And in the end...

Okay, end of my Beatles reference streak. All in all I am very pleased. Goodness knows I would have changed a few things in retrospect, but I am happy with the result. Looking forward to rendering video, once a few things are fixed, as photoshop cheating doesn't work as well in moving footage.

the long and winding road

Well after a long long process that may or may not have been worth it, I finally reach photoshop with a few hours to spare. The outlines, one example seen above, will hopefully aid in this endeavor. The top one is a render from maya. As you can see, there are issues with hedges mainly (and ironically!) hopefully i will be able to patch these issues up in photoshop as well as adding something to the project. We'll see.

textures abound

It's a telephone booth! So far I'm pleased with how the textures are coming out, learning a LOT about layer and color manipulation, but it's getting that acid feel that I have been shooting for.

watercolors part 2

So I solved that problem! As it turns out, the color was in indexed mode? I hadn't heard of it before, but upon changing it to gray scale, a lot of the speckling went away. I did some light blurring and levels work to try and optimize it them. And from there they should be good for all sorts of sordid purposes!

special texture edition #1

textured head, with much thanks (almost sarcastic) to CS4's 3D mode. Used a combination of photograph textures, hand painted and watercolored/scanned. And a disgusting number of filters!

The other picture up top is one of the watercolor texture pieces, I completed 6 total, though it would seem that a number of them ended up with quite a bit of noise in the scanning process.

Live from blogga dot cahm

It's a head! With an occlusion! The story of creating the head is for another time, especially the ear. Ears are awful, I felt a little closer to understanding Van Gogh. Never mind the seam, it'll go away.


A carriage! On tracks! that lead off a glowing cliff! Never mind that those tracks are for the moment strangely invisible. That's not important! :D

The views that the renders were taken at are possible final compositions. That, however, is subject to change. That was your obligatory blog post of the year. More to come later.

Where to go?

I have that feeling that one gets when they come to a fork in the road realizing that both paths come to the same point. I have several models at this point, uv'd and some occlusion baked, and I am sort of daunted by the "what next?" question. I feel like there should be a few more models still, obviously texturing needs to happen, as does ground, sky, bringing everything together and lighting, finally rendering and at some point making a shiny little presentation. I've been working most of the night, I will certainly be posting pictures of that soon, I just feel like I've hit a bit of a stand still. Hopefully a few hours away from it will help put things back into perspective. I am still, for the life of me, running into that perfectionist tweaking that kills so much time as well.