Secret Agent: Update

Here's a more final version of my Secret Agent, with a slightly different camera angle, and lighting re done.

Update On Kitchen

Here's an update on my Kitchen Scene

Kitchen Lighting

So here was my first real assignment for the CG society Workshop I am in. I'm learning so much about lighting, can't wait to learn more.

WIP Agent

Starting to come together just need to get the hair done, and do some little details

Jet Pack W.I.P

Gun W.I.P.

Another piece of the project I am currently working on.

Bridge W.I.P.

Project that I'm currently working on, lots more work to do!

Old Guy

Just messing around with Zbrush one night.

Hair Test

So here's my final test for the hair this round. It was pretty fun practicing hair, very difficult too. I have realize I need to do a lot more referencing for some hair, and just study it a bit more. All in all, a fun learning experience.

First day of summer break...

Really want to mess with Zbrush over the break, so I figured I'd get started early. Lots more Zbrush to come!

Volcano Eruption

Volcano from Manny Gonzales on Vimeo.

Volcano Eruption made in Maya and Real Flow.

Camp Fire

Camp Fire from Manny Gonzales on Vimeo.

Camp Fire I made in visual effects class.

Fur Test

Fur Test from Manny Gonzales on Vimeo.

Fur assignment for class. Used Maya fur attached to the Maya hair system to add the dynamics.

nCloth Fun!

nCloth Fun from Manny Gonzales on Vimeo.

Used some nCloth for some curtains in class, Hope I get to use more of it in the future.

Flea

Flea for my 3D studio class

Mosquito

Mosquito for my 3D studio class

Dog

Here's a Dog that I modeled for my 3D Studio class.

Junkyard Model

This is a model that I created for my 3D studio class, It was designed by Lesley Sierra, (check her blogspot work) unfortunately we decided to go another direction, so this character will no longer be used. I do plan on texturing him and maybe doing a little animation just for fun.

Material and Lighting

As the quarter comes to an end it means its that time for wonderful final projects. Here Is my Material and lighting final. I Find myself being able to do these projects faster and faster, which is nice because I can put much more of the final and little details that I would like to put in. The project was like usual we take a pic and then have to re create it.

I think The most changeling part of this project was trying to get the shadows dark enough in the near corner while keeping the stairs and poles still visible, I managed by using some final gather cubes, and adjusting the material attributes a little.



You can see the floor is almost completely blown out from the sun, or maybe my camera just did it, but I couldn't get it to do that in Maya, so I retouched the photo a little in photoshop a little just to color correct some things.

ste-ROID

This was the second project of my material and lighting class. We had to come up with a object/character with the style of a movie or cartoon. So obviously I chose the theme from the Pixar movies Cars. I Loved the characters in that movie how each had there own persona. Being the sports person that I am thought of the idea of a football car character jacked up on some steroids. I went through some ideas in my head, like what kind of car to make, and what aspects of a football should I add to the car. I knew I wanted the facemask, and the football helmet shape. So9 I decided to go along the look of a SUV like car, since they have a big look, but can also have some speed. Its modeled slightly after a range rover. Most of the cars in the movie aren't exact replicas of real cars, most of them had softer edges, and more roundness to them. So that's what I was trying to go for with this character. The body of the car is shaped like a helmet, so it has the stripe down the middle, and a logo on the side.

The lighting was much simpler then the bathroom sink project. It's basically just a 3 point light setup, with a key, a fill and a back light. I had to add another fill light in the front because of the shape of the car, it left the front of the mouth area in too much darkness. Next came the reflection of lights. In the movie, when lightning McQueen is racing, you can see all the lights from the stadium reflecting of his body. I wanted to create that effect too.

I made a stadium like setup with the spotlights you would see from a stadium. I put point lights on them and turn there diffuse attribute off so it wouldn't wash out Roid, but still reflect off him. I then made 6 copies or so and circled it around him giving the effect of stadium lights. The project came out the way I wanted it to. I wish I had more time with it though, It was during finals and I had to get some other projects done, but I plan on rigging it after I finish my rigging class, then I can play with it a little more.

Material and Lighting

This was a class assignment I did last quarter for material and lighting. Beginning that quarter of school I told my self to start pushing myself in my work. I felt that before that I was just kinda hanging around. So I took it upon myself to really go above and beyond on the first assignment of the class, and i think I achieved my goal.





The image to top is the original picture I took from my digital camera of my dirty bathroom. The picture to the bottom is done in 3D. I modeled, lit, textured and rendered it on my own. The modeling wasn't too difficult except for the sink, reasons being is that I think the image had some sort of distortion on it because I measured my sink for its dimensions and everything, and my model just didn't match up with the picture. So i ended up just deforming the sink to look like it did. So from any other angle the sink would look like a misshapen oval.

The most difficult part by far was the lighting. The picture had a mixture of hard and soft shadows. But my bathroom only had 2 lights in the room, so I had to figure out how to get some of the objects to cast soft shadows and others hard. I went through many trials and errors, and I'm so glad, i learned so much from this project, that now i find myself getting through lighting and texturing stuff so much faster. I used some basic light linking to get the right shadows from all the objects but will still getting the shadows a light Grey color. I then found that I can turn the shadow intensity to a negative value!! This made a little light bulb in my head go off and knew that I could change the light intensity so low that it wouldn't effect the overall materials and then crank up the negative shadow, resulting in a very dark shadow, while keeping the the ones I wanted light.


After that It was just a process of trial and error trying to get everything to look right. The textures were pretty simple. Just used a UV layout program and applied the right textures to what I think I saw. I wish i spent more time on them though. Overall i fell that this project came out as a success. there are still something to me that jump and I think "wow! that looks horrible!" but I'm sure I will feel like that on 90% of my projects.

Super Jump

My assignment super jump, kind of want to polish it out a little more, but we'll see. I'll have a render coming soon also!

super jump

Here's my jump animation so far. It's just the key poses so far and the timing is still a little rough.

Material and lighitng scene

So here's an update for my first project in advanced texture and lighting. We basically had to have a scene, model it, light and texture. All the textures have to be hand painted, I mean physically hand painted with paint and a paint brush. Hopefully I have time to do that, or else I'll just have to use good ol' photoshop. The scene is coming around pretty good. There are A lot of things that are annoying me right now though...

For one, the time, Pretty sure the project is due next monday and I really don't know if I will be able to get done all that I want out of this project.

2. Mental ray is a time waster. Since we are using mental ray the render times have gone up, since I upgraded my computer recently it doesn't takes as long as usual, about 2 or 3 minutes a render with global illumination turned on.

however...

3. FINAL GATHER IS F****ing with me. For some reason when I turn on Final gather my whole scene gets Waaaaaay darker??? and best of all, when I turn final gather on to see if the changes I made were good, the render time ballons to about 25 minutes!!!

All in all though I will manage, Luckily my other classes are cake so I can put most of my focus on this doozy.

Trick or Treat

Well its been a busy week for me. Loaded with school, two internships and work. While all this is going on I decided to enter a monthly competition on the Gnomon Workshop forums, and with only 6 days left in the competition!! So the last 6 days I've been working on this small project. I've never had to cut so many corners, and fake so much stuff. lol But it was a learning situation for me. I have noticed my modeling skills or not only getting better, but much much faster. I plan it out and just do it. I see myself doing less thinking about how or which way and just do it.

The contest theme was ghost and ghouls. I figured most would do a horror like entry so I wanted mine to be different so I decided to be a little more comedic. I wanted a little girl going trick or treating to be scared by a little boy trying to take peoples candy! I Feel that I ended up doing a really good job considering the time constraint I had on this project, and how little I really worked on it. Let me know what you guys think, comments suggestions, critiques?

Mental Ray

This is my first project where I knew I would be using a Mental ray render. The project was to simulate a light source that was coming from outside, inside and both, and to render each one separately. This was my outdoor render, that I think turned out the best. For me personally the hardest part was that we weren't allowed to use ANY textures!!! Only shaders and a bump map. I was practically killing myself not using a wood texture for the table, and a wine label, but I managed.

I am really excited to start using Mental Ray, I don't have a lot of experience with it, so I will be learning a lot, hopefully be getting much nicer renders!

SCEA!!! ( Sony Computer Entertainment Of America)

I just got another Internship with SCEA. I'm really excited to see what I have to do with them. Especially since my current one doesn't really seem to be getting anywhere. The hiring manager just called me and it look like right now I will either be working in the animation pipeline or perhaps the modeling and textured part. I guess how they work is that any thing that Sony is having a hard time with they send down to the San Diego section. So I could be working on anything from Video games, to to the menus, or the cinematic trailers to the games themselves. We'll see though, but I mean its SONY!! so who cares. I let all you know when I know more about my position.

Its a brid... Its a plane.... Its...

SUPERMAN!!!

So this is a project i have frankly been working on way too long. With school and work in the way I just haven't really gotten back into it. I started it around a year and a half ago and it was the first real full character I've done. It was also the first time I started using Zbrush, which I have really started to fall in love with. This is basically a copy of a design from Alex Ross's painting of superman, In the book called Mythology. It had perfect turnaround sketches of Superman and I knew once I saw them I had to make this in 3D.





I'm a huge fan of superman, so I'm trying to make this project perfect. I don't think I will ever seen it as perfect, especially since I started so long ago, when my skills weren't as good as they are now. I'm sure once I get a little bit better at character modeling ( and learn how to do hair) I will Probably scrap this whole model and try it again. I will love every second of it though. Superman was always my favorite super hero. He will always be my favorite and will probably never be satisfied with any model I do of it. But thats ok, cause at least I will always be srtiving for perfection.

Scared Lamp

Scared Lamp



Assignment for my 3d Animation Class

Potatoe Sack

Determined Potatoe Sac




My final for my first 3D animation class

Finally!!!

So I finally started a Blog with a little inspiration from other blogs, as well as from myself wanting a place where I can talk about my work. I hope to be on here regularly showing you my work, and talking about it a little. Please leave comments if you have any questions, and I will be posting some of my previous work today, getting to the stuff I'm working on now. Enjoy my site and hope to hear from all of you!!

-Manny