Holy Crap I love Deviant Art

I just uploaded a couple of sketches, and I got a comment and 3 favorites within two minutes. Wow, talk about a thriving community!

Sketchbook Dump

For some reason I do not yet know, I just cannot stick to one sketchbook.  I have about three different ones containing drawings that span the course of 10 years, and none of which are even a quarter used up.  I have a drawing from 2000 and a drawing from 2008 five pages away from each other.  It makes it very hard to archive my work.

But in any case, that's what I'm trying to do here:  In the next week or so I will upload pictures from my sketchbooks starting from the very earliest--my cringeworthy middle school Anime days--to my most recent.  Along the way I hope to discover patterns and trends in my work that will, with luck, allow me learn where my problems lie and help me become a better artist.

Warning: Nudey post

So I'm taking Figure Drawing II this semester, and in addition to being a welcome break during the day, it continues--just like the first class I took with Doug--to teach me more about drawing than I've learned in the last 20 years.  That being said, it has been a significant struggle getting "back in the groove", so to speak, so bear with me here (and pardon the hack Photoshop job--much better cleaning up will happen in the future).

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Color

I recently had my first encounter with what is probably a chronic frustration among website designers: the wildly varying color temperatures of different monitors.  In my case, I had carefully devised a color scheme for my website based on the output from a PC monitor, which tend to be blue.  When I got home to admire my prodigious work on my Macbook, however, I was horrified to find that all my blues were gray and all my grays were yellow.  It looked awful.

I guess it just means I need to get more chummy with the HTML color codes so I can know what the "true" colors are.  Sigh.

More sketches

Believe it or not, I've been hard at work!  I just haven't been able to upload the pictures.  But, I have a brand new Macbook Pro with a built in SD port so more updates are coming.  =)



The guy at Utrecht.



Backs are really hard to draw.

Money!

I win more money!  I got first place in the CIS Summer Research Program and got $75 to Barnes and Noble.

Even though I'm technically not undergrad anymore...  (Shhh)

Speed-sketches

I know I'm severely behind on my updates, but come on: we both know that the whole "daily" thing was just for show.  Anyway, I apologize for the sincerely shitty quality of the photos; my camera was out of battery so I took them on my phone.  I tried to color correct in Preview (Apple version of Adobe Reader for you Mac-phobes) but I failed somewhat miserably.

I HATE INK

Hate it.

Prismacolor

Just ordered a 24 piece set of Prismas from eBay!  SO EXCITED.  I've wanted those babies for years; I have no idea why I never thought to buy them at a severe discount before.

Bathroom

God, what I would give to have the ability to draw straight lines.

Unfinished Bored Person by Sea

Technically this is cheating because I didn't do it today, but it took a day and it's unfinished because this is all I can do in a day.  Better speed up.



Yes it's flat and poorly lit and has weirdly alarming eyes, but this isn't my showoff blog; it's my progress blog.  The harder I suck today, the more incredible will be my improvement tomorrow.  Or so I tell myself as I cry in the corner.

Noticed some anatomical anomalies: jawline goes too far back, no ear.  No wonder it looked funny.

ART

I am a crap artist.  I know that I have the capacity to be a slightly less crap artist, if I practice.  Which is why I need to practice.

So, here's my self-challenge:  one piece a day.  Doesn't matter what it is, or how quick the sketch, I have to do one piece of work a day and put it up on this here site.  There, I have publicly declared my goal and must now stick to it.  It's true that I have shamelessly aped this idea from certain other superior artists* I know, but isn't that the whole idea of any pursuit?  To copy those who inspire you?

*P.S.  Sorry for linking without asking.  I figure it's the price you pay for being insanely talented, but if anyone wants me to un-link, just let me know.

MEL GUI 1.0

Line Weight

Manga artists have such a knack for line weight. Ink is a medium I've always had something of a hate-hate relationship with, and I'm beginning to realize it's because I don't know how to use it to its full potential. You can say so much with just slight variations in thickness.

Pulled this off of Amy Hadley's deviantART page.  The girl writes/illustrates an English-language manga called Fool's Gold.  Looks great, and vaguely Sherlock Holmes-y.

Refraction Attempt #2

I'm still a little suspicious of my algorithm, but I think I finally fixed refraction.


Scary next step: photon mapping at last! I foresee problems already, but maybe forging on ahead will illuminate ways to address them. Or will cause me to trip over myself. Either way, it should be fun.

Orange with mold

[vimeo="http://vimeo.com/13888456"]

Fur still isn't sitting right. I need to iron out this two-pass system I have going. Maybe I'll add a fur shadow pass.

Orange

A little dark, but otherwise more convincing than the apple.

Fake-looking apple goes boom

[vimeo="http://vimeo.com/13858040"]

Brown spot looks like it's floating on top of the apple rather than being an actual part of it, and the mold is the wrong color.  Baby steps, baby steps.

The difference in growth pattern from the tomato was produced by varying the constants in the RD equation.  Sometime in the foreseeable future this variance will be determined by factors like water content of fruit, skin thickness, firmness, temperature, and humidity.  Right now it is determined by factors like whatever I pull out of my ass.

Apple

I made a fake-looking apple, and since I have nothing else to offer, here it is:



Stem material is a bit funky.

Must. Resist. Urge. To turn. Duckling. Into. Dinosaur.

Demo Reel

I haven't put anything up for a while because nothing looks all that much different yet, but here's my demo reel, for anyone who needs something to look at:

http://vimeo.com/10783307

Breakdown here.

Also, my shamefully outdated website.

