CAGD 250

ZBrush Unit

This was the final unit of the class, the homestretch towards the end of the semester. Over the past month or so we were given 2 assignments to test our skills with ZBrush Core Mini. I had the full version of ZBrush which gave me more liberty to make what I wanted, but despite that advantage I still felt helpless in this unit. 

The first assignment of the unit, before we really learned anything about the program was to create a biped or quadruped creature. I thought there would be more instruction or even a demo, but we really just jumped right into the program. 

This was the monster I decided to pick, I figured it would be relatively simple to make given it's extruded limbs. However, I realized in this assignment that I still didn't know much about the program, I had to ask about how to extrude arms even though I'm sure it was a concept that was covered earlier. 

From the concept to the final I struggled to get the details into the model. I was so focused on making it not symmetrical that I ended up making it symmetrical. Makes no sense when I write it out, but that is what actually happened. I started trying to get the blue lines for the body, but I was unable to get lines that looked like those in the reference, so I stopped after connecting the pattern to the arms. Overall despite these problems, and the fact that I struggled with any art that is not modeling, I still felt that the final render came out pretty decent. My creature concept turned from a creature more into a grasshopper/mantis. 

The final assignment of the semester was to sculpt a human head bust. I was horrified since I struggled to make the simplistic creature above correctly. So how would I fair with a fully detailed human head? Better than I expected in all honestly, I gathered some side and front views of faces and got to work. The end goal of this assignment for me was to create Draxx from the Guardians of the Galaxy squad. 

 

This was what I started with, nothing much. However, once I got this form I felt extremely relieved since I got the general outline despite me worrying about my ZBrush skill. This was the start of many revisions and images that I could share but it would be like 24 images. Instead I'll show another in progress, and then the final render.

These images showed great progress from the original images and boosted my confidence to just keep going until I reached a final product. I had no idea what I was doing with facial features, so this was a massive shot in the dark for me, but I felt my shot hit pretty well.

The facial features took me some time, but ultimately they were not hard to make. I had symmetry on for the whole head, even after I finish all the facial features. In order to break the symmetry I decided to only turn it off after the features were done so that I could tweak them with the move tool accordingly. There are some details that I missed of course which would make it more life like, but I really like my end result. I do believe that my bust has similarities to Draxx, maybe not an exact replica but I could tell it was him from looking. 

With these assignments done, I feel like I was able to tackle my fear of experience, and art in ZBrush. However, that is still not my area of expertise, so I think I'll stray away from that workflow and let someone else more skilled in that form of art take the wheel. I want to focus on the modeling and not really on the sculpting side. This was a fun experience though and despite not giving much instruction on creating the creature or human bust. I felt that the lack of demos actually helped me in the long run due to me attempting something I would not have thought of ever doing in my free time. It shows me that I can do it, but I feel that a more art focused person should do this instead so that the work can be done quickly. In the end though, I felt the skill of knowing how to make a human head is a nice tool to keep in my back pocket.

Compositing Unit

Over the past month or so we were given a variety of assignments that tested our skills in compositing. I want to highlight a few that challenged me and gave me problems in the long run. 

The CGI Image Render was an interesting assignment to tackle since it was my first real attempt at blending layers to create a completely different end product. 

I struggled with trying to capture a neat looking color combination on this character to really bring out the charm. I was focused on creating a colorful creature, but in fact I found my comfort zone with a duller color pallet. However, the background was questionable, but I tried my best at the time, I don't think it came out half bad considering this was my first composite.

The next assignment that caught me off guard was the MatchToLife car lab, this was such a tough challenge because the tutorial utilized parts of Maya that I have never seen before.

This assignment also introduced me to after effects which was a learning curve, but in the end after some trial and error I figured it out and got a decent end result. I really liked that assignment as it was an interesting challenge.

The final challenge was the Compositing Capstone Assignment. I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what clip I wanted to attempt. My original thoughts were to do a variation on a sample video so that I could add a story, but after thinking about it more the video idea I had would have caused more problems that I would have liked. Examples of those problems are shadow, lighting from the flashlight that was in my original idea, and reflections from my glasses. 

My final idea was to utilize a statue that I owned and shrink myself to act surprised when looking at the statue. I think the end product came out great, there is one problem that I was not able to figure out, and that was add a proper shadow to my walk. I tried to add a shadow, but it was a copy of my clip so it just started walking off in another direction. I also tried adding a light to help brighten me up, but after trying it I realized that the light was breaking the blend between me and the background, because of that I scrapped the light and left it as it was. This assignment was really fun and helped give me a better perspective on the world of compositing and editing.

 Editing Capstone Assignment

Hi my name is Matthew Montalvo and I was assigned to edit some footage into a full edited video. I was given the choice between 5 short films, I decided to go with Bully for the reason that it had a storyboard that I could follow.

I overall did not believe this assignment would be very difficult, I did however predict that this assignment would take a good amount of time to finish. I made decent progress on the assignment when I put all of the clips together at their appropriate times, the video ended up around 90 seconds of film, which fulfills the 60-120 second window. 

I managed to get some pretty cool transition shots and decent overall flow in the film, but I had one major problem that I needed to solve. I realized towards the end of the assignment window that the Bully short film had almost no audio files that I could insert as background noise or even sound effects for that matter. The way I solved this issue was to take the cleanest background audio from each shot I used, and then insert it into each scene. I made sure on specific scenes where the audio was to loud to lower it to match a similar tone as the other scenes. 

I did however miss a few key sound effects that tied the film together due to a lack of planning on my end, there was a sound effect for the kid being called over for dinner. I actually never used that file and had a scene where the bully watched the kid go away from his toy with no context. I also never inserted a gorilla sound effect (or an equivalent since that sound effect was not in the files) for the kid when he destroys the car, and a sound effect for the car alarm. Those could have given more effect to the film, but I still feel that it flowed overall pretty well despite those flaws.

This project overall was a fun experience and gave me a great insight into the art of video editing, it is not a practice for everyone, but I enjoyed my time in the project. EditMentor was a great resource that helped me learn the basics of video editing, and also helped navigate Adobe Premiere throughout the creation of this video project. I'm sure these skills will help me in the future if I ever need to create any videos for YouTube or the games that I create.