Burning Barrel

Pretty sure the 'Hello World' of the VFX industry is setting things on fire. So made some fire in UDK's Cascade engine, which as expected was infinitely more robust and customizable than Unity's Shuriken. Though I'm glad I learned on Shuriken first.

Fire sprite sheet was generated by Positech Games' neato Explosion Generator.

Crate Teleportation

Finished effect in AfterEffects. Did some color correction so the crate looks like it fits in a bit better.

AfterEffects Teleportation In Progress

Following along with an AfterEffects tutorial on Digital Tutors making an alien teleport around. Except I wanted to use my own footage and not use any of the supplied files so I'm teleporting a crate into this shanty town.

Emergency supplies or something. From space.

3DS Max Couch

Haven't really modeled anything in a while and boy do those skills get rusty if you don't use them. Here's a really spectacularly terrible couch I made in Maya:

I've been trying to learn 3DS Max as well as Maya so I figured this was a perfect time to do some tutorials and make myself a couch in Max. I do really like the Max interface better than Maya, but I know my way around Maya better.

Anyway, here's the couch I made in Max. There's a lot of turbosmoothing going on here, along with some push/pull vertex painting to make the rumpled looking cushion. Unfortunately I don't know how to UV in Max so this is going back into Maya for cleanup and texturing.

Chipped Rock Floor

Made this chipped rock floor in 3ds Max while following along with another Digital Tutor lesson. Very first time using Max and it seems pretty handy for blocking things out like this.

In progress blocking in Max:

 

Took my tiled block pattern into Z-brush and sculpted about half the blocks, then back into Max and duplicated the sculpted ones along the blocked out guidelines I made.

 I generated all the maps in Max with Render to Texture, then made an additional grungy normal map in Knald based off a photo I took of fishsticks I made that burnt to a baking sheet:

 
Finally I brought the whole thing into UDK and combined the two normal maps for finer detail.

And the final result:

Finished Dinosaur

Dino is all  finished. Used procedural nodes to texture the eyes, teeth and gums, and added some spec. Here's the maps, a viewport screenshot and the final renders.

Diffuse:

 Bump:

 Spec:

Dinosaur Day 2

Almost done with this guy. About 10 more tutorial videos to go. I'm done with the body bump map, still need to do the mouth and claws. And his eyes obviously.

Velociraptor Demo in progress

Been working through a really nice tutorial over on Digital Tutors, texturing a Velociraptor. ( This tutorial) I converted the provided model from SubD's (which I don't know what those are) to polygons just because it was easier for me to work with. This is also the first time I've used Maya's 3D painting to fix seams which worked better than expected, though a little blurred.

And after day one (8 lessons out of 35) this is what iI've got: