Geometric Pattern

This week I experimented with vector shapes and texture repetition. All objects are vector, rendered in bitmap, and made with the shape tool. Three different circular parent objects were used to create this pattern each gaining more complexity the larger they are. Hopefully I'll be able to use this texture in a 3D scene.

Antelope Canyon Progress

This week, I've been continuing my work on Antelope Canyon. The rock face material has possibly been my most complicated material yet. Composed of over 15 nodes of different operation, the texture is almost entirely procedurally generated, that is, using no UV maps, specularity maps, displacement maps, etc. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of the scene and the number of light bounces used, the piece takes over 30 minutes to get a reasonable render. I'll take this piece home over the weekend and get a reliable and appealing render then.

Antelope Canyon (WOP)

I've been following a tutorial on rock modeling recently using displacement textures. I've done this wort of work before but because of the amount of parent and children meshes needed to get the sculpted effect, this tutorial has really helped with my organizational practices. Aside from organization, not much has been done in the way of color, texture, or additional development. The piece is composed along a center line with the curved rock walls protruding to a common ceiling out of camera.

Here is what Antelope Canyon actually looks like:

Ornamented Mask

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!