Final renders - Vivus town house

So despite the fact that I didn't finish what I expected to do at the beginning, I'm pretty happy of how the final renders look:

 

It looks quite different after you render it up. This is just me playing with a beauty and occlussion pass so I'll definately finish the scene just as a practice. Details that I notice when wrong is the texture in the sign; I'm guessing is the flare deformation that could have altered because it look fine in previous rendering test. I could have also add some deformation to the roof to avoid making it look so asian-like. 

Pandore

On the clouds of the mythic Mount Olympus, a young girl unleashes a dangerous monster from a mysterious box. Is he match for the little devil that set him free? 

A pretty cute and funny animation produced at GOBELINS, l'ecole de l'image in 2009. The closest style I can think of is Zelda wind waker, but never the less, I'm a big fan of this kind of animation. The texturing matches the style in a unique way and the whole cartoony way is really charming.
The monster in specific is the character that I believe had more work on, as his movements are really well done, it has a lot of personality and the design itself is fantastic.

Credits: Created, Directed and Animated by Meryl Franck, Elen Le Tannou, Nicolas Caffarel, Marion Stinghe, Benoit Guillaumot. Sound design by Vincent Hazard. Voice of monster by Das Panzer Benz, Girl Voice by Kaycie Chase. Music by Pascal Franck (Mathilde Alloubert on harpe, Isabelle Hebrard on flutes, Gae Ascal (mastering and remix). Sound Effects by Andre Fevre, Sound engineer Clement Naline.

Final Product

Final web product :)
The music by the altar was made by my good friend Manuel. It was awesome finally working with him in a project.
I hope you can give me some feedback, and just remember that is just meant to be an environment, so don't expect much of it.  FEEDBACK PLEASE!!!

Unity Web Player | Quetzalcoatl_WEB

« created with Unity »

Eternal Sonata

As part of the result of my compulsive eBay-biding face I got my hands on Eternal Sonata by Namco Bandai for the PS3. 

As a single-player RPG that I usually go for, this one has a strong anime style which I think goes really nice with the cel-shading graphics and despite the weird plot that spins around the story of the pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin and a fantasy dream that happens just before his death, the graphics of the game is what capture my attention. 

After I started playing it I discovered that the amount of detailed they put on the scene was absolutely fantastic for its style. It's good to see some games stepping aside from the dark realistic graphics once in a while, and this one features an incredible well use of colour the whole time. 

The game itself is based around musical features, so the sound design is well appreciated for someone with some musical background, although I naming the characters after music styles is a bit too much (I mean, come on! Polka, Salsa, Allegreto...really?) 

I heard bad reviews about this game, but to be fair I haven't found anything wrong with it, and in fact I think it has a decent level of difficulty and I really hope it carries on like this. (I haven't finished it yet) 

Might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I certainly helped me to carry one with my scene and inspired me to work more on my detail levels. 

Journey

If anyone asked me to describe the latest game developed by the famed-indie studio thatgamecompany, Journey I would say: Deep.

Ever since I saw the trailer for it I became curious about this title, reasons being the fact that it's only a 3 hour game, no status bars, no "bad guys" or monsters and narrative based on images (no text through the game or voice at all).
After downloading it from the PS Network I started the game and there you are; in the middle of the dessert with no one to tell you what to do or where to go, on the distance a mountain with a bright light on the top.
Regardless of this, and with out spoiling anything important, the game posses a very clear plot, but it is something else that captivate me all the way until the end.
I believe that Journey is a tale of devotion, persevarance that shows you the power of determination and the cyclical continuity of life.
With a fantastic online feature, as long as you have internet access, the games automatically puts another player along your side (randomly) so the feeling of not being the only one in the whole world seems to be shared between two, but saying this, the only way of communication is a single-note whistle. Might not sound like much, but I couldn't believe how "attach" you can become to a complete stranger that follows you along side your journey.
Deep...

Graphically speaking, and despite the minimalistic style of the game, the whole scenario and levels of the games are an orgasmic feast for the eyes (seriously). The feeling of a boundary-less vast world rarely changes and you get straight away the idea of being in a unique post apocalyptic world that yet is gorgeous.

Sound wise... I'll just say that I'm eagerly waiting for the soundtrack to come out; already pre ordered...that's how good it is.

Certainly Journey quickly became one of my favourite games of all times. I hasnt come out of my head and I'm eagerly talking about it to everyone, yet no matter how many time I try to explain it, it just doesn't sound nowhere near as how good the game actually is.
It might be just me who got obsess with it, with the concept, with the music, with the playability and re-playability, and it might be just me who gets really attached to games that go deeper into the user's emotions, but I'm sure that everyone can fit the game to more than one episode of their lives and therefore make of this 3-hour experience into a unique journey.


(It even inspired me to do some fan art lol ... still working on it) 

Some progress III

The sacrifice altar wasn't difficult to model at all. Having a basic structure and thanks to some good planning I manage to do it in no time.... ....

ok, that was a lie. 

I did struggled at the point where I had to do the diagonal stairs. Because of my intentions of trying to make everything look huge I had to do the staircase relatively close to a normal stair size, meaning that I had to LOADS of stairs and that diagonal shape on the ends did not help to make it any easier.

the fun part for it was also the UV mapping, because, as usual, didn't put it in consideration when building it so, after detaching a few pieces I manage to come up with something easy to work with. 

For the snake pillars I struggled less since I had a better plan for it. Using some references I place some planes that made my modelling more precise. 

 So now pretty much the main structure is there.
Because some work what I've been doing with some flowers (I'll post about that later) I decided to all the textures by myself, so wish me good luck texturing all this.

Some progress II

After loads of attempts of trying to get Mudbox running on my laptop and nothing good, I decided to give it a try to Zbrush. My plan was to make the stalactites and stalagmites in high poly and then capture the details on a normal map. The product was quite good looking, but I think I spent so much time trying to get this level just for one piece and thinking of the amount of pieces that I needed to make it look decent. 

At the end, and after spending so much time looking at tutorial after tutorial, I decided to just edit one big mesh and make it look as good as possible with a tileable texture. much more easier as Zbrush does the complicated UV mapping for you and it's really easy to export back to Maya once you set it up. After running a decimation to avoid killing Maya on the attempt to export an object with over 1 billion polygons, I got quite surprise that it changed from quads to triangles... never worked with them and my previous 3D professors where completely against working with them. 

Didn't care...

So manage to get the normals working and to get it all fit and scale with the rest of the scene. So far is the object that's spending most of my poly-budget, but hopefully will be worth it. 

I still want to play more with Zbrush, since it's a really different software, that quite took me a while to get my head around, but seems like one of those in which I can see myself getting lost for hours just trying and trying all the tools. 

After duplicating the half of the cenote (cave) on which I worked on, and merging them together I saved and closed Maya, but is until now that I noticed that by doing that I completely destroyed the UV map and it was turned into a square, so now I either work with an automatic UV proyection or start working on a uv mapping of an object that has over 67,000 polys and loads and loads of organic bumps. God save my soul if I chose the second option. (which I probably will) 

Jabberwocky - Game Cinematic

This was a game cinematic for the game Jabberwocky by Blur Studio. I found it by coincidence when I was looking for the famous Lewis Carroll's poem that appeared on trhough the Looking-Glass, and what Alice found there  (turns out the game was relate to it).

The animation seems stylised in a cartoonish way, and the colours are my main inspiration for my game scene.
I tend to find non realistic, but well made styles like this one really attractive since it gives you the freedom to be more creative in a fantasy world.

The design was made by Todd Harris and the animation supervisor, layout artist and animator for some scenes, Leo Santos. Unfortunately his is an unreleased game, which is a shame because I could see a lot of potential with this quality of work.

L'Odyssée de Cartier

L'Odyssée de Cartier is the new Cartier film (advert ) which takes you to a journey between dreams and reality. This is the very first time that Cartier has decided to create a cinema epic focusing on its history, its values and inspiration, its artistic and universal scope.

It was directed by Bruno Aveillan, and certainly it's a fascinating piece of film.  It effectively transmits the elegance and design that the company always focus on.

Kara

I found this video of a concept that Quantic Dream Studio (creators of Heavy Rain)  made just to test the idea, but it's not currently a developing project.
It's really sad, because the mechanics that they used where made on a really good quality basis for any PS3 game. The graphics and sound are stonishin astonishing, but it's the plot that really captivate me. In such a short clip you get a really good gesture of the hard work on emotion that this studio has, just like I appreciate in the few hours that I played from Heavy Rain.

Do I have power

Do I Have Power (2011) from Carlos De Carvalho on Vimeo.

