April 3rd:
My niece's birthday present is going to be a couch that I'm making by hand for her 18" American Girl doll. This is the beginning of it. I built it using old books, a photo paper box, glue, tape, and foam. There are some wood blocks below it that I'm planning to attach as legs.
April 2nd:
I went out to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve today to take some photos. Most of the poppies were gone already, but I still managed to get a couple of good pictures.
April 1st:
Today I set up and rendered a few beauty shots of my model. Then I realized that I should probably pose my model before getting too crazy with the beauty shots...
March 31st:
I spent some time today video editing my girl's turntables in After Effects for my demo reel.
March 30th:
I made the extra maps, masks, and materials needed for my girl's clothing and accessories. Then I fixed her skin material so that it appeared less rubbery. I'm quite pleased with the final outcome.
On to rendering!
March 29th:
Today I spent a lot of time working in both Photoshop and Modo. I painted material masks and tweaked texture maps to create new maps (like specular amount maps) in Photoshop, then tested the effects of those maps in Modo while I refined the materials applied to my girl's body.
March 28th:
One more step down. Mudbox texture-painting: DONE.
March 27th:
My girl's body color texture map is done and I painted preliminary colors on her clothing and accessories.
March 26th:
I started texture-painting in Mudbox today.
March 25th:
Back home: back to modeling. Spent my art time today testing and fixing abnormalities in all of those normal and displacement maps that I baked before I left.
March 24th:
Another quick iPad sketch.
March 23rd:
A quick iPad sketch today using my nifty Wacom stylus.
March 22nd:
My nephew is really into Minecraft, so I used some perler beads from my sister's craft supplies to make him a 3D Minecraft Cube and a 2D Minecraft Zombie. Then I made my niece (the Disney Frozen fan) a 2D snowflake and a 3D Minecraft Snow Cube. Then, just for the heck of it, I made them some hot glue stars.
Then later, at rest time, I drew my nephew some 8-bit style dragons on graph paper:
March 21st:
I unofficially finished page 25 of the Cut-Up Sketchbook.
Then I colored this scene in a Disney coloring app on my sister's iPad:
I unfortunately do not remember the title of the app in which I created this image, but it was one of those officially licensed Disney products. They provided the outlines and pattern design: I just colored it in and told the pattern brush where to go.
March 20th:
A bit more color on page 25 of the Cut-Up Sketchbook.
March 19th:
A few more doodles to fill in some space.
March 18th:
Further progress on page 25: mainly tracing the drawing that I did last night in the semi-darkness without realizing that the pen I was using was navy blue rather than black and coloring in some of the images.
March 17th:
Out of town: back to pages 25-26 of the Cut-Up Sketchbook.
March 16th:
I'd never baked normal maps out of ZBrush until this model: I've always baked them out of Maya because I heard that they came out so much better. I decided to try it this time because it seemed like it would save a lot of time. What I didn't account for was the learning curve of finding the right settings in ZBrush, so I ended up spending twice as long as I should have because I spent a long time fiddling with settings in ZBrush and actually ended up baking one set of maps from Maya in addition to those that I baked in ZBrush.