet again)

As you can conclude from my posting here, I have returned from my summer vacation (as unfortunate as that is ;-;). However, with my return to school comes the start of an interesting project. The starting project this time around is 1)learning how to make someone levitate in Photoshop and 2) brainstorming and creating my own levitation image.

My idea right now is to have myself centered in the image (levitating) with several objects orbiting around me. Hopefully I can use the green room in the class to do this...

In any case, here is what I have so far for the levitating man in Photoshop.

Final

Unfortunately, I didn't finish R2D2 in time, but I still got pretty far.

I successfully made the body, and some slight adjustments to the legs, but I was unable to extrude some of the faces on the head, as well as make the vents that appear along the body. I also would have had to paint the faces so that it looked like R2D2 (and some of the extruded faces would be more visible).

R2D2 Body+Leg

Now that the leg is pretty much done, I can move on to making the basic shape of the body. Once I have accomplished that, I can split it in half and mirror it, making it so that I have both legs and the full body. While I started the work for the body of R2D2, I didn't really get further than making a cylinder and scaling it. Regardless, this is what I've got.

R2D2 Leg Progress... Again.

Alright so I know I said I would move on to the body of R2D2, but I realized that I would have to mirror the leg and half of the body if I didn't want to do a lot of work. That said, I'm almost ready to move along to the body, which should be relatively easy.

I meant to post this yesterday, but ran out of time. I'll try to make up for that by making another post today.

R2D2 Leg Finished.... Sort of

As of right now, I have completed the leg for R2D2, and I will be moving on to making the body. Once the basic body is finished, I will have to start adding more components to both the legs and the body.


Here is the finished (at the moment) leg.

I have pushed in some of the faces of the leg to make the pits on the leg as well as to make the jagged inner edge on the main leg piece. I apologize for taking this long to put up so little information, but with shortened days last week it was difficult to put in any major work.

Finished Lantern + Game Over Screen

Last class I had a substitute, and currently I'm having some issues with R2D2, so I decided that I would go back to work on the game that I am helping a friend with. As the title implies, I managed to finish the lantern, which had some difficulties rendering since my reference image somehow kept finding itself in the way despite being moved several times.

The image in the back is an HDR image, which is essentially an image sphere that will give the material i used some color to reflect, which reduces the effect of "black light" (basically the same effect as looking at a mirror in a dark room).

As for the game over screen, I downloaded some brush tools to use in Photoshop and used basic text on a black background. Not exactly the best game over screen in the world, but that can always be changed later if we decide to change it.

I feel like I should have used the splatter effects behind the words "Game Over" instead of in front of it, and I feel like there is also too much negative space in the back as well. I'll find out what to do with that later.

R2D2 Franken Leg

Today I managed to finish the shoulder joint for R2D2 (I called it the coupler in my last post. Could have sworn that was what the tutorial said... maybe I'm just crazy). In order to get the main leg section to stop hiding part of the shoulder joint, I had to create a duplicate shoulder joint and make it it longer so that I could use the Mesh>Booleans>Difference tool to remove the geometry hiding the shoulder joint. Now the joint looks like it's supposed to.

Devil Cube Finished + R2D2 Progress

So I finally finished the great cube challenge. Surprisingly enough it only took the first 10 minutes of class, today. This is how it turned out.

Also the weird shading on the sides was fixed by using Normals > Set Normal Angles. Essentially it fixes the normals of the vertices of the object.

Also I have made more progress on R2D2. Currently I am working on the coupler for the leg. This is what it looks like now.

The Great Cube Challenge: Part 2

Well I managed to fix the problem I was having the last time I talked about this. Unfortunately, I ran into another problem. When I try to merge vertices that are on top of each other, the extra vertices remain. This cube is evil.

All hail the dark lord, cube.

The Great Cube Challenge: Part 1

So as another side project I'm supposed to do, I have to do this thing called the great cube challenge, which I will leave a link to at the end of this post. Unfortunately, one of the tools (the append to polygon tool, to be specific) refuses to do what I need it to do. As much as I would hate to leave behind a mega disappointment as my screenshot of the project, I don't have much of a choice.

So yeah, there's that. Long story short, I'm already hating this thing.

The Great Cube Challenge: http://www.3dstudents.com/2014/01/mini-great-cube-challenge.html

I Did A Thing

Today my teacher had us screw around with particles, and I did this

Honestly not sure how I got here, and I need to learn how ambient light works, because I want the green to make a light glow off of the particles, not take over the entire particle.

R2D2

I have more progress on the R2D2 leg. Sadly I have hit a point where the tutorial no longer has pictures to show you what your result should look like. Gonna have to talk to the teacher about that one. That said, here is my progress.

February Reflection

At the beginning of the class I started a sketch for a lantern. That sketch would then be scanned, and than scan traced over in photoshop. Once the tracing process was finished, I placed the picture into Maya and began modeling the lantern based on the sketch. Now I have to texture the lantern and make the lantern give off light.


On that note, the R2D2 is coming along well. I'm going to need to edit the portion of the leg highlighted green in order to smooth out the top edge, though.

Side Project

So, while I was working on R2D2, my teacher decided to have me help him test a tutorial on how to make R2D2. In other words the lantern is on hold at the moment. I have made some progress on R2D2's leg already.