Lost my USB where all of this work was stored (exhibit A for why you should back up insanely important data), so unfortunately I cannot fiddle with anything on there now, but I'm hoping that the work I do this summer will be quality enough to toss in and hopefully distract from the many, many existing problems.

Also P.S. Joe just expressed his approval for my work on the side--YES.  No more frantically minimizing my raytracer VS project whenever I hear footsteps behind me.  I was beginning to feel like a man hiding his mistress.

Refraction

I think I got it wrong, but here it is anyway.

Note: You probably noticed something missing--caustics. This will be implemented when I get to the photon mapping (if I can manage to actually finish this raytracer).

Phong shader

Badly working Phong implemented. LOTS of kinks to work out on that one.

Notice the angry highlight. Eek.

Tomato collapse with mold

Tomato collapse with texture changes

There are still about 30 frames left to render, but I thought I would put up what I have so far. No fur-mold yet; look for that later today.


Additional note: I will probably be putting the other stuff on hold because this project (which I happen to be getting paid for) takes first priority for the next couple of months, and at least for another week staying at work for ridiculously long hours is not possible.

Fur test

Played around with the surprisingly realistic Maya Fur. Still don't know how to do anything except light it; this is using the Duckling fur preset slightly modified. Maya Software render, because mentalray hates fur and hates me.

Basic Ray tracing

I am deeply unsettled by the fact that my fudgings have been piling on--I really need to learn not to cheat so much; it's awful. One day I will go through this code and clean everything up, but for now I at least have reflections and shadows implemented.



The shadows should really be black, but it looked ugly so I made them a more delicate gray. Yet another instance of cheating.

Ray casting corrected

I'm still pretty sure I'm fudging a lot of things I'm not supposed to fudge, but at least it looks the way it's supposed to now.


And because I'm not too fond of that look, the wrong version and the right version comped together:


Theoretically that would be calculating the color values based on both angle from light source and distance from light source, but something tells me that's not the whole story and that this is the wrong way to do it. Oh well.

Ray casting

VERY basic ray casting implemented. Only 3 types of primitives, major cheating and hard-coding going on, but hey--it works. (Somewhat).



For comparison, here is a Maya software render of a similar scene:



Now that I look at those two, I realize the "ray-casting" algorithm I pulled out of my ass is clearly wrong. Damn. Looks like I will actually have to reference my old CIS460 notes. Groooaan.

UPDATE: Figured out what my problem was. I was calculating color values based on distance from the light, not the angle between the point on the surface and the light. Laziness: 1, Actually knowing what I'm doing: 0

Tomato video 1

No collapsing yet.

Drool

This is my inspiration for the kind of images my raytracer should be able to produce by the end:



Done by Marc ten Bosch of Brown University, I believe.

Main resource: Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping by Henrik Wann Jensen.  Really great book and an easy read (with a full C++ implementation in the back!  I will try my best not to cheat.)

Planned work

• Tomato


• Fixed raytracer with photon mapping


• Fast caustics (might give up on this because I'll hopefully have caustics implemented with photon mapping)


• Some sort of vaguely-defined aging surfaces plugin


• Carvaggio-like still life (with cheese, grapes, wine, tablecloth--subsurface scattering, layered textures, Maya caustics, cloth, and LIGHTING)


• A duckling (Maya fur)


• Grace's drawing

Tomato part 2

I considered waiting until this actually looked passable before putting it up, but I decided that there is no point in having a progress blog if I don't bother sharing the sadder portions of my progress.







Still need to figure how to make the mold look like mold.  Maya Fur is the closest thing I've come up with so far (the same thing we used for the Senior Project render) but it looks like... fur.  And crap.

Notes:  I'm using mentalray this time because I really don't know how to use the Renderman shaders effectively and I'm short on time.  If the opportunity presents itself, I might make more of an effort to learn Renderman, but at this point I don't really see a reason to.  mentalray is fine for now.

Julie Bell

I love, love, love Julie Bell's attention to detail in terms of musculature.  Most of her artwork is of the sci-fi/fantasy/bordering-on-porn variety, and I love it.  THAT is how you should draw naked people.  Forms that are so accurate to life and beautifully rendered that it doesn't matter that she is the science fiction equivalent of whoever paints Fabio.

I particularly like this piece because I like comic book art.  It's so distinctly American, and there is something about the way they portray action that I love.  In a lot of other styles (I'm thinking of anime and manga artists right now) you'll get a real sense of movement and speed, but you don't see that here.  They're just suspended in air, muscles mid-ripple.  It's like time just stopped--you can almost hear the silence and the stillness, and you wouldn't expect that from an action shot.  It's fantastic.

Oh my god, it’s back!

Yes, the tomato is back.  It looks exactly the same, except that now the mold is growing in a somewhat biologically-based fashion and it doesn't collapse yet.  Here is a fresh one:

And here is an orange with some sort of dent in it (for the hell of it):



Less appetizing versions to come.

NOTE: Tomato/stem model credit goes to Michelle Chen!  And spoiler: the orange is a sphere.  There is a reason I am not a modeler.

Hello there

I wanted to come up with a clever name but then I thought, "This isn't my clever blog anyway."  This is my project blog.  It's mostly for me to keep track of the many projects I am convinced I will eventually start during the remainder of the summer, because my brain does a bad job of keeping track of anything.  It is public and available for you to peruse because A) it would be nice to have conclusive evidence that most of what I do does not, in fact, involve explosions or spaceships or dinosaurs and B) it forces me to be accountable for the crap that has my name plastered on it.  Perfectionism has never posed much of a problem for me, but public embarrassment has, so I'm hoping that this blog will discourage me from producing work I wouldn't be proud to show my friends.

Also, I kind of just want an audience.