Earlier this week my mom gave my roommates and me a ginormous sack of apples, so I’ve been eating apples all week. Which is good, because I love apples.

So I had an apple sitting on my desk, and I had Maya open, and I was a little bit bored, so… I made some apples in Maya!

Over the past few months I’ve developed a bit of an… odd… workflow for texturing/shading irregularly shaped objects (apples… muddy boots… hermit crabs…). I start with modeling and whatnot in Maya, as usual:

Then I go into Photoshop and use various reference (images found online, photos taken with my Nikon D60, etc) to paint a tile of the texture I want. For example, for the apples I took some photos of the apples and then extracted textures from the photos to create this texture tile:

Next, I bring the object mesh and the texture tile into Mudbox and use Mudbox’s projection stencil tool to paint the mesh using the texture tile as the stencil. The nice thing about bringing things into Mudbox for texturing is that I don’t really have to worry too much about UV mapping. Mudbox will automagically take care of all of the UV stuff as long as the imported mesh doesn’t have any overlapping UV coordinates. So instead of messing with the UV editor in Maya before texturing, I can just use Maya’s Automatic UV mapping tool to make sure that no UVs overlap and bring that into Mudbox. After painting in Mudbox, I got a texture image like this:

After texture painting in Mudbox, deriving spec and bump maps in Photoshop is a relatively straightforward affair. Once texturing and shading is done, I render out the beauty pass and z-depth pass and other passes…

…and bring all those passes into After Effects for compositing and color grading, and I’m done!

For animation class, we were given an assignment where we each had to pick a random mixed drink name and use that name as the basis of a 10 second animation in After Effects. I picked something called a Watermelon Smash (it contains…. watermelon cubes… and I don’t remember what else). So… here’s a watermelon smashing something!

We were actually allowed to use anything we wanted for the actual animation, the only rule was that we had to composite the final result together in After Effects. I wound up doing the ocean, splashes, and sparks in Flash (with tons of help from Joseph Gilland’s book Elemental Magic) and painting the boat and the watermelon in Photoshop. The watermelon itself is animated entirely using the puppet warp tool in After Effects.

I’m not terribly happy with the sound. That needs some reworking probably…

Here’s a few stills breaking down how the entire thing was composited:

…and here’s some random stills:

This is just a quick dump of recent things I’ve been working on, detailed posts to come later.

I’m done with my character model! Until I can think of a better name, I’m just calling her “Raincoat Girl”.

Here’s a still:

Getting the hair and cloth sims to work right took aaaggggeeesssss. Thank goodness Marissa Krupen knows so much and helped me out a lot.

I wound up cheating on the subsurface scatter for the skin. I couldn’t get it to look right on its own, so I wound up using a layered shader with the subsurface on one layer and a normal texture map on the other layer. I think the end result looks okay.

Turntable!

I’ll post more stills later, but now I really need to study for that Finance final that I’ve been avoiding… I also have to make an environment for my character to go in to, and I still have that final project for 3D modeling to finish (I haven’t even started…).

Okay, I’m close to finished with the face…

I’ve decided not to give her eyelashes. They didn’t look very good. I also noticed that in some Pixar characters, Pixar chose to keep the lips the same color as the rest of the skin… I kind of like that style choice, so I’m going to steal it (read: Karl is too lazy to paint lips).

I’m working on a character model right now loosely based on this sketch. Here’s how the cloth simulation stuff is looking right now:

There is still much work to be done.