Monday, November 26, 2012

Star Trek and Renders


Here's a little 2-fold project, I've been playing a lot of Star Trek Online, I got into 3D modelling partly because of my love of Star Trek ships and wanting good games to fly them in. Star Trek Online is easily the biggest gaming title for Star Trek right now, and overall they've done a pretty good job. One thing that's been lacking, and is absent from most Trek games is a space 'carrier'. On the ocean carriers are used because planes have a lot more range than guns and more versatility than missiles alone. In space this would more or less be the same, and there are carriers in Star Trek Online, but there's only an alien carrier and a small carrier for the Federation, while the Kingon's have an all-out space supercarrier. So I decided to try my hand at designing a Federation carrier, and this is the design I decided to refine. I'm planning on making a 3D model of it, probably starting this week. I've called it the 'Monterey Class', in honor of Monterey, California where I spent 2 fantastic weeks boosting my animation skills back in July.
I drew the design while my computer was rendering. I realized I needed a re-render, with the addition of ambient occlusion passes, and a wireframe pass of my best models to bring my modelling portfolio up to speed. So you may have seen these before, but now they have those additional passes composited in. I still have to do this for my models of Mantel, Avalon and my old Goaticorn model, but those models are lighter so they shouldn't take as long. The airship Ecclesia also has it's AO and wire passes done, I just have to redo the 'beauty' pass (that's the regular color one for the non-3D inclined)

So as mentioned, content is coming back! The deadline for various internships at Disney is this Friday, which is the main reason for this push. I'm glad I started these renders last week, with just my lil' ol' computer for rendering power, it's taking quite a while to pump these out. I have one or two new model projects, but there's no way either of them will be done by Friday, so I'm focusing on refining what I already have.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

This is still a blog

Yes I am still alive, now that image above is a painting I did over a photo. Just something I did out of the blue (or, red) and decided "Hey, the blog needs some love, so let's throw this up there".

So I've been looking for some sort of 3D job for a few months now, a couple leads have come up but nothing's clicked yet. I've started a few model projects to boost my portfolio, none of which are quite far enough yet to put up some progress shots, but their getting there.

So as might be apparent, I've definitely been in a massive art rut. I've done plenty of art between now and, well April, but not half as much as I could have done. Anyways, I think I'm starting to restart my engines, going to be doing a re-render of my train model, with wireframe and an AO pass so hopefully, if that works and doesn't take all of tomorrow, that should be up tomorrow.

Anyways, reviving this blog!