Holy Shi-!

Two posts in a matter of days! (ok.. so maybe it's been a week but still..!) Hm. As I type this, my computer is twitching like no tomorrow. Did I mention that my computer lays in its deathbed? Only a matter of time... I'm slowly scraping together fundage for a new rig. Not exactly a cutting edge rig but in theory it should run a bit faster than this 7 year old battleship! The computer I've dubbed "Persephone" is nearing the end of her service as a frontline box. She won't be decommissioned for a good while yet though. Once the new system's up, I'm using her as a video recorder and maybe hook her up with a nice TV set and settle down with the PS2 and Xbox!

Errr... yeah. Anyway... Enough of that. So I've dug up some stuff from what I was doing over the summer at De Anza College. There were 2 projects I was working on -One I'm still working on actually (the computer where all my work is on is sort of stuck in a place where there are electrical issues (read fire hazard) but I suppose I'll explain that part another time)

Ok. So the first thing I have up is an amphora. It's basically a Mediterainean storage pot which I sort of took some liberty with in terms of design. The design shows what's known as "black figure" (from what I recall -my brain sort of blew out after the summer probably a sleep deprivation thing) which has a nice blackish color but also leaves a sort of reddish hue in the glaze. Typically found with fancier amphorae. Not commonly found with this particular shape which is more utilitarian (the pointy bottom supposedly used to sort of stick into sandy beaches so they'll sort of stand upright) but I liked the shape of these and the black figure style so I combined them.

Anyways... the first one was done using uhhh... damn. There goes my brain again. Hmmm... Mental Ray with final gather... The short version is, it's a lighting approach where light is scattered throughout the scene and calculated (averaged out?) to give it a more realistic effect in terms of light behavior.





Yeah... so I liked the lighting on this one. Admittedly, I needed to work on the glaze a bit (among other things) but I didn't exactly have a ton of time to put in a specular map and all the other fancy stuff. I couldn't get in the shadowed tree branches either -likely something related to the scattering of light (which probably complicated things quite a bit) The glaze looks way too shiney and maybe a bit errr... sweaty... x__x+:

*ahem* So then I took the approach that was actually taught in the class which was pretty much using spot lights. This one could have used a little more work too but again, time...















...and then there's this thing. I don't have a current render of it unfortunately but here's a general bunch of "preproduction stuff" for the scene. It's sort of a "part 2" to the Human Expansion thing I'm taking periodic random stabs at. We have one scene concept that gives a general layout (I'm still *sort of* tweaking it a bit but it's fairly close to what I want), and some model sheet refs of sorts. The last one being what I used (am using) for modelling the 3D head.

I'm hoping to do some subsurface scattering with this project and play with some fog...























































Digging up more stuff, some of you might remember (or maybe not) the WH40k Sister of Battle pic I'm working on. I have it finished for the most part and I was planning on printing a few of em off for friends and stuff. Christmas for sure! :x
Anyway, some things changed as it moved towards completion -I did manage to recycle some elements that were sort of obscured or lost. Here, I've made a recruitment poster:

Well there was one other thing I wanted to post here but I think I'll wait for another time... sorry! ^__^::

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