My hermit crab is ready for texturing and lighting and rendering! I’m going with Mudbox for texture painting for sure. I’m still not entirely sure how I’m going to get all the prickly parts of the legs done… I’ll probably just do a displacement map or something.

I’m working on a hermit crab in 3D Modeling class! The shell was really hard to make… I wound up making a small segment, duplicating special it, and then stitching all the segments together by hand. So… the crab itself is only some legs right now. I have a lot of work to do on this still…

I’m thinking about trying Mudbox for texturing this thing. The UVs on the shell aren’t pretty, and I don’t want to spend a gazillion hours unwrapping those UVs….

More later.

Ana suggested a few changes. Much credit to her, the painting looks much much better now:

I also played with giving the girl goggles of some sort and a snorkel, but I’m not sure this idea works so well.

I felt like painting (in Photoshop) today. I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out.

In Penn’s SIGGRAPH chapter, we’re spending the next few months designing our own little characters in Maya!

I drew a little girl complete with little kid size coat and rubber rain boots:

I don’t really have any idea yet of what kind of adventure she’ll go on. I’ll figure that out as I go along, I suppose. I picked a little kiddo mainly because I love how crazy exaggerated little kids often make their expressions. Just check out the absolutely beautifully animated short Playing with light - Mon ami le robot.

More later!

A few weeks ago I joined a startup founded by a few Penn alums called Venmo! My project at Venmo for the past few weeks has been helping my friend and co-worker, Ayaka Nonaka, with a new app from Venmo called Gifi, which is a Foursquare/Venmo mashup that lets people leave Venmo money at geographic locations. I’ve been working on Gifi’s website and overall look. Here’s some of the artwork I did for Gifi: