Alec Figueroa's self portrait

The image above is a work in progress of a self portrait of my face. First I started with a base mesh of a head in Mudbox. I had a frontal view and a profile view in Autodesk Maya and moved the vertices around the muscular structure of my face. it was a challenge in doing so because I needed to keep the edge flow/topology consistent and make sure no vertices were flying off in random space in my perspective. I sculpted a bit of the lips, ears, nose, and a little bit of the border of the eyes. I didn't have time to take the UV's into photoshop and give it texture, which is why this is still a w.i.p. I also added hair, but that is a w.i.p. too. It was much, but I could have gone a bit further if I hadn't slown down at parts of the process.

Animation Project

It seems that the 30s animation project is due this week at Gallery. Well I thought I would tell the story of how the animation came to be before I show it. I made this animation using the dimension I love to work in; 3d. First I was going to do it this project in flash but I wanted to test what I could actually do in Autodesk Maya. I learned a few modeling techniques on the web to help me model my character. I started trying to approach a storyline for the character I had made on my computer...I went with propaganda. I chose this because it was something that I was studying in my contemporary American history class and I wanted to try it out. After I had made the storyboard, I started off using a Maya 'mocap' example to get me accelerated in the right direction. I started animating afterwards and then started modeling the environment, more animating, more on the environment, which wasn't a whole lot to be honest. I then textured the buildings with very basic textures I made in Photoshop. The Troubles I had in this project were animating and texturing, unwrapping, planning, rigging, rendering and some other things, but overall it gave me a better understanding of how to overcome these obstacles. Another trouble was that rendering in mental ray took a while and it would have been a pain to have transferred the textures that were not in the maya default directory, and remaking the folders on another computer to render. Another trouble was that after effects always made the composition corrupt and when I had rendered a scene and put it in after effects, it gave me a lot of editing errors. In the end the composition cranked out, but it could have been better but it sufficed. its quality is for you to decide.