Epicity

^ Excited to start working on this as a Lighting Technical Assistant at Blue Sky Studios! Just finished my first week at the studio and it's been great!

For the past 3 months, I had the privilege of working as a freelance 3D artist at BLT Communications on some awesome movie posters. Unfortunately, only one of them has been publicly released. I only contributed to a tiny fraction of the pixels on this one (modeled the bases underneath the armors), but still! Click to view larger!

Updates!

Thesis character turnaround:

Snippets of work from my Summer internship at Pixar Animation Studios:

render party!

Modeling, Shading and Rigging Reel 2010-2011 from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

[2012 UPDATE: If you wish to view this older version of my 3D Generalist Reel, the password is "reel2010". Please note that this is not my current demo reel. Thank you!]

Quickly threw this together today. Well not so quickly, but finished it in one day, compared to my first reel that took me half my academic quarter to compile.

I want to refine it further, and re-render some things that our Renderfarm messed up. Also wish I knew better last year than to smooth my typewriter model. It's not the best reel, I admit. Either way, I at least have something right now, so I don't have to panic near deadlines. I want to focus more on working towards an animation reel in the coming months.

Ohkay, good night!

lighting tests, cntd.

[2012 UPDATE: The passwords for the following videos are "test"]

Shot001_LightTest_11.10.10 from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

Re-did some lighting tests, with the character textured correctly this time. It's not bad, but it still feels flat to me. Going to play around with the lights more before break starts and I don't have the privilege of rendering in the lab anymore.. Rim lights should help break out the flatness a little, and probably a little more contrast. Other than that, I don't want to get carried away with lighting and texturing. Animating the clocks from shot-to-shot is going to take some meticulous thought, and that's next on my list to tackle before I start animating next quarter.

I also plan on thumbnailing most of my shots over break.

Shot010_LightTest_11.10.10 from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

Also, working title has been changed to "Dissonance".

enter protagonist

Here's my bot for my upcoming student film, almost done!! These are two renders I did for my Advanced modeling class.

And here's proof that my rig actually works so far! The poses should be familiar from Richard William's book of awesomeness. I slapped in the extreme poses for the character for this quick test animation. At first, I was going to animate something for a shot in my film, but I decided to do something more "cartoony" with broader movements to really push the rig. In actuality, the acting in my film will be subtler, but I wanted to make sure my rig was capable.

I can't wait till I can start animating!! But for now, on to more lighting tests!!

sneaky peaky

These tests took about 11 hours to do. The character isn't done texturing yet. Now that he's in the set, I have a better idea of how to texture him so he doesn't blend in with the background so much. Till now, I've been using the Norman rig in my 3D animatic, so now I have a better sense of where I should be going.

Also, rigging is still as terrifying. But I have to thank my self from the past for making life easier for me in the present by practicing rigging all of summer =)

^ I goofed up on the timing of the light for this one.

digging out some modeling

Here's something I forgot to post last time.. It's my first project from Advanced modeling. We had to find a common, everyday object, make an efficient "rigid" model of it (^above) and then a "soft" deformable/animateable model with more edge loops, etc. I should post more pictures with my edgeloops on them.

Here're some of my reference images...

And here's my final animation of the soft model. There are a few things in the animation I want to go back and fix- like the snappiness that happens when it jumps up, etc.

And this is the first rig test I did for the headphones. Animating the wires was quite difficult!

Mr.Bean, done.

Final render. I realize the blend shapes at the end are just mushed up in the animation. We had to make a clip under 10 seconds and I have a million blend shapes. I'll go back and make a better clip of it.

But for now, here he is! I'm not too happy with how he turned out, but it went somewhere.

Mr. Bean Caricature Bust from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

mr. bean in color!

Still have to rig and animate!

caricature

Rowan Atkinson/Mr. Bean caricature in progress (ignore obnoxious grid running through his face). I'm so scared it's not going to end up looking like him. Here's what I started with

inspiration tests

Trying to figure out visual styles, etc. etc.