Found this stunnin music video made for the Timber Timber song 'Do I Have Power' that was created by Carlos de Carvalho.
I wish I had found it when I was working on the 2d animation 'Isolation', but now that I'm doing some 3d this kind of work gives me ideas for other kind of twist I can give to CG styles. This also reminds me of the importance of keeping a constant art style and the possibilities that can occur when you explore and mix some tools and medias.

Check Carlos' website to see more of his work.

José Alves de Silva

Jose Alves da Silva is a Portuguese 3d artist that has had loads of appearences in magazines like 3dtotal and 3dcreative.
Appart form loving his over stylised way of working, I found very interesting to find a some images of the same final product, but in the different phases of it's making. Like the one below, you can see the turn around of the character on actual clay, a final 3d model and the final product with textures and post production. Also de fact that he started his current 3d passion by doing a degree of architecture kind of game me a little bit of hope of being someone in the industry.
Check out his website and portafolio:

http://www.artofjose.com/
http://josealvessilva.daportfolio.com

Little & Large

Finally!
This is the final piece of my first 3D animation:  "Little & Large"
I'm really glad that I manage to get it done on time, since I had some technical issues on the way.
Loads of room for improvement, but I'm really happy with the outcome considering the amount of time I had to make it and the little knowledge I have of the software.
Also, I'm really thankful that my friend Adam Fergler, once again, accepted to work with me and made and awesome melody for it.

I'd love to have some feedback about it!!!   ... if I manage to get a better computer soon, I might come back to it and fix some of the little details that keep annoying me every time I see it.

oh! and just for the record...it is inspired on my actual working space (I just couldn't get to get aaaall the details)

E.T.A.

This is nice short animation called "E.T.A." made by Junkworks.
It has a really simple plot, but it is driven in a way that makes it outstanding in some way. No surprise it won the   Best animation award Break Point 2008 in Germany and the Best New talent award on the Aarhus Filmfestival 2008 in Denmark.
This shows you the power of only one Director (Henrik Bjerregaard), two modellers and animators (Soren Andersen and Michael la-Cour) and one music composer and editor (Rasmus Kudahl).
Space topics are definitely not part of my main interest, but when something is well done as this, I not only appreciate it, but I also enjoy it.

 

Tahyon - 3D fractal

One of the artists that I recently started following is Joldos Dan Emanuel, a CG artist (and furniture Designer), who has an amazing collection of works, most of which are representations of 3D-like fractals. When I first saw his pictures I thought they where produce on a fractal software (I've try some before) but I haven't seen any that produces ones of such a good quality.

Then, while looking at his website I saw a video and it was just surreal. It is a nice composition of constant flow and morphing shapes that hypnotise you. The concept of space and physics as know completely disappear and the boundaries of creation seem endless. 

I really wish to have to make a concept like this, probably adding a narrative, but the idea of breaking those boundaries is something that excites me and will definitely will look in the future for ideas like this one. 

How to of how to train your dragon

How to train your dragon of Dream Works has recently entered my list of favourite animated films and recently I found in youtube this video that shows the behind the scenes:

Being in the process of animating my russian dolls made me think again of the amount of steps and hard work that need to be put on an animation, specially if it's one that's going to appear on the cinema.
Team work is what I got more from this video. It is obvious that doing everything on your own makes things easy since you have control of every aspect, but the level of skills is different for every process and that can affect the ending product of your final piece.
On studios such as DreamWorks it must be really important to get a really good team, experts on their own fields, but more important, a team that's on tune with what the project is all about. Style, graphics, movement, sound; everything has to be completely synchronised and that is something that I admire from studios like this one.

Alma

This is a beautiful animation called Alma, directed by Pixar's animator Rodrigo Blaas.
Having people from pixar working on it can probably give you an idea of the quality this piece of work has. The thing that caught my attention from it is not only the amazing graphics, but the way they adapted this well know style into a more spooky narrative. Something always bothered me is when my parents used to tell me that cartoons are only for kids, when there's actually a big potential to make other type of plots without having to necessarily rely on dark and realistic CG.

PlotThe film has no spoken dialogue, just lighthearted music playing throughout the background.
A young girl is walking down a snow-covered street of a small French town. She stumbles across a wall with names written in chalk on it. She adds her name, Alma, to the wall.
Opposite the wall is what appears to be a closed toy shop. The doll in the window looks like Alma, and she is fascinated by it. She looks away briefly, and when she looks back the doll has moved from the window to a table in the center of the shop. She finds the door is locked, and angrily leaves, but hears the door open as she walks away. She excitedly walks in and the door closes slightly; there is no one else in the store.
Alma stumbles upon a small boy doll riding a tricycle which has fallen over. She pick it up and places it on the floor upright, and it heads towards the door, but the door closes on its own. While the little boy continues to slam against the door, Alma sees that the doll has somehow moved up to the shelves. She climbs up the shelf and reaches for the doll's face. In an instant the doll's eyes move, and a quick flash of images, and suddenly the lens is through the glass eyes of a doll, sitting on a shelf in the shop. As the camera pans away, we see that Alma has become the doll and is looking around the store like all the other dolls, trapped and unable to move.
As the camera pans out, another doll appears in the window suggesting the appearance of the next victim.

CG Reality

Knowing that my interests go more towards cartoonish-animation and videogames, I've always found very impressive the quality achieved in some films that incorporate in a realistic way parts of CG.

On my years doing architecture and trying to achieved a realistic-looking renders was really complicated (specially when you have short deadlines). There are so many aspects that you have to match with reality that you normally dont notice. Lights and shadows reactions are the hardest ones. Textures and camera angles.

The short film underneath are just some shots from Paris, but the impressive work that has been done to make it look like floated is amazing. The water looks really realistic and the reflections on it gives the complete feeling of it. I assume the illumination was made with images from the same place. (Worth watching in HD) 

5:46 AM // Paris Under Water

Mimicking fluids, specially water, has always been complicated for me since my computer dyes every time I try.
Also not only in the field of fluid, but the integration animating surroundings to make something surreal yet realistic looking. The adverb below is a good example of it, because of the synchronization with the music and the dance with the animation makes it really good looking.

While trying to work in the past with 3D max I remember being a huge fan of Josep Kosinski, because of his architectural background I was years ago, so probably the graphics now are not that impressive, but the point in the composition is there.
Here's the adv called Race from Mezzo. The first one is the complete advert and the second one is the steps for the composition on the visual effects.
It gives you a good idea of how professionals work and the most important steps to considering when making a composition with something that has already been filmed with real actors. 

Can't wait to be able to play with light in maya. I always struggled a little bit in 3D max and if it wasnt for render engines like Vray I wouldn't have been able to do anything in decent quality. Hope maya is slightly easier  (屮ﾟДﾟ)屮

Jerad S. Marantz

Remember the Kraken in the recent film clash of the titans or the amazing creatures of infamous 2? Well if you do, then I assume you understand the high quality of work that the concept artist Jerad S. Marantz does when it comes to creating fantastic creatures.

I came across this artist by accident, and almost refused to take a look at his work since part of the title of that post included the film sucker punch, which I never wanted to see after watching at the trailer.

Thankfully I had a look at his work and realise what an amazing artist he is and how many interventions he has done for many projects in the film and game industry as he is the lead designer at the Aaron Sims Company.

Anyway, what calls my attention from his work is the amazing detail in the textures that he puts for most of his monsters. Mixing that with an incredible ability to render and you get real life-like creative monsters and creatures.

After watching all his work, I got got really impressed at the ones for Zack's Snyder’s Sucker Punch, so I think I'll give it a chance to the film.

Even though my project with my character Reban (and also Belina) doesn't go that far, I always had the thought of adding this kind of creatures at some point in the story being Belina the one creating this weird creatures. If I ever keep with the story, I hope by that time I have a good technique level to achieve concepts of this quality.

Meanwhile, have a look at his gallery and start stalking /following his blog

The Bear and the Bow

Desperate to go and see the Lion King on 3D and watching for the 10th time Tangled, I remembered about the new film of Disney Pixar that's coming on June 22nd 2012: BRAVE.

It's a story that takes place in ancient times on the mysterious Highlands of Scotland where the first Pixar's females protagonist Merida, a princess full of courage, confronts her traditions but her actions unleash chaos and fury in the kingdom, and when she turns to an old witch for help, she's granted an ill-fated wish. Now she has to discover the meaning of true bravery to undo the beastly course and on the way to carve her own path in life.








Here's also an interview with the director Mark Andrews and some of the voice actors that describe the characters a little bit in more detail.



(....CAN'T WAIT! ... mean while Lion King on 3D ...)