Mask Progress

Due to computer troubles, I couldn't  get a render out this week to supplement this text but I'll try my best to describe it. I've been slowly starting to practice sculpting human form and I felt a nice practice would be to make a mash, which would be abstract, but still real enough to give good practice with face structure. I have the high poly model mainly done and I plan to retopologize it to smooth it out. If time allows, I want to practice with using multiple materials on the same mesh. This would mean coloring the intricacies with a gold material while keeping the base an oxidized bronze. Hopefully, this can all make sense once I get an image up on the blog.

Space Tutorial

This week I've been working through a tutorial on how to create a Sci-Fi laser beam. Most of the tutorial was fairly elementary with the exception of a section on Selective Color, an adjustment layer I've never worked with prior to this tutorial. Organizationally, I generally followed the tutorial's, mainly because I liked it. I tried to incorporate and focus on negative space in this piece with heavy black corners and a narrow subject. Color became important as well even though I only used one color. This was intentional in that the "main beam", the hard line upon which the piece is composed, stands out the most with the strong white highlight and electric hue.

Tutorial: http://www.psdvault.com/abstracts/abstract-sci-fi-style-line-effect-creation-in-photoshop/

Triangulation Blender Tutorial

This tutorial focuses on working with triangulated meshes and mixed materials. I'll walk through how to create the scene above, but get creative and take your own approach as I'll only gloss over the materials.

1. Start by entering Top Orthographic view and spawning in a plane.

2. Enter edit mode and rotate the plane by 45 degrees. (press R, Z, 45)

3. Now we must form the shape we want. Select the faces you want to delete and press X. Select "Faces" in the menu. 

4. Select the entire mesh (press A) and press CONTROL-T to triangulate the mesh. Finally turn on proportional editing (press O), change the falloff to Random, and select the middle two triangles. Pull up on the Z axis to scatter the faces.

5. Exit Edit Mode and spawn in a new plane, repeat the process for the heart but don't move the faces as in step 4 as much.

Now we need to add in the lighting. For the top, we'll use a blue Point Light right above the heart and a plane set to Emission on the bottom.

1. Spawn in a Point Light and use the values I do in the image below. Play around with the size and strength to get the result you want.

2. Spawn in another plane and rotate it 90 degrees along the X. Scale it along the Y and Z to get a rectangular shape. Set the plane to Emission in the Materials Tab and use my values below.

Now we can apply the proper materials for the meshes. For the heart, we'll use a Mix Shader with Toon and Glossy and we'll use a Mix Shader for the ground plane with Holdout and Diffuse.

Heart Material

 Plane Material

Add in a Camera and set it to Top Orthographic, set the Camera from Perspective to Orthographic and set the Orthographic Scale to properly contain the entire heart, 25 should do just fine. In the render tab, bump up the sampling to 150 to 200 and then render it out. You can save your render with F3.

Enjoy!

Little Boat

As a standard portfolio piece this week, I decided to formally learn how to make a convincing ocean. Surprisingly, the ocean texture is noting more than a fully metallic material with a dark blue gloss. The wood grain texture is completely procedural and calculated through blender. The sun and the boat are both organized using the rule of thirds. I intentionally broke a "triangle" of elements in favor of more negative space below the sun and to the left of the boat. Instead, the sun is placed along a direct diagonal to the boat. I finished the piece with some blender compositing by adding light bloom and contrast.

Edge Lighting

This week, we were given a test of our Photoshop skills by taking a regularly lit portrait, and adding edge lighting to but the normally lit photo in a sunset context. I tried to keep the colors natural in this piece by sampling from the background around my friend's head. This color choice kept the lighting natural. I was debating on whether or not to keep the background in focus but the DOF the lens blur adds gives the subject, in this case the head, the proper attention while keeping the general context of the background. Lastly, the composure was originally arranged in a rule-of-thirds method but I instead opted for a center oriented subject.

Tutorial: Creating Topiary

http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/creating-topiary/

This week, I've been following an excellent tutorial by CGCookie on how to make topiary in Blender. I've only chose a mesh I waned to use so far with the branch network and leaf particle system yet to be implemented. The complex branch structure is made using a clever add-on called IvyGen. After the branches have been implemented, the leaves are placed over top as a particle system with Cycles materials and realistic UV textures. Hopefully, I'll have a finished product ready for show after the long weekend.

Image property of CGCookie.

Cinemagraph

At first, I found the idea of making a portraiture gif to be rather daunting. After discovering the greatness of cinemagraphs, however, the project became quite fun. The process involves taking a still video and setting one frame as a static layer and then using the others to add selective motion, like in the hands flipping the pages. As a global ascetic, I tried for a moody feeling by shifting the subject to the right and adding a gradient vignette across the left. This added the negative and positive space I was looking to achieve.