Sum Renders

My ram comes tomorrow! I read online AFTER I ordered the 8gb, that even though apple says my macbook is limited to 8gb of ram people have been getting it to work with 16gb. So thats something to think about I suppose. Anyway in the mean time here are some simple renders.

Another P.S. This is starting to become an awful habit. Anyway along with the painting I also plan to mess around with some posing when my ram gets in, as this pose is very sterile.

Nothing to see here

Well I won't be posting any re-paints of my model until A. I go up to campus to use one of the computers in the computer lab, or B. I get more ram. So I ordered more ram. The max on my laptop is only 8gb though. Hopefully that will put a dent in the mudbox usage issues. In the mean time I will probably try some renders in maya with just a basic material. I could export the texture map and paint it in photoshop I suppose... I would still like to have more ram tho. Im rambling.

OH P.S. if you are interested in adding some ram to your laptop, don't buy it from apple. The ram they sell costs almost 10x market value. I payed 50 bucks with tax for 8gb of compatible ram, the apple site charges 400 dollars. I can't bring myself to believe that their brand is that much better than Kingston.

Hindsight is gooder than normal sight.

So as it turns out my needing to go to sleep was probably the poisoned taco bell coursing it's way through my veins. I was up sick all night last night, though I managed to never throw up. Anyway started feeling better around 10 today and since I had taken the day went back to it. Here is my mostly finished xenomorph. Based off of the alien3 alien, so it doesn't have the back spines. 

These are just screenshots from mudbox, I plan on posting some renders and maybe a couple different paint jobs in the coming days.

Time for a shutdown.

You ever get to that point where your brain is so fatigued that you make stupid mistakes and bad choices that could possibly screw up what you're working on? Well thats me right now. Its only 12:30, and I hoped to get more done tonight, but I'm just getting more and more sloppy. Im going to have to get some sleep and skip work tomorrow and try and finish this baby. Heres my progress since the last post.

Finished the torso and pelvis.

From the underside... you perv.

The finished tail, with one of the vector displacement maps I made. I used this one along the top and bottom of the tail.

The finished tail with the other vector displacement map. This one I used to run along the side and turned on mirrored in the x-axis.

Arms. And started the hands but then decided to forgo all the work I had done on them because they looked terrible. I will have to start again fresh tomorrow.

Still have to do the legs, feet and head. Aaand paint and render this sucker.

Holy Crap! My ocd is making this difficult.

So this is going slowly. Here's what I have so far on my alien. The rib cage... Yeah its due on tuesday. And no I havent even done the spine yet. I think I am going to try and do a vector map stamp for that though. Have to find ways to make this go more quickly.

Xeno update

Finished the model, UVed it, Maya crashed, UVed it again... and brought it into mudbox

Xenomorph

Here is where I am so far on my alien toy model. Still blocking out the basic mesh to take into mudbox.

Dinosaur tutorial.

Well I ran through a Digitaltutors tutorial on mudbox. Its a pretty fascinating program. My favorite things seem to be the painting and stencil tools. It makes it so easy to slap on textures that increase the realism of a model.

Here I have just done some basic 2 minute sculpting in the face. He looks very suspicious.

And then its so easy to throw on a stencil and add a great texture which adds so much to the realism in such a short amount of time. I added another stencil on the neck lips and snout.

then few paint layers with a stamp and an alpha turned on gives a nice organic look to it. My color choices aren't that natural.

Then I used a vector displacement which is SO cool to put in some ear detail.

Another remarkable feature was the posing tools. This allows you to essentially make a very rudimentary rig and pose your sculpture.

So all in all I'm not sure if I like this better than zbrush or not. I need to do a couple more tutorials of each to learn their advanced features. So far the painting seems better in mudbox, but the sculpting seemed to feel better in zbrush.

In zbrush no one can hear you scream

Because the Alien movies are one of my favorite movie series, and in preparation for the upcoming prequel Prometheus I chose this as my toy to model.

The dog xenomorph from Alien3.

Horse!

Modeling a horse in Maya and Zbrush!

Aaand my final render, including some weird artifacting. I was having some problems with the displacement in zbrush, which I think stemmed from my UVing in Maya.

Finished

Here are my final renders for my abandoned school project. The things I have learned in Maya thus far: modeling using polygons and nurbs surfaces (haven't yet learned why one would use sub-div surfaces), UV mapping, texturing, creating materials and shader sets, lighting, including real world lighting, HDR image based lighting (not used in this project) and volumetric lighting, aaaand rendering in mental ray. I can't wait to learn more! Oh and btw the tree was modeled in speed tree and brought into maya and the ivy on the tree was made using the ivy generator discussed in my previous post.

Render 1

 Render 2 with volumetric lighting (this render is slightly lower quality because volumetric lighting raises the render time by about a factor of 20, so I had to lower some other settings)

Ivy generator

Just a heads up to everyone. If you are looking for a nice way to make your models look good this is a simple program that generates ivy. Definitely worth checking out. There is a tutorial video at the bottom that walks you through the usage.

Ivy Generator

Where have I been??

I know I know, I haven't posted in a long time. So here are some updates on what I have been up to.
UVed my scene and added a default tree from a program at school, who's name I can't recall. The tree looks alright, but I would still like to try something a little better and something I actually make myself, not just a default tree model.

Next I started toying around with some textures and bump maps. I used some photos from the oc textures photobucket to fill the doorways in the back.

Now I am just adding more textures and tweaking things, trying to make it all look right.

And here is where I am so far. I am also testing out the mia exposure node settings, trying to avoid that washed out look. As you can see the pic below has a bit more contrast. The tree is still out of the scene and the arrangement of all the debris is going to change of course. Oh I also added an image pane outside to give the appearance of another building out there. Still a lot to add and tweak between now and tuesday, but I suppose I am pleased with it so far.