Update

I've been very busy as of late and, to be honest, I still am. I applied for a 2nd course at my university, so if I'll manage to qualify, I'll be attending two courses simultaneously. I applied for industrial design, so I would have classes like drawing, painting, sculpting, etc. Pretty damn neat.

All the things I was working on are on low priority right now but I promise to get back to them as soon as possible. More news next week.

Logo change animation (WiP)

Right now I'm working on an animation that I want to release before my next project. It's going to be a sort of a transition, between my current "logo" and a new real one that I've recently come up with. My current "logo" or maybe more of a recognizable thing that I've used in my movies, is based on a quake 3 advert that I scanned from a gaming magazine ages ago.

The animation I'm working on, will show this scene, falling apart, and my new logo rising from the smoke. The idea itself is quite neat, but actually doing it, is quite tricky. To set up the scene in 3ds max, I'm using free stock 3d models that I found on the archive3d site. I had to scale up each of the models and put them in their place. This alone takes a lot of time, I'm not done yet, but here's what I've put together so far.

As you can see the models aren't the same as the ones in the advert, a lot of elements are missing, but I'll take care of it. I've already cut out some parts of the ad that I'm going to use as a background in the 3d scene. Then, I'll have to animate everything, make it fall apart. Then comes rendering. To be honest with you, I don't know how to make things look photorealistic.. YET! It's something I really want to learn and I'll be reading into it more soon. Then smoke some comes in, I'll most likely add it in AE since I've already found a nifty tutorial on it.

This all might still take a while, but I'll learn a lot of new things on the way, which I'll be able to use in my future projects. This animation will be quite a milestone. More news soon.

Sup

Just wanted to give everyone a little heads up. I've been a bit busy these days. I moved back home to stay here for a while. Before that, I was messing around with my new logo, because I want to get it on the site and get rid of that ugly under construction banner. I was also playing around with dm17, replacing the textures and stuff. Basicly, preparing things for my next movie project. The rocket launcher remake priority is lower now, first I'd have to finish that hard surface tutorial (which is awesome by the way). More news soon.

Rocket Launcher remake - part 4

I didn't finish the detailing yet, after a while my hand began to hurt a bit, I was using my girlfriend's graphic tablet and I'm not used to it yet. Anyway, the details are sketched out, and I've added some gray here and there to make the metal parts look a bit like metal.

I don't like how the details look sort of organic right now, I'll have to read a bit about hard surface sculpting.

Few days ago Paul Steed passed away, he was a very talented 3D game artist mostly known for his work at Id software with the first three quakes. I picked up a book of his about modeling and animating game characters. It's a fun read and I'm learning a lot too. In the following week I'll try to model a low-poly character. Not sure about the theme yet, but I'll figure something out.