Summer 2013 Internship --- New Addition to Modeling Portfolio!

For my modeling portfolio, I finally added images of the houses I worked on during my internship.

During this past summer I worked at the IRC (Imaging Research Center) to model historic Baltimore houses for a virtual exhibit about the War of 1812. The exhibit is soon to be put on display by a Maryland historic society.

I modeled them in Maya and based their scale off of the exact measurements from maps and architectural schematics. This project was a lot of fun because of the history involved!  Learning about the significance of each area in Baltimore and the respective houses was fascinating.

In the future, I might decided to texture the buildings and add an environment.

November 1st -- 2D Animation

"November 1st" is a short animation that I created. It follows a boy walking through his neighborhood until something catches his eye.

The boy's cycles were animated on pencil and paper. The character was inked and colored in Photoshop and Illustrator.

The backgrounds were images that consisted of houses, trees, and a street that were modeled in Maya, and a far background matte that was painted in Photoshop.

The foreground elements (pumpkin bag and candy) were created in Illustrator and Photoshop.

 All of the background and foreground elements were then composited in After Effects.

Updated Soldier Sculpt

Since my last post, I have revised my sculpt to be more proportional and to have more accurate armor detailing.

Alien Soldier --- Project "EMT Merci"

I am currently involved with UMBC's Game Developer's Club. I joined a 3D mobile game project called "EMT Merci". EMT Merci is a space game in which the player is a medic who heals human marines during combat.

As a 3D character artist, I was tasked with designing concept art, modeling, and texturing a class of enemies. This enemy is a work in progress and I expect it to be completed in December.

I used Zbrush to sculpt the mesh from Zspheres.

Dilophosaurus Rig

I am currently working on a dinosaur rig. The dinosaur in question is the dilophosaurus.
I decided to attempt this project so that I could improve my modeling, rigging, and animation skills.

With Maya, I modeled the body, eyes, and teeth.

I used Photoshop to texture the eyes, Mudbox to paint the body, and CrazyBump to generate the bump map.


I plan on rigging the model and creating some animations: walk cycles, a short film, etc. I am considering including it in my senior project.

Diffuse map from Mudbox

Scales stencil layer from Mudbox

Bump map based off of stencils image

source: http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurpictures/ig/Dilophosaurus-Pictures/Dilophosaurus.-43o.htm

CG Clouds

A recent mini-project of mine was to create clouds in Maya.  I achieved it by creating a fluids container and toggling with the textures and shading attributes.

 

I also created a sky using Mental Ray's image-based-lighting. 

 

I then used the expression fluidShape1.textureOriginZ=time*.02 to animate the clouds.

I rendered the sequence as .JPGs and then composited them in After Effects.

Final Project--A Character Animation

My final project for my Advanced 3D class at UMBC was to animate the character rig that I've been working on for the semester.  Above is the final, fully rendered, result.

 Steps for creating it:

1) I extracted audio from the film Born In Flames (1983) for the soundclip.

Here is the portion I used.

2) I imported the audio and used my character's blendshapes to lip synch with the audio.

3) Once all of my lip synching has been completed, I modeled a simple microphone to use as a prop and for eye-tracking purposes.

4) I then animated the character's torso, head (head, neck, eyes), lower body, and arms.







 5) My next step was to create a scene and render it. I created the radio station using Photoshop and bumpmapped it using Crazybump.

6) I added lighting and arranged the wall textures for the final scene.

7) Lastly, I batch rendered the scene as .PNG files and then composited the images with the audio in After Effects.

Satellites at the IRC

So as I mentioned in this post, I acquired a 3D modeling internship at the UMBC Imaging Research Center (IRC). The project that I participated in was a joint effort between IRC and NASA (the Goddard Space Flight Center facility in particular). I made low-poly previsualizations based on the satellites from the NASA Global Precipitation Meausurement (GPM) mission.

I modeled them in Maya and in the next few months they will be textured and rendered by my supervisor, Ryan Zuber.

By the end of the summer they will be part of a short animation on display at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

For scale and detail references, I used publicly available art renderings, schematics, and photographs such as the ones below:

https://directory.eoportal.org/image/image_gallery?img_id=189545&t=1338557852321

http://www.spaceflight101.com/uploads/6/4/0/6/6406961/2481265.jpg?455

http://www.spacemankind.com/images/ms/20091019-dmsp-hr.jpg

Finished Game Assets

Here are some new screenshots from "Detached". During the second phase of development, I was tasked with a large redesigning of the level (compare to the old level from before) . I had to remodeled some of the gravestones and walls and I then textured them using photographed images and bump maps.

Some of my assets were:
-Rocks
-A tree
-graves
-Mausoleum
-walls

I was also tasked with building the level in unity by laying out the assets and assigning colliders to them.

The ground, lighting, and rendered grass were created by Stephanie Ruff.

3D Character Walk Cycle

Here is my attempt at a basic walk cycle with the character rig I created. I used the basic 24-frame cycle and I animated it in the "layered" fashion as opposed to "straight-ahead".

Blendshapes--Human Character Project

For my Advanced 3D Animation class I have been building a human character throughout the semester. One past project was to create the blendshapes for the character and to animate to lip synch the animations to an audio clip.

The clip I used was from the Harley Quinn character from an episode of Batman: The Animated Series.






I created the blendshapes by duplicating and extracting the head and then moving the vertices of each duplicated head in order to replicate common phonemes and facial expressions.

When animating the character, I tried to match her facial animations to the character from the audio. Harley Quinn is a villain that is known for her madness. I tried to keep that quality in my animations by creating some exaggerated smirks and odd grins.