Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've last updated the blog. I've enrolled in an art school with the hopes of boosting my artistic ability and I've been doing quite well. It's been crazy busy and a lot of hard work, but I'm making progress. Woot!

In other news, I'm updating the blog to also show off some of my class work. More on that below:

A 3D illustration and infographic of how games loose their value over time in relation to trade-ins. It's a bit selective as I chose some recent popular titles with some older ones to flesh out the poster.

Made with Blender 2.6x w/built in raytracer render engine, forget which
Clean up in Photoshop CS5
Type and layout in InDesign CS5
Box Art textures from the ever helpful NeoGaf Custom Cover Art forum thread

Also, since the original was this MASSIVE 11x17 300dpi image, I decided to shrink it down

3D Medusa update

Not too major of an update for some, but an update none the less. I, finally, got off my butt and made some textures for the tattoos that adorn Medusa's arms and added some makeup to her face, then made some test renders with varied lighting to see how things worked out in LuxRender v0.8. So far, so good! Now, I need to correct some of the clothing materials so that her outfit doesn't appear to be solid black and maybe do some more adjustments with her hair.

So, enjoy the test renders. ^_^

It's been a while

Hey everyone, I figured I'd update a couple of people on the progress I'm making for projects. Well, one of the many anyway.

A fully custom character by me for Sanctioned on DA! First time working on something like this outside of Poser, especially for rigging for animation. That took forever! Any who, check out the work in progress shots below. There isn't much at the moment, other than Sanctioned's character and the "meh" hair, but I really consider it progress! ^_^




Textures are off at the moment due to testing. That and the lighting. >_<


This last one was actually what I started with when I used the curves tool to set it up. If I can get it to make a solid object, I may go back and use it instead.

Medusa WIP 17

Well, it's been a few months since I've really posted any further work on this particular project. Needless to say, I've been experimenting more and more in Blender and less in Poser 6/7, mainly as both versions of Poser seem to hate the outfit I made and using it as dynamic clothing seems to make things worse. So, I've decided to move back to Blender and I'm in the middle of re-rigging Miki 2 for animation and general posing. Not too much of a problem there as setting up bones in Blender is a hell of a lot easier than it is in Poser.

But, my problem seems to step from using clothing physics on the outfit I made. After a couple of tests, it seems that the outfit does using clothing physics in Blender gives much better performance and is easier to manipulate than it ever seemed to be in Poser; but, for whatever reason, it seems that I can't get the outfit to collide and animate against the model I'm using. I'd ask for help here on the forums, but considering the general lack of interest from here, or any other place I post about this project, I honestly doubt I'll get any.

So, in short, more tests and, eventually, I'll call this finished and move on to another project.

Medusa WIP 16 update

Small update with experimental lights using Lux Render 0.6.1. It seems to fix some of the problems I was having and performs better than it was.

Medusa WIP 16

Minor updates, just adding some fullsized renders to the blog. I'm still experimenting with the vector arrows as lights. It works, but I think I need to set them as real objects and not duplicated ones as Lux Render seems to have issues with them.

Minor update, if anyone is still watching...

I went and modeled the armbands and I am also experimenting with Lux Render for better rendering results. Next, I'm going to model a more accurate snake from the Soul Eater series that the character uses.

Also, I got an update for one of the game characters I wrote up for that long winded RPG I've been working on. 1 (technically 3, if you include Maya and Rad) full designs done, several more to go.

Benisato Dress release!

It's not much, but I managed to pack together an outfit I made recently for other Poser users to play with. More info can be seen on it over at My DA Gallery or on my ShareCG Page.

Other than that, not much else to report. Well, other than my Lux Render experiments which are still in process.

Medusa WIP 13?

Well, I'm still going at it, trying to better refine the render. This time, I exported everything from Poser back into Blender, then used an external rendering app named LuxRender for betting lighting and overall render finish. The end result that you see above took 33 hours to do. Oy!


For the most part, many of the materials and textures I had used previously for Medusa Final v.2 were not imported into Blender, which leaves me having to recreate them manually twice -- once for Blender and once for LuxRender as they don't seem to communicate properly amongst one another. The other odd thing I noticed is that while LuxRender takes forever to get a scene rendered, it took almost the same length of time to render this particular image (initially 14 hours or so) as it did with Poser 7 and it did not scream at me for somehow passing the theoretical memory limit as it used much less memory. Though, if I passed my installed memory for any reason, the LuxRender UI would crash as it loaded the scene. I guess I should report that to the devs. :shrug:

Anyway, depending on how much my modeling skills come to be in the near future, I may as well go ahead and replace Miki 2 with a custom model of Medusa. For now, I'm going to end up just modeling my own custom snake like the one she has in the series.

So, I'm still working on it, and hope to have some better results in the future!

Medusa Final v.2

Version two of the previous render, now with better hair, textures (hair only) and lighting. Also added some effects in Photoshop.

Well, I went back and redid the ponytail and textures for it using Kozaburo's messy Jessi v1 hair textures, then spliced it to match the same hair. I also ended up reworking the hood to to cover the parts that were exposed or coming through. Other than that, better lighing and snake textures.

