Nicoya

I was watching the debates and diving into Painter, so that wasn't a great idea. On the goodside, I'm listening to some bumpin tunes.  I still made a good stride in the material milestone of this exercise.  I added in a bunch of leaks, oils and grime.  I'll let this simmer and tackle this again tomorrow.

Unwraping and ch-ch-ch-changes

I've spent a lot of hours this weekend unwrapping and cuting out the garbage pieces or areas that would cause problems in the bake.  I threw it into Substance Painter to get the dice rolling for monday, applied a couple smart mats and painted in some dirt patches.  

This is fun

Today, I cut back about 40% of the IMM work I did.  It was fun but the design look blah.  I plan on baking this asset, so I need to prepare for the future. I have a plan for the pipes, but for now they create some nice negative space.  

IMM loving it!

I wanted to add pipes, so I learned how the Curve Modifier worked. I also learned about IMM Brushes.  I now love IMM Brushes. Seriously, how do tutorials skip out on such a great tool!?!

Hard Surface Headbust practice update

Going easy but smooth on Hard-Surface in ZBrush.  Since most pieces were retopo'd, I feel that I won't be seeing a big hastle when baking the maps down the road.  Tomorrow I'll aim to get some more floaty like pieces for the neck area and cables

Weathered Rock (No Maya Wayz!)

I've spent the past two weeks rumaging through ZBrush tutorial out there.  While I was opening up a file, I saw an older rock texture that was pretty well done.  Since it's been a year, I've went ahead and did a quick ZBrush and Substance action.  I like how this pipeline cuts out Maya, and in the longrun, could make freelance more easier to join in.

Top image is Substance, bottom is ZBrush.  The final polycount is about 5k, which is overkill but I'm not worried about that.  My concern was getting comfortable with creating assets and not touching Maya.

Expanding on Hard Surface in ZBrush

I was pursuing this, but it's really tough to keep the momentum after a week.  The tutorial I followed though has made it more easier for me to make hardsurface in ZBrush.  For now, we'll let this die here.

Compositing Exercise: FR

One of my goals in life is to complete some 3D Composite short.  To get there, it's going to take practice.  DePaul had a broken course that covered some topics on 3D Compositing, but now I"m exploring it more.  This stock footage was grabbed from a site I have bookmarked somewhere, but you can see what I have in store for it by this rough blockout.

UPDATED 02:  Here's the proxys!

Mom! Whats this green stuff?

Commuting to Chicago via public transit is terrible.  Somedays I'd leave the studio at 5:50 and wouldn't be home till 9:00.  Getting to work took about 2 hours, with an overall day of commuting coming out to 20$. Gross. That's also solid reason I haven't been documenting my work this week.  Fear not! There will be a car that I can use next week to get to work, cutting my commute down to an hour both ways.

I'm about to put a bow on this environment, but I discovered what Lighting Complexity is in UE4.  It's main purpose is to show texel density for lightmaps across the world.  A lot of my lightmaps were red and bad, so I spent the past two days cleaning up lightmaps.  I"m also cutting back on excessive modularity pieces(the ceiling and floor are all ind 4x4 meshes, when I could just use a flat plane.)