Thursday, June 7, 2012

A nice turn of events

I am taking an extremely temporary job- of two weeks. It seems that I keep finding myself in a "save the day" position where they bring in someone when deadlines are looming and the work doesn't seem to be getting done in time. Let's see if I save the day again like I did before ^.~

And now for something completely different:

funny pictures - Lolcats: 'Star Wars' Day Classic: Jawa Cat!
see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Redoing My Pazuzu Character

You can find my original Pazuzu character on my portfolio site if you really want to see it. I decided a bit back before I moved to Vancouver to redo this character. Originally it was hastily done while creating all the assets for Tribes of the Eternal Moon. While this character was a bit of an after thought and for the most part, wasn't even supposed to be textured, I powered through it as I put together my demo reel in the last month of Full Sail. Given that I've learned quite a bit and I've kept at enhancing my skills, I decided he needed a make over (only doing him as a bust). 

So here is the old Pazuzu, God of Pestilence. 
Sculpted
Edge Flow- untriangulated
Basic Diffuse texture added

Now what I ended up doing is making him into a bust, fixing his edgeflow, going back in and fixing some of his anatomy, like his jaw which the new one now closes perfectly with bared teeth overlapping nicely. I also didn't like flaps of skin hanging down either and so I changed those to be a leather patch nailed into his bone. =D

This shows the newer sculpted version. For those who don't know, the colored squares are checkers used to make sure the UVs, or textured area on the model match in size, and also aren't skewed or wrong in some way. The flesh to bone area on the muzzle now has... a fleshy area of skinless tissue. These are all just screen caps in maya by the way.
As you can see the edge flow is much more organic. The leather strap area has a max stretch (current mouth position) and will fold over when the mouth closes. The 5 star is located in a relatively safe place in terms of potential animation deformation. I'd say this is still a medium quality in terms of poly count like the original.

I've been neglecting the Spikes and collar so far and just started going into painting the diffuse. This time I'm not spending 2 hours to texture the entire character like before, and I'm hand painting the bust like I wanted to do with the original. At this moment I have hardly touched the diffuse other than to block it out. I've been working on some pick up items and such for another project, and getting my citizenship/sin/applications for jobs done otherwise. I will be taking breaks at some point to get his diffuse going this week though. =D nothing better than taking a break to paint!

St George Coat of Arms

To celebrate the attaining of my very own SIN after many trials and tribulations (which include being attacked by crows ) I'm going over a small and quick project I did for my father as a Christmas present for last Christmas. What I did was take our original Coat of arms, or Heraldry and redid it. Originally I was just going to work off the original but as I was listening to all the research my father had done for our family and how inaccurate and cookie cutter heraldry sites tend to be, I decided I needed to do my own research.
This is the original. 
I don't really know where it came from, 
but it's kind of sloppy, wouldn't you say?

So looking into how these Heraldry images are made, it became apparent to me that it wasn't just this equals that. It turned out that every family has a written heraldry, which is much like a word formula, called a blazon, which can then be used to create any heraldry image based on a sentence. For the St. George family, ours was this:

Argent a Chief Azure overall a Lion rampant Gules crowned Or.

The Blazon means this: Silver Shield with a Blue top, Lion positioned over all the shield, with an attacking position facing to the left (3 legs up), colored red with a gold crown.

Starting point where I focused on the lion.

This Blazon is incomplete since it only goes over the shield and mentions nothing about the treatment of the helm. For some of it I had no choice but to go off what the original depicted. I did find out that the knots on top of the helm are basically the feathers coming out of the helm, as well as the "leaves" that decorate the space around the shield. These ornate parts don't seem to have any meaning other than to ornate the image.


 I did change one thing which I thought was necessary since the family did attain knight/nobility hood at some point in their history (it's been 6 months I'm foggy on the actual details of who and when). The Helm with an open visor means that the family had attained nobility or knighthood. 

Changes made, rough coloring.
With everything ready and blocked in, I went a head and finished it off for the final piece shown below:
The Final

Hurray for finishing my dual citizenship ... ness!