Researching Resources

For this week, we need to find some online communities (other than the provided ones, such as Polycount and CG Society) involved with our chosen artistic focus.

The main one I've come across is actually the Digital Tutors community forums.

http://www.digitaltutors.com/forum/forum.php

In addition to the thousands of digital tutorials created by professionals available on the site, they also provide a forum for discussion of various tips and tricks within software, as well as a section for sharing finished and in-progress work to get feedback from others. 

Another forum that might be useful is Creative Crash.  (http://www.creativecrash.com/forums)  Although the forums appear to be slightly less active than Digital Tutors, having more resources available is never a bad thing.

Finally, I'll leave you with a tangent related to one of my other interests: comic art.  The Digital Webbing forums, (located at http://www.digitalwebbing.com/forums/) provide a similar community focused around comic art critiques, collaborations, and even the opportunity to find others for paid work. 

Ethics of Character and Personality

For today's blog post, I've been tasked with examining my own personal ethics, in terms of both character and personality.  In general, I'd say I'm pretty ethical, but let's go a bit (i.e., a lot) more in depth and see what my strengths and weaknesses are, at least in my own mind. 

The current module in class defines character ethics in the following terms:  Integrity, Humility, Fidelity, Temperance, Courage, Justice, Patience, and Industry.  I'll speak a bit about each of these.

Integrity:  I'd like to think I have a great deal of integrity.  If I say I'm going to do something, I do it.  I'm usually early with it too.  If I'm not sure that I can perform a task, I'll make it known, and I usually won't commit to a deadline unless I know I can meet it.

Humility:  Anyone who knows me will know that I have humility.  Probably too much so.  I don't often like to talk about myself or accomplishments, and I hate being "that guy" who has to point out something awesome he's done.  Unfortunately, it can often get me overlooked; it's something I'm trying to work on, although that probably goes more with the courage discussion a bit later.

Fidelity: I have fidelity in as much as I can do work independently, and don't require someone around to check up on me.  If I had to find a weakness in this category, I'd say while alone I tend to multitask (ie watching TV, or listening to a podcast) while working.  It doesn't really interfere with my work quality, but in the interest of being honest, I figured I'd include it in the discussion.

Temperance: I'm very quiet.  I usually don't speak up, so if I do, you know it's a serious problem.  I tend to take everything in and then put together an argument.  I think I'm a bit more immediate in writing/online, but even then I find myself writing and rewriting comments/messages before sending them.

Courage:  At first, I was going to say I have very little courage, but after re-reading the module, I'd say I actually just have a lot of fear.  I can overcome it if and when I need to, but the feeling doesn't really go away.  I tend to be very quiet when out of my comfort zone, but if I need to speak or otherwise present myself, I can do it. 

Justice: I'm very fair to others. Not sure what else there is to say about this one.

Patience: I used to have a lot of trouble with patience.  Lately however, thats started to change as I've found that I learn more and become more comfortable with my existing skills, when showing others how to do them.

Industry: My work ethic is probably the strongest one of these on the list.  I've always got tons of things going on and work very hard to complete them all.

Now we'll turn to personality ethics, which basically comes down to how pleasant you are to be around.

I tend to be a positive person, and try to do the right thing at all times.  My dad always told me that before you can do anything, "you gotta know what you're doing", and I really try to.  I'd much rather be the guy that knows whats going on, and helps get others up to speed, rather than bring people down.

The weakness in my personality is probably outward appearance/expressions.  Sometimes I look like I'm mad or sad when I'm actually just very neutral or thinking about something.  I tend to have to force facial expressions, as they don't usually match up to my internal feelings.  I'm just a bit awkward that way, so it's something I do have to consider.

I think that's about all I can say in relation to my ethical background, character and personality.  Obviously these could be skewed more towards what I want to be or how I think I am, but I'd hope people see me at least mostly in the same light.

