Reference Drawings 1

Hi. Oi. Hallo. Hej.

This is the reference image that I am using to make my minaret.

I laid out the primitives on Maya already but I forgot to render it. I will update this blog later to include that image.

Anyways, I think that maybe a minaret might be too simple. So should I have the personal bandwidth, I would like to maybe do a tank. Or Totoro or something.

Post 4: NURBS

Logo: This Adobe logo was much harder than it first appeared. I mean, the text in itself was really difficult, and I'm not sure that I've got the whole NURB curve thing down yet. I had to do this is several pieces too, but it was nice that Maya was able to recognize positive and negative space when you make curves within curves into planes. That definitely made things a lot easier.

Also, the gray is supposed to be white, but I think because of the lighting, it came out that color. Meh.

Revolve and Extrude: I did several of these before i decided that I finally wanted to render this image. You know, I did your standard wine glass for the revolve thing. I even made that spinning top Leonardo DiCaprio uses in Inception. For extrusion, I made tunnels and tunnels and more tunnels. But here, I rendered a bowl (a simple half U shape rotated around the axis) and some macaroni bits (a circle extruded along an arc). I wanted to fill the bowl entirely with macaroni but it proved much more time consuming than I originally planned. So there are, like... six.

Loft: I figured most people would make terrains with this loft tool, so I decided to think outside the box a little and make a neat little witches hat. In all, I had four roughly sketched out circles. Then I lofted it, added some silk texture and voila! A witch's hat!

Post 3: Digital Painting

This was a pretty difficult assignment. I'm not as skilled with the paintbrush tool as I'd like to be, so getting the right amount of shadows and highlights in spots was difficult. If I overdid it, it would look really splotchy. But I did my best to make it as natural looking as I could and making it look more 3D than flat.

I also tried to get in some of the color temperature in the house and in the hills. I painted over with colors along the color spectrum. For example, the house has yellows and oranges. The hills have dark greens and spring greens and white.

Anyways, enough blabbing. Here's my final work:

Post 2: The Skyspheres & the Ice Creams

The first assignment in my animation class was to make a skysphere and so I did. I mapped out a panorama of a rainy desert setting onto a sphere and rendered the following images. It's quite moody, but I couldn't help it. Hurricane Hermine WAS wreaking havoc on central Texas the night I worked on this.

I'm not sure if it's just the image, but the road in this rendered image looks kind of strange. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just me.

It turned out pretty good, ya?

Also, just for funsies, I tried to make an ice cream cone. I took a blueberry ice cream texture, mapped it onto a sphere and duplicated it to make a double scoop! Then, I tried to make a sort of waffle texture but failed. I tried to use like checker patterns and stuff, but it didn't turn out. It's just a brown cone. Oh well. At least it looks something like one. Not bad for the first time using Maya ever.

Post 1: Introduction

Hello all,

I've created this blog for my Radio-Television-Film class entitled "Computer Animation & 3-D Modeling." I'll be using the software application Maya for the first time ever, though by the end of the semester, I should be a pro at it.

For this first post, I'm to introduce myself so that my instructor and classmates can identify my blog as mine own.

My name is Edmarc Hedrick, I'm a 4th year at the University of Texas at Austin studying English and Radio-Television-Film. I have a minor in journalism and am working towards minors in Mathematics and Marketing as well (should my schedule for my last two semesters allow for it). I'm interested in too many things and think of myself as a very well-rounded individual in terms of education. In the end, I want to do marketing in tech - I want to return to Silicon Valley!

I like to run and I like to eat. I love playing board games as I am a highly competitive person. Scattegories is my favorite; I hardly ever lose at it. I like listening to music and I like going to shows as well (so long as I have the funds to attend).

I have a strange fascination with Scandinavia. Music, film, culture, people. Music includes; Familjen, ceo, El Perro del Mar, Montt Mardie, The Tough Alliance, Jens Lekman, Johnossi, Jose Gonzalez, Little Dragon, Lykke Li, Moneybrother, etc, etc.

I'm also fascinated by electronic/house/techno/dubstep, but listen to anything and everything. If you have any recommendations, send me a comment and I'll check them out.

So I got off tangent a little. My subsequent posts won't be like this. I'll be putting up my work. I'm super stoked about learning this program and then sharing it with you all.

Cheers!

-Edmarc

EDIT (8/31)

I believe I was supposed to also post up links to my old work. Well, to be honest, I don't have any film work to show off. I do, though, have some of my photography to show. A lot of the newer ones on my flickr are mobile photos I took while in the Bay Area this summer so to find the gems, you have to look through my older photos. I also used to regularly update my tumblr with advertisements that I really liked. Maybe I'll get that going again sometime soon!