Again a very late update. It was been a long nice summer holiday and for the first time in  several year summer without  a summer job so could actually enjoy the nice warm weather:) My pc stayed in copenhagen while I went back for the holiday though so I did not do any 3D work during the holiday.

However I never mentioned here my contract did get extended so i am still working in the same company and now I have been back in work for several months already. It is has been a very quiet period waiting for the projects to come in, but now the projects have started to roll in. Always interesting how they all show up around the same time and are due around the same time. But during the quiet period in work I did get the opportunity to have some different days with joining both my bosses to IKEA, spent a day setting IKEA furnitures together and generally experimenting and testing things in Maya. This has resulted in several small projects as have been shown earlier here. Below a couple of renders can be seen, unfortunately I have forgotten to render out pictures of several of them but this ones were the ones I had. The two top ones are obviously very much still work in progress. And the lantern have been tweaked a bit further. The bark boat I found quite interesting, the water there was not really the look I was going for but I kind of enjoy the accidental paintary feel it gave reflecting the plane below. So would be fun to work further with that or use the effect for an other project. I haven’t really decided yet. The bottled post (if that’s the right english word, it is flaskepost in norwegian at least) has just been modelled so far and still playing with what kind of scene I could place it in.

Finally some of the movies that were  made before the summer has finally come out. For these movies I shaded all the lego products. Helped build, model and texture the train scenes. In the two bottom ones I mostly helped place out the snow clumps and well some various other tasks when needed.

Update on my Sootballs fanart, characters from the spirited away. Think i am fairly happy with it now, it was just suppose to be a fast test of xgen after all and it did turn into a cute small fan art scene.:)

I made some more “realistic” eyes, in the form of actually having all the elements as a iris, pupil and cornea. But kept the irtis white with just a bit of texture to keep it similar to the original character. Xgen, however, did turn into quite a headache. Especially due to the density mask that I tried to use to mask out the eyes to not get hair there. I could not find a way to use a normal texture mask which would have felt more stable and comfortable for me, so was forced to use ptex. I must have done something wrong or something because my masks worked in the start but then they suddenly stopped working and when trying to adjust them they just kept disappearing so ended up remaking it a lot of times. And if this had been according to the UVs I could at least have used the same mask for both characters, but no… Oh well my work around in the end ended up being a duplicate object where I removed the eye socket to only have the parts the hair was suppose to be on. Luckily I managed to save the fur as a preset so I at least didn’t need to complete remake it all the time during these tests.:)

For the stars I tested Mayas new super shape “ultra shape”. It made the process really easy and fun, cool to see the different shapes it could produce. Would have taken a lot longer time modelling it from scratch.:)

It has been a bit quiet in work lately as we are in between projects so I have been playing around on my own. This is still a work in progress, but I am fairly happy with where it has gotten so far so I figured I would share. It is still a fairly simple scene, but it has given me the opportunity to play around a bit using some of the stuff I learnt during work the last 8 months and experimenting in Redshift and Maya 2018. We still use Maya 2016 in the office so this gave me the opportunity to play around in the new version trying out the new UV layout system, and play around in mash for spreading and randomising some geometry grass. In the picture above this can be seen together with some grass textured alpha planes, but even through the alpha planes look nice they leave quite an obvious straight edge that needed to be covered hence the poly grass found its use.

The trees I borrowed, they were made by my supervisor in speed trees for a previous project. While the lantern was made in maya and roughly shaded there before I decided to use it to test out channels in Mari. I have used Mari some before but more for painted textures and not explored what the program is capable of. So now I finally looked up some beginner videos to learn the proper workflows to optimise how I use the program. Therefore Mari was used to create some dents, wear and rust on the lantern.

The candle was mostly a challenge in getting the wax like texture. So I ended up playing a lot with sss (subsurface scattering) and different material settings to try to recreate how lights shine through it. I think it is starting to get there, but I feel I have some noise issues I have yet to solve.

To tie the whole scene together and create more of a ghostly atmosphere I made a fog in redshift using redshift volume scatter and sat up dof (depth of field) with focus on the lantern, blurring some of the environment around. This I felt added a lot to the whole picture giving it more of realistic feeling but also adding to the mood.

To finish this scene I would like to remove the noise of course, but also fix the flame a bit as it looks really fake at the moment. Originally I also wanted ghosts around the lantern, but I have yet to find a good method for creating them. I would love to have used a volume shader of some sort, but I have yet to find a way to get this to work with redshift. They have a method importing a vdb file for a volume shader, but maya doesn’t support exporting to vdb so I will have to look into plugins and solutions for that then we will see.

While I have put this project on a hold for a bit I ended up having fun trying to make the sootball from spirited away. I haven’t used much fur/ hair before so that was a small fun experiment to play with xgen masking out areas and playing around with the settings to I got something I liked. I know the hairs look a bit messier than it is suppose to, but I felt this gave more the right feel for the character when translated to 3D. I am still working on the eyes, then it could be fun to rig it and set it up in a scene.:)

On the other hand at home I have just started a 30 day trial of Modo to try another 3D software and see how it works in comparison to Maya. So far it seems really interesting, much less floating windows and clearer more modern interface. However, it is still very confusing to navigate around in, so to motivate myself I have made myself an aim to try to model Zangetsu (sword from bleach). It should be fairly simple, but it is taking a while due to my own frustration over not finding the buttons.XD But the softwares are continuously in development so it is handy to learn some different ones to be able to keep up with the times and learn how to pick up different softwares.