Assignment 2.2 - Self Critique

 

I'll be honest, this car is one of my favorite pieces, and I don't have a whole lot of critique for it.  I was learning a new modeling workflow (starting with curves to create NURBS and then converting to polygons afterwards) and I think it was very successful.  If I had to nitpick, I think the headlights look pretty flat, almost like decals, even though there are definitely many modeled pieces in there.  It's probably an issue with the materials/textures used.


The animation of the robot is another really successful piece that I'm proud to show off.  I haven't done a lot of compositing, so I was happy that it came along easily.  As for some critique points I've thought about as I look at it now, I think the animation itself looks a little stiff, even for a robot.  Also, I probably could've done a better job with the reflections of the room in the robot's limbs itself.  To save time, I used the same background image, rather than using an image of the other side of the room.

This image shows the evolution of my design for the robot in the last video.  I think the final model was pretty faithful to the original design, and I managed to keep it pretty low poly in general, which helped with render times.  If anything, I would critique my original sketch, since it didn't address all of the issues with the robot's construction.  I had to solve some design problems (such as the robot's joints, and how they were attached) while modeling, which is never a good thing.

 

Here we have a self portrait... and it looks like me.  The major critique I have here is that some hair cards and/or hair geometry would've made it slightly more realistic.  I played with a few variations, but had to cut them in the interest of time.  Overall, I still like it though, and think it looks pretty good for a low poly game resolution model.

Moving on to the full body self portrait, I think it may be a bit too low poly.  I relied too heavily on photographic texture, and didn't use enough texture in the zbrush sculpt / bump map itself. 

Here we have a regular plain old crate.  The successful part is the fact that it is extremely low poly and will work great in the game engine.  The rough part is the low resolution on the textures, creating a pixelated look.  Ideally, I could've found some way to smooth out the image/angles or redesign the pattern so that it wouldn't look so jaggy in the close up.  Luckily, it won't be viewed that closely in game.

This is a game environment running in Unreal Development Kit.  I think it worked out pretty well, although maybe I could've done a little more.  It might've been nice to see some other buildings between the main scene and the far away billboards.

The low poly trash can looks decent.  I think the difference in specularity between dirt and metal is pretty good, but I think the lid needed a little more detail.

Here's a character design.  While I like the design as a whole, something seems off in the perspective of the guy's arms.  For some reason the shading/coloring on the boots stand out well, while the rest seems to go a little flat in places.

Here's some hand drawings.  I like them, and think they're pretty accurate.  To make them better, I think some light shading could go a long way.

This is a clothed figure drawing in charcoal.  It's one of my favorite drawings I created during my clothed figure drawing class. However, I think some of the shading goes a little flat in the darker areas.

This is another drawing of the same model (who's actually a friend of mine).  While I think its a strong drawing, I believe the angle of her foot, and possibly hand seem a bit off.

This drawing is more of a study in shape, so there's not much to crit.  It would look much better without the smudges, but time hasn't been good to it.

Double Clicked Comics is a webcomic that I created along with a friend of mine.  The image above is the cover of a printed collection of strips that we did a few years ago.  I don't have a critique of the design as whole, since it was using previously created art from our strips, but in printing, the blue ended up really deep, and I think it could've used a slightly lighter shade.

This Charger model isn't as well created as the Camaro (its much, much older), but I really like the shader I created for the paint.  I think the car would work well as a background piece, but it's lacking a lot of the details that it would need to be featured.

This is a pretty cool photograph I took for a photography class.  It actually won a contest and was featured in the Pingyao International Photo Festival.  If I had to do it again, however,  I would've considered the reflection in the plasma ball.  If you look closely, you can see the interior of my dorm room at the time, and it's not very interesting.  There probably could've been some really cool interactions if I'd paid more attention to the reflection.

And we'll end the critique with a stump.  It's a pretty decent ZBrush model, but I think maybe the texture smaller grooves could've been accentuated some more than they are.

First!

Hey all, I'm Ryan and this is a blog I've created for GAM 631 at Academy of Art University.

I'm supposed to write something describing my aspirations in both life and the class, which is actually pretty convenient, since my main goal is the same in each so here goes nothing:

Don't fail.