Portfolio: Life Drawings

I just started a new blog to keep track of my life drawing progress. I started sitting in a couple of classes about six months ago to help meet the life drawing requirements for the master's degree I am looking into. I was very rusty at first but my recent drawing do show much improvement, each week they seem to get better and better. I will keep updating my progress.

Here is the link: papertopoly.blogspot.com

Portfolio: Model - Lamborghini Reventon

I finally completed the Lamborghini Reventon model I have been working on. I had the model completed about 6 months ago but never moved on to the textures. Over the past couple of weeks I spent a few of hours finalizing the materials. This is one of the more sophisticated car models I have produced and I had a lot of fun on the production. I guess now I may have to make a simple game so I can drive it. Hope you enjoy!

Portfolio: Character Models - Cartoons

Here are three characters that I have created. They all started as small sketches that evolved into full 3D characters.

The Ant Man was most recent, I modeled him in Maya and textured in Mudbox. I may supply him to a future Prototyping class for their main character, but until then he will go into the archive. I had a lot of fun sculpting his armor plates to separate up the different sections of his anatomy.

The Toadadial is a mix between a toad and a croc. The main objective of this model was to play around with Mudbox and learn the sculpting and texturing tools available in that software package. I also wanted to combine to very foreign worlds by giving the character a cartoony feel but using realistic textures.



Skel Eton I have actually had completed a while ago. I even have a full 3 minute animation involving this character. I was drawing cartoony skulls, and one of the results was the motivation for this character.

Portfolio: Mr. Apgar

I had this model in my archive for a while now; I think I actually modeled him (me) about 2+ years ago. I have even completed the rigging and UVs of the model as well, but for some reason I stalled out on the textures. Other projects, lack of time, distractions... whatever the excuse I finally got around to completing the final version of my Mr. Apgar model. I have used it several times in my animation lectures, but the next time I use the Mr. Apgar model in class it will have nice textures to go with the animation.

Portfolio: Custom Depth of Field in Photoshop

While I was working on a hallway scene using Mental Ray I ran into some issues. I was not happy with the result that the Mental Ray renderer had with its Depth of Field effect. It was fast but very grainy, more like sandy noise than a blurred effect. I was disappointed to find out that the old DOF effect from Max's scanline was not available in Mental Ray, it may take a long time but the effect was great and could produce a very high quality DOF effect.

I started to play around and I came up with an idea to reproduce the same effect. The old scanline effect would simply move the camera re-render and overlay the images to produce the DOF effect, so I proceeded to move the camera in 3d to attempt to reproduce the effect. I started by moving the camera 4 units to the right and took another render. I wanted to test the DOF effect before moving any further to see if it even had the right effect, what is discovered was not a DOF is was a stereoscopic effect. As soon as I overlayed the two renders I realized it would work for a DOF but instead I produced a 3D image. All I need to do was set the left image to red, and the right to cyan, overlay the two and "poof" the magic of stereoscopic imagery.

That was cool and sparked a love of stereoscopic 3d, but was not the effect that I wanted. While playing around with the stereo effect I realized the solution for the DOF effect was a simple . All I need was a Depth Map and Photoshop. I rendered out a frame and the depth map for that frame. The depth map is a gray scale representation of the z-depth of your scene, all you need to do is use the Color Select option in Photoshop to select out the range of gray that you want to be in focus. Invert your selection and then use the Lens Blur to reproduce the Depth of Field effect. The result is higher quality than in Mental Ray, and still takes only a fraction of the time from the scanline effect.

Original Render:


Depth Map Render:


Depth of Field in Photoshop: