2 out of 3 ain't bad

I have now come to a near completion of two of the three maquettes I have been working on. I fiddled with them during last semester to escape from regular work, but didn't really make any headway. During the break I would work on them during the few minutes I had to myself each evening while everyone else was in bed.  After I baked the figures I did some minor adjustments. I sanded down some patches and carved away a few things that I missed while sculpting. I also painted and sanded the base to help them look more elegant. Very lastly I sprayed the figures with a light gray auto paint primer to give them an all around even gray tone. I say I have completed them to near completion because I know there are littles things I may change up or do to them down the round.

Recent Work

Since the Spring 2014 semester is about a week away I thought I would post some of the things I did last semester before this new one begins. If I don't do it now, chances are it will be put off for the foreseeable future.

I took my first 3D modeling class last semester and flourished in it. However the first few weeks of the class I was hoping I would be able to escape the class with a B-. The key that unlocked understanding Maya was two-fold. First was looking at Maya like it was Adobe Illustrator but in a 3D space. The second was my teacher, Tom Austin, giving us free range in our designs. Once I had those two things I just took off in the class, and had a lot of fun.

This was the second object that I modeled. The foreshortening is due to it being in 3/4 view. I named it Ulfbert after a documentary I watched about viking swords.

With the shield I started to add some actual wear and tear to my objects. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, I just wanted it to look cool.

The next series of images is of a viking sea chest. I spent a lot of time developing the shaders for this object. I also did a lot of research of how they were made and used. Since they are used as the seats on a viking ship I added the wear of a lot of repetitive sitting. 

I couldn't resist adding some kind of a joke.

This set of images is part one of my final. We were tasked with making a house for a viking village. For this assignment I researched houses/huts vikings lived in. Luckily there are a few modern replicas of viking villages. The house I modeled this one from is one of the more well known houses in the Swedish open air museum Foteviken. 

I made "my" viking the ship builder of the town. I added some logs under the side of his house to help show who he is. I also couldn't resist the urge to put in a Dalarna horse as well.

I threw this table together in the 11th hour to help fill up the area and make it look more lived in.

I also added my sword, shield, and chest from my previous assignments which helped to personalize it.

Part two of my final was building a shed for the viking ship. As a class team building exercise our teacher had us build a viking ship in two weeks. I was tasked with creating the hull of the ship. 

I couldn't just build a shed without having some kind of tools to go with it.

This was pretty fun to come up with the design of the shed and put it all together.

In my animation class we did weekly animation tests. In my animations I was able to keep pushing my animations and get more believability out of them and some actual life put in to them.

Of the several warm up animations, I like the leaf drop the most. It is nice to have some personality within the object.

For this walk we had to come up with a character and all of their background. After we came up with their background, we started to draw some sketches of them in action. After all of that, the character background and sketches were collected and then redistributed to someone else. This is the character that I got.

For the final we needed to have a flour sack interact with an object and go through a change of emotion. After 100 ideas, the first idea was picked to go forward. Several changes later I ended up with a more refined story.