Doin' Thangs

To keep up my skills and force myself to not be lazy, I've decided that on every day off from work, i'm going to pick a tutorial and follow it in its entirety. The last three that I did were all photoshop, and came out with some really cool results. I'm also learning some nice tricks that will def come in handy for my texturing work. Yay!

With this project I learned about making custom brushes, and got a clear grasp on how to work with masks. I dont know why, but they've always confused me before. I also learned how to make special selections like shadows and mid-tones. All in all it was fun, and now i have a really cool facebook profile picture!

I made this one with the intention of having it the header for this very blog (which also got a much needed makeover). I got some cool spray paint custom brushes from the project. Honestly, I didn't really learn much from this one. It was fun though.

This bad boy actually took me two days to finish. It was so long and complicated! I learned about creating your own alphas int he channels box and then loading them into selections to make masks and adjustment layers. Soooo many adjustment layers (which I had never used before)! I really like the adjustment layer, now that I know what it is and how to use it. I also made curve adjustments a lot, where I used to fall upon the levels slider, so thats something new and useful. This is one that I know I wont be able to recreate without looking at the tutorial again. But I like the final product and I can see how it can be useful in the future. I can also easily replace the coke logo for something else and just slap it into a project whenever I need to!

We'll see what I come up with next time... I wanna do some maya and mudbox/zbrush tutorials as well. I need to get better at using mudbox/zbrush in general and in maya I want to get better at basic lighting. Its a skill that can really help me in my work, but that I am seriously lacking knowledge in. That and procedural texturing... but that scares me.

Ja!