Nevertheless, I am now gaining a lot more respect for my colleague (not that I didn’t respect him before) for his struggles with maya after he has worked many years in Softimage. Even through I know what I have to and want to do it really can be challenging getting used to a new interface and different system.

Alright time for a new update, I am so slow with this. I am still working as a junior 3D generalist at Gimmick VFX, and learning new stuff everyday. It is still challenging and has its tiring and frustrating moments, but still enjoyable as well. Especially being able to see the completed results after weeks of hard work. There has been several releases since my last post so here comes all the last videos I participated in the production of. There was a lot of challenges lately since we recently switched from vray to redshift. So our whole shading library has been converted and tweaked several times through this projects.

The videos are sorted from the most recent project first and oldest work at the bottom, the oldest one was rendered in vray all the other ones was in redshift.

I have participated to various degrees with the videos. Common for all of them is that I assigned the shaders, connected up the textures and miscellaneous fixes when needed, but I will add some lines about what I personally did for each movie under each.

In this one I tidied up in background making sure it looked right through each shot. Adding stuff and removing stuff according to what was needed.

Same as above.

Same as above.

Here I made and exporting skyplanes for the background, so houdini artist could make the galaxy and then I imported each one back into maya to render.

In this movie I modelled the metal thing to the right.

Here I helped with some asset building.

Here I exported alembics for the water effect.

Same environment as the one two vids above.

In this video I built the background and some of the assets, satt up the scene and rendered it out.

For this movie I textured the background and assets, satt up the scene with the assets, lighted the scene and rendered it. This was my first time setting up lighting (well in a professional setting), and as can be seen there is definitely potential for improvement, but the shading library was also adjusted a lot after this luckily as everything seems a bit to shiny.

That was it for now I will try to update more soon. It will soon be summer holiday and my contract expires so we will see where I end up afterwards. At the moment I am enjoying the early summer weather that has surprised us here in Copenhagen. This is the warmest Mai/ start of June in many years so it has been a bit heavy in work with a boiling office.

It is so exciting to work in a fast paced environment with products being released rapidly. It never gets boring with various tasks so I never work on the same thing for a long time. Still a project the company I work for and I have been working on for the last couple of months has finally been released. It is a higher quality than we have time for on most projects and has taken quite a while due to this, but that’s why it is even more rewarding to finally see the completed products. For this movies I helped a lot on the environment, modelling and shading props, switching out the shaders on the products and some small stuff here and there with exporting alembics and rendering masks etc.  I have added the link to were the original videos can be found below each clip.

Nexo knight

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I finally completed my master degree in animation. It still feels unnatural to say I am a master in Animation as I still know I have a lot more to learn, however maybe that is part of having a master degree. As I have always felt the more you learn about something the more you realise there is yet to learn. However, it definitely feels nice to finally be finished.

Here is the final video. I was happily surprised to discover vimeo now accepts 360 videos.

To see the process of the project you can check my project blog here.

Now to the next chapter and work on portfolio and work applications. After a small celebration, break at the moment I am back in the Netherlands at a friends place as we are going to a kpop concert today. No judgement please, it just makes me SO happy to listen to even though it is quite different from what I normally would pick. Therefore I am really looking forward to the Block B concert in Amsterdam later today. I will be staying with my friend in the Nederlands for a couple more days hopefully also having the opportunity to meet up with other friends before travelling on to the UK meeting up with my boyfriend. It is so nice to be a bit away from the computer travelling around and not having to worry about the master project which have been hanging over my head for the last year. 🙂

After having worked on the master project for so long I needed a break to just do something completely different. Therefore to push myself to explore a different style I continued on an old realistic looking orange model to explore how I could edit it together with a photo. For a first proper experiment with a more realistic style I am quite happy with it, even though I know it has some potential for improvements particularly with the lighting and editing. A better photo could also easily have been taken with a proper camera instead of just a phone, but it worked for its purpose. The models was made in Maya with texturing in Zbrush and editing in Photoshop.

For me this picture sums up a typical winter scenery with coffee, oranges, snow on the trees surrounded by wooden houses some of the elements that helps make the winter warm and cozy.

For the last 6 months on my bachelor I will be working on my thesis as well as two different practical works. The thesis ties both the practical projects together within the topic of costume design. One of the projects is a group project were I am working together with a classmate to create a short animation. In this project we have bought pre rigged characters to be able to save time, but we are still giving them a makeover in the form of new clothes to give the characters the feeling we are after. The other project however is a personal project in the form of a comic made in 3D this project focuses on modelling and texturing and will have a supernatural creature from Norway in focus. In this project the creature and clothes will be designed together. So as can be seen this is two very different projects and with very different aims, but I believe both can be useful for me to learn from in two different ways.

Nisseworld (blog)
This is a project which aims to tell about the Scandinavian creature Nisse’s characteristics and its function in our society. It will be told though a series of still pictures rendered from the 3D software Maya. The setting while be an old norwegian barn, with semi realistic colours to give the feeling of that this could be real in some way.