Medusa Outfit Final... Somewhat WIP 11

Well, I've finally managed to get the outfit to a point where it moves decently enough not to destroy the collar and the hood! WOOT! I stayed up almost two days trying to figure out where I was going wrong in Poser 7's cloth room and the book did not help very much. If there's one thing that needs work, it's the manual to the software. Oy...

Anyway, I had to adjust the collar, buttons, and hood to be constrained portions of the mesh since they were always in contact with either the hair or Miki2's head. While I lost some minor detail with the hood not moving a great deal, it kept it from messing up everything in the area and looking like it went through a meat grinder when it touched the hair. I also did the same thing for the thigh portion of the mesh as it saved a TON of time to calculate the dynamic mesh deformations. The tail was set as a soft decoration with the tip being included in the calculations so it wouldn't make contact with anything else.

The hair... well, not much has changed a great deal with the hair other than I managed to use the above techniques to make it move to match the bends of Miki2's body and to come over the outfit without making part of it explode. Later, I hope to have the hair fixed in a manner that looks faithful to the original character's hair. Though, the same could be said about making a fully original piece and render that entirely in Blender.

Let's see... other than that, there are some texture changes for her nails to match up the original character, eye color was altered, and two snakes were added from www.most-digital-creations.com for their Shadow Serpent object as it saved me some time in creating another mesh (I'll have to make a better one that's actually specific to the series though) with altered textures. I wished I could have added Medusa's vector arrows to better show her as a character, but I ran out of time and was really too tired to draw up additional textures. Maybe later... or next time. XD

Anyway, I think that's it for this one. Time for me to get back on schedule.

Medusa Outfit WIP 10

Well, I found out what was keeping the outfit from working as a dynamic cloth in Poser, mainly the lack of polygons and trying to add parts of it as constrained groups during the simulation tests. Though, I can't seem to keep the buttons from turning into malleable cloth like the rest of the outfit, so I may end up having to separate them to keep them from moving. Also added the finger and toe nail textures to Miki 2.

Other notes: Seems as if no matter what setting I have enabled during the cloth simulation, the hood tends to go through the collar from time to time. On the other hand, since they are all pretty much the same color, it's barely noticeable. The hair textures are pretty much botched and need to be redone along with the UVs. Also, I need to choose a pose that does not force the hood to move so it stays in place and have it collide with the hair so it covers it as well. Oddly enough, doing that tends to result in many ugly messes as it touches the hair mesh, so I'm not sure what to do to cover the area. I also noticed that since the mesh was also colliding with the floor, it seemed to have pushed through her knee, but it was hard to tell prior to creating the render. Oy... I'll need to adjust the post to avoid that in the future.

Next up, better texture maps for the hair and either some of Medusa's tattoos for the arms or some sort of snake prop with dots!

Medusa Outfit WIP 08

Well, this is the latest work in progress for the Medusa Gorgon outfit I've been working on. Yeah, it's been a while and I know I've been slow with it, but meh...

Anyway, I moved the tail up to the appropriated length, changed the hair and tweaked the hood. For the most part, I'm almost done; but, when I was working on the UV mapping for the textures, the entire UV map somehow moved or removed itself and left the parts that I needed textured -- the button and hood -- ended misaligned or the textures no longer show up as I had intended for them. Does anyone know what I did wrong and how to fix it? I ask as whatever happened, it's keeping me from resetting the UV texture mapping or even seeing the vertecies while trying to edit them in the UV editor window. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Medusa Outfit WIP 07

After trying diligently and loosing a ton of time with the hair, I said screw it and modeled only the parts that will be visible after I finish working on her hood.

Oy...

Also started working on her hair textures. Sadly, I thought it would be harder to do.

Medusa Outfit WIP 06

Redid her hair again, this time with a better reference.

Medusa Outfit WIP 05

More work done. This time, I went ahead and redid the hair using flat polygon extrusions instead of a full out box look that was not working. Not sure if it looks much better at this point, but I did manage to get the UV's setup and might experiment with the hair textures sometime later.

Medusa Outfit WIP 04

Well, this is the 4th TIME I've tried to submit this work in progress submission to DA, but it doesn't seem to want to take! I don't know what the hell is going on, but I'll try again. Pisses me off that it took that long to do. Anyway...

I've started on Medusa's hair, obviously prior to creating her hood and morph. For the most part, it's proving to be a bit more difficult to do than I had initially realized and finding a decent hair modeling tutorial for blender, or ANY modeling app, has also proved to be difficult. So, I've went ahead and started working on it the same way I've already done, extruding and moving the verticies into position. It seems that it's working, but I don't know. I'll let you guys be the judge of that.

So, what do you think? :? And does anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed?

Medusa Outfit WIP 03

Relatively minor update, with a collar and buttons! Next up, Medusa's hair, then the hood!

Medusa Outfit WIP 02

Added the tail! Though, it looks like it's a bit low.

Also added better lighting to so it would be easier to see her tail.

Medusa Outfit WIP 01

Well, I've made some progress in redoing the outfit for Medusa. At this point, I have her clothing down and I just need to work on her collar and hood. After that, I need to figure out how to get her hair done.

And the color I set on the base outfit is so I can see if there were any areas of poke through that were hard to identify when everything was colored the same shade of gray. So, don't worry about that!

I guess I should test to see if it works in Poser 7 before doing anything. :lol:

Any feedback on this and what I'm doing would be VERY helpful! ;)