Dilophosaurus Work in Progress

For my senior project, I have continued working on my dilophosaurus rig. I spent the past few weeks rigging my model and I plan on making an animated short film about dilophosauri fighting over a carcass.


Along with a joint skeleton, I have included reverse-footlocks on both feet, and set driven keys on the tail, tongue, and eyelids.

Updated Alien Sculpt

 


I have updated my alien solder Zbrush sculpt since my last post.

Since then, I have added textures and made small changes to the mesh.

My next few steps will be to retopologize the mesh, rig it for animation, and to model its weapons. And then it will be game-ready for GDC's "EMT-Merci"game.

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.

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.

New Projects and Internships

Wow! Quite a bit has happened since I last updated:

1) Unfortunately, my game "Conduit" was not chosen to be continued past its prototyping. Despite this, working on the prototype was an excellent experience that provided me with the opportunity to learn level design/editing in Maya and arranging level assets in the Unity game engine.

Instead...I will now be an 3D artist/level designer for the game "Detached", a third-person, action role playing game. "Detached" follows a zombie that awakens in a post-apocalyptic world in which mythical creatures run amok. As your body parts rot off, you must replace them with the appendages of your enemies!

2) Since mid-February, I have been hired as a part-time 3D Artist Intern for UMBC's Imaging Research Center. I am very excited about the work I am doing with them and I am looking forward towards the final product; an informative animation that I will elaborate on once the project is complete.

3) The World War II special effects project, that was a collaboration with a Cinematic Arts student, has been canceled due to the student had problems with acquiring the props and locations for their film and the time constraints that were placed on their project.

4) Due to conflicting commitments, I can no longer continue to be a game artist for KleptoClockers in the Game Developers Club.

 
Here is some of the work-in-progress from "Detached"

"Conduit" was picked!

Just an update from my last post: my game pitch for "Conduit" was picked for my game development class! There were approximately 30 pitches in total and out of those 30, 12 were picked for prototyping by professor Marc Olano.

Hopefully my prototype will go well and will be among those prototypes selected for the final round of development.

Keying/Greenscreen

I recently created my first keying/green screen composition using Adobe After Effects.

I created this by first, creating a background. I used Autodesk Maya and Autodesk Mudbox to create a 3D model of a fantasy landscape.

 I then shot footage of my actor in front of a green screen.

I then used the "Keylight (1.2)" plugin in After Effects to key out my actor into the footage.



Here is the final, and completely edited composition.

Messing with Sculptris

I recently acquired "Sculptris Alpha 6" from Pixologic and I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's not quite as powerful as Mudbox or Zbrush, but it is pretty intuitive and has some rather nice materials.  In my opinion, Sculptris would be a better match for Mudbox and Zbrush if it had an improved importing system for basemeshes (specifically for Maya) and a way to export UVs from the paint feature (I couldn't find a way to do so other than baking the basemesh and painted models), and lastly, a better lighting system for renders, as evidenced in the landmass sculpture.


 The following was created entirely in Sculptris unless otherwise stated.

The landmass sculpture was created as a basemesh in Maya and then sculpted and painted in Sculptris.

This is a concept illustration I made as a basic guideline for the landmass. It is nearly identical to the last land model I made which was completely created in Maya.