Day of Glory

Guess what folks? MY PORTFOLIO IS FINALLY COMPLETE!

That's right. It's been a LONG time coming, but that day has finally arrived. I finally feel like I'm ready to start shooting out those resumes. Huzzah. I just pulled an all nighter on the bike, just to make sure it got done. And done it is. It turned out to be even better than I could have hoped for, which is very exciting. Very exciting indeed. A definite shout out of thanks to my greatest ally Joe D'amico for coming through with an awesome concept to work off of. Thanks to you sir. And if ya'll want, you can check out the website for higher res pics. It's fancy.

www.ryansanderson.com


Without further adieu, I give you The Blue Bomber:




Texturing went a lot faster than I thought it would. When you have the groundwork laid out from the normal maps, it's surprising how fast you can work out all the other details. I tried to keep the colors mainly neutral, with some accent colors thrown in. Having certain parts of the bike painted blue, yellow, and white allows a conceptual reason for this to happen. You'll see little dabs of red here and there, but it doesn't overpower by any means. I also was trying not to put too much detail into the maps, which is a problem I've had in the past. This project taught me that sometimes less is more. There doesn't seem to be any part that overshadows another. You honestly don't want to know the total amount of layers I used in Photoshop for this project. I'm guessing at least a couple hundred.

The cardboard, toolbox, and wrench were thrown in last to help fill out the scene, and also to help with a little narration. I'm pretty proud of the lighting setup as well. It gives me some liberty to not worry about the background so much so that I can focus on showing off the bike. I didn't want to have a blank background for it to sit on, but I also didn't want to overcrowd the scene either.

You also might be able to tell that the normal mapping detail pops out more as opposed to before, with the overall lighting having better contrast. Messing with the shadows parameter in the postprocess editor helped to achieve this. However, you'll also notice that the shadows aren't as dark at the same time. With the amount of light that's hitting the bike, they were way too dark before. MUCH better now, I think.



Some wireframe pics thrown in for good measure to show that I model nice and clean. :)

Overall, the polycount comes in at 10k. Considering that this would be onscreen constantly, almost as much as the main character, I think it's just about right. I must say that I'm impressed with the amount of polys I was able to cut out. It was HEAVY before.



Since my computer is a total fail when it comes to rendering a lot of polys onscreen at once, I had to export each part out of Zbrush individually to composite all together in Photoshop. With a little shadow tweaking, it turned out pretty well.




And finally, some of my best sculpts individually rendered. The engine turned out REALLY nice. Added in some sexy blue. Who doesn't like sexy blue?




And that's it. DONE. So happy. SO HAPPY. Now, I go into work and try not to pass out. Coffee don't fail me now.....

What's next? Cover letters, cold emails, resumes, looking for a job. All that good stuff. Be on the lookout for some possible progress pics of a robot looking thingy for my RPG Meetup group.

Also need to order new business cards. Also need to shave. And get a haircut. I've been very bear-like lately.

Color coding

This post is about you guessed it: color. The actual texture detail isn't even close to being final (a few are close though, actually). Rather, it's just a "color pass" to get an idea for how the overall color scheme will feel.

I always envisioned the painted parts being blue, with some sort of accent throughout. I ended up using yellow and white for this. Seems like they go together well. Everything is fairly neutral, with splashes of warm and cool colors here and there. I really tried to add in some subtle coloration all throughout. If you look real closely, you can spot hints of blue and green in some of the chrome, for instance. It's all about finding that perfect balance. I think I've achieved it here more than I have in the past.

And last but not least, I've finally come up with an official name for the project. Henceforth, the bike will be forever known as "The Blue Bomber". Guess what the title references, and I'll give you a dollar. No joke.

I'll post progress pics of the texturing as they come.

Fresh, normal baked goodness

Finally, I can now say that the normal mapping is done. It's most likely gonna be the vast majority of time for the project in the long run, so it's a relief to have it finished. Though I will say that diffuse mapping is gonna be pretty time consuming as well. It's funny to think that when I first started out on this project, I thought it would take significantly less time than the desert. Silly me. If you really look at it, I really have around 70 props to make total, which rivals that of Desert Straggler. Over ambitious much? Well anyway, here's some pics. UV layouts, textures, in-game normals. It's all here. I decided to split the bike into three separate props for importing into unreal. The front of the bike, the back, and the sidecar. The images for each are 2048 x 2048, which is barely enough resolution to cover all the details found in the normal maps. Not bad I must say, considering the sheer mass of parts it has.

Bike front:

Bike back:

Sidecar:

Now it's about time I dust off all these paint brushes.

Enter the Dragon (or, insert your own, more clever phrase here)

So, as promised, here's some renders of a piece I did for Casting House. It's basically a dragon design meant to go on the side of a ring. It's all shiny and stuff. In the future, I'll probably be posting more stuff from work if it's something I think looks good. I'm sure there will be others that won't. Ha.

Credit to Steven Howell for the actual ring that the design sits on.

Details, details, details.

I must say, I really put my foot on the gas for this one. It went WAY faster then I thought it would. The detail pass for zbrushing the motorcycle is complete.

Rust, scratches, dents, welding, fading, it's all here. It's nice to know that's one major step is out of the way. I think that it was a lot easier for me to do this then adding the clean structural detail, because it's what I'm more used to doing. But, both passes come together to form a pretty solid whole, i must say. A fair warning: there's a lot of pics this time. Also, if you have a phobia of tires, I wouldn't scroll down. You've been warned.



















I tried to have certain elements that repeated throughout all the pieces to help unify it all. Bolts, a lot of scratching, and welded parts are examples of this. I tried to make each object feel like it's own thing, but I also wanted all the pieces to fit nicely together. I also tried to lean away from making every single piece beat up all to hell. You won't see most of these cleaner parts, mainly because I felt they wouldn't be interesting to put up here. Nevertheless, they help out the bike as a whole.

Next up:

1) UV layout
2) normal map baking
3) setup in unreal
4) texturing
5) screen capturing, rendering, assembling for portfolio page

The UV layout and normal baking will take some time, so you might not hear from me too soon. I might post my UV layouts just for kicks, but it's German to most people. So we'll see i guess.


Also, some random stuff in my life:

I'm proud to say that I was promoted at work! I will now no longer be supporting jewelry models. I'll be helping to actually make them from now on. The best part of it is that I'll be using Maya, Photoshop, and Zbrush to do so. So that'll be awesome. I might post up a particular piece I did. So look out for that.

I beat Portal 2. It's awesome. You should play it. Like, NOW. Valve also published a digital "book" that shows what went into making it. It's pretty rad.

My parents are coming up to see me next weekend, and they're bringing me some awesome stuff. A couch, my two cats Sam and Jake, my Nintendo 64, and an air conditioner.

:)