Quick Modeling: A Trash Can

I had to model this beaten up trash can for a project I'm working on.
This was fun! Especially the beating-up part... :)

A Rendering Challenge

I have been neglecting the blog, and actually my 3D work as a whole...
Don't have any real excuse though.

This is a rendering challenge from CGTalk Israel forum -
render a given model of a cheese and knife.

Here's the result I have so far:



I used the following lights and materials.
Lights:
* Area light to simulate a kitchen window.
* Spot light to simulate indoors lighting with hard shadows.
* HDRI image for reflections.

Materials:
* Cheese - Mental ray SSS material, with a noise texture in the specular map.
* Knife - Mental ray DGS material, with maximum glossy and specular values.
* Knife handle - Simple blinn material with a very dense noise for a bump map, eccentricity 0.4 and specular roll off 0.5 to create softer speculars.
* Tray - Blinn material with wood texture.

VFS here I come!

I was accepted to VFS!
I will start studying the 3D Animation and Visual Effects program at June 2008.

I wasn't sure how strict their requirements are,
and I was looking a lot for portfolios that got people into VFS,
but found nothing on the web.

So here it is, for future reference of anyone looking to get into VFS -
my VFS portfolio.


1. Life Drawings
I handed a drawing of my cat, a drawing of a woman's face in the rain,
and a drawing of "Shoot 'Em Up" movie poster (the one with Paul Giamatti).






2. A Wasp Model
This model was done in Maya, and textured with Maya and a little bit of Photoshop.



3. A Walking Lego Man
Modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation was done in Maya.
Compositing was done in After Effects.

Wasp - Final

These are more or less the final images of the wasp - please click on the images to view the full resolution.

It doesn't look completely real yet, but I guess that's about the best I can do without working on in for another week...
So it's time to move on to the next project :)

Wasp Update

The eyes, wings and body are final, except for some hairs I might add later.
The rest (head and legs) still need some work.

Wasp Model

This is a model of a bee / wasp I've done in Maya.

I started it a long time ago and finished it in the last couple of day.
The next step is texturing it. This will be the first time I seriously texture anything so it might take a little time, but I hope it will be done in a couple of days.

After that - back to the Cubies...

Cat, Bear and Woman

Here are some more drawings from the last few days:

Shoot 'Em Up

6B pencil on A4 copy paper.

The reference for this drawing is the poster of the movie "Shoot 'Em Up":

Life Drawing: Face in the Rain

6B pencil on A4 copy paper.

The reference for this drawing is taken from a modeling catalog.

Cubies: Week 8.5

Forgive me blogger, for I have sinned...
It's been more than two weeks since my last update.


I have been called for duty in the IDF for 3 weeks. This is the second of them.
But that's not a good enough reason to stop working, (after all I am still home every evening) and so I did, and I proudly present the next complete scene.
I didn't update much since I was actually working on more of the same: Animating, animating and animating. There isn't much I can say about that :)

This time I did a playblast of two scenes together: first the big Cubie wakes up and then a third Cubie comes into play.
Together it comes to 30 seconds, which is something in which you can start seeing the big picture.

That means in total I have about one minute of action, and I expect the whole movie to take something like 2 minutes - lots of work ahead!



What I have learned the last two weeks is, animating 3 characters takes about 3 times as much as animating one character, and a little more. Not a big surprise there...

Thanks for watching :)