That alley thing is almost done!

Here are some finished renders of the boxes and pallets... I'm going to render out the whole thing later today, but that will take my computer a few hours. Updates to come later!

Work in Progress...

Here is a preview render of my alley. I really like the boxes and the pallets. The dumpster is still a work in progress, I only started on it today...

Luckily I have the day off tomorrow, so I can finish the dumpster and fix the concrete flooring. I was being lazy and used the same texture from the street. Now its too stretched out for close ups like this... But for now I think I'll fix the lighting before the scene gets too heavy. *sigh* I hate lighting...

Here it is after a little lighting work:

A New Direction

After talking with some industry contacts of mine, i've decided to seriously cut back some of the material in my portfolio. I'm going to put up a new piece that is definitely my strength, but uses all the new skills that I have learned from all of these tutorials. And then create a turn-around reel with break-downs of the textures on all of my best pieces. Here is a link to my portfolio as it stands  now: http://slewis21.daportfolio.com/ .

Originally I was going to make my new piece a walk through of a city street. As I was modeling it, it became way too big. I was already cutting corners int he interest of getting it done, rather than taking my time on each piece. So I changed it to just a dark alley with a few pieces that I can really focus on. So far all i've worked on are the boxes. Here are a few screen shots:

I still plan to take these guys into mudbox and create a normal map of fold and wrinkles in them. I'm excited about this project and I hope it comes out as great as I am imagining!

In the mean time, the job search continues. Something is gonna happen eventually, and i'm not going to stop until it does!

Still Life - still no job

So after that last tutorial, I decided to try and replicate it for myself. This is what I came up with. I still wanna re-render it in layers and work some compositing magic before I put it up in my portfolio. But I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. I really need to work on my rendering and mental ray settings in general. That's something that I am still pretty weak with...

On the job search front... whole lot of nothing. But I will continue to look while I continue to develop my skills and eventually something has gotta stick, right?

Gettin back to Maya

So I had been doing a lot of photoshop tutorials trying to buff up my skills there, but now I need to get back to using Maya (and mudbox with this one). So I went to digital tutors and pulled up a still life texturing tutorial. Unlike all the tutorials I did before where I actually created everything from scratch, I used a lot of the pre-made project files to do this project. The bread, lemon, and flowers were all done by me though!

Despite not making a lot of the texture maps myself, I learned A LOT from this tutorial and it took me three days (and an entire night of rendering) to finish. Firstly, I have always used mudbox for sculpting and exporting normal or displacement maps. But for the bread and flower I used mudbox for painting. This really opened my eyes to a whole new (and easier) way of making texture maps. 

I also now know how to properly apply a normal or displacement map in maya's hypershade (I've been doing it wrong this whole time). On top of that almost all of these textures are placed on mental ray shaders, which I have always been hesitant to play around with. I've really learned the different setting and presets and how they can really help me take my hand made textures to the next level. Along with learning how to apply those maps, I have also learned how to layer several bump maps onto one object. That was something I didn't even know you could do (though I am not surprised you can). 

Doing this tutorial has shown me that I still have a lot to learn about the profession and the specialty that I have chosen, but it also proves that I greatly enjoy it and love learning and applying new things! I think my next project will be modeling my own still life and putting it together much like this one. That way I will have something to add to my reel that will be unlike anything else in there. I have quite a few days off of work this week, so hopefully I'll be updating soon!