I was pretty much drifting in the air when I sat down to work and plan things out. So I started with doodles and sketches. I have a secret crush on animating credit sequences so I started sketching possible backgrounds for my credit sequence animation (I know, I'm more excited about the credits than the actual film- which kind of got me thinking... but now's not the time to explain that)

So I started with these:

And got inspired to do these...

This is just lambert with occlusion. Initially, when I didn't even have an idea, I thought of this style for simplicity's sake because I had seen one or two student films in this style that weren't super-immaculate with textures and all. But maybe I won't use it.. I just wanted to try it out.

As far as layout, I'm taking inspiration from German Expressionism...

Over summer I had something like this, but now I feel like it doesn't go well with the mood and the personality of my character.

So now I'm going for something more like this:

And now I'm super excited about the film!

And Other Updates

Here's the product of many weeks of trial & error and meticulous work and rendering and re-rendering and burning and re-burning DVDs and this and that and other fun stuff :

Modeling Demo Reel from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

And here's my final project for my intro to 3D Animation class which I got a full score on! The sound quality is a little bad. It is taken from Singing in the Rain.

Monologue Acting from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

And my first 3D walk cycle:

3D Walk Cycle from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

Enjoy.. and more to come.

Classes I am taking next quarter:

Animation Production - that's where we spend the entire academic quarter making an independently produced animated film.

Audio Concepts for Animation - I am really really excited for this course, because I'm a physics lover and sound waves and motion are my favoritest topics!

Deaf Art and Cinema- this should be really interesting..

Beginner's American Sign Language - this will be scary but fun. The class is taught by a hard-of-hearing or completely deaf teacher without an interpreter so that we are forced to learn the language by struggling. I'm sure there is a specific pedagogic term for it, but you get my drift. It's intense learning, basically.

I'm also thinking of auditing a drawing course. The only reason I am "auditing" is because it might become a heavy course load. But drawing is something I want to be doing continuously and consistently under the guidance of a teacher.

Oh which reminds me, here's the final composition with typography (theme: self-portrait) I did for my 2D design class. I'm not too impressed with it, but the teacher really liked it.

Maya Update Cont'd

And here's a lab assignment that our professor didn't really stress too much on- just wanted us to complete it. It was a tutorial for Maya 6.0. But but but, it was doing it a really complicated manner and ended up with n-gons and more than 6 edges converging to a point, which were left unaddressed. I had a copy of the book with the tutorial CD, and when I opened up their finished work sample, I was thoroughly disappointed. The feet looked like octopodi, the fingers were not knuckle-y..Just...The whole body they modeled looked unrealistic. And unlike other stylized projects, this was meant to be realistic. So I tried to follow as much of the tutorial as possible, but deviated from it often when it started leading to redundant and complicated geometry. I don't know how efficiently I did it, but... here it is.



Anyway, the body I modeled is probably not the most perfect body in the world, but I'm satisfied with it, having done in just a week and a half with the machine project at hand. I wish I had a wireframed image with me right now. I'll have to get one when I get back to school.

And here he is, no longer beheaded!! The head too was a quick assignment. The purpose was to make us learn to model a body through extrusions. The method, not the accuracy. A preparation for our final character project, which would have to be accurate. But of course, it was to be stylized.



Well! I think that's all the modeling I have for now!!

Maya Update!

So here is all the other modeling work that I promised.

The bedroom project was our first "major project". We had a choice between a bedroom and a living room. I chose to make a little girl's stylized bedroom. And by stylized, I mean using less realistic proportions, to show that it's a little girl's world in a normal sized room. I'm really proud of this work. Of course, the light from the lamp could be perfected and made conical. Also, the lighting could have been better done to make a better circular composition- perhaps show less of the ceiling? Turn off the fan light and put in a night light on the the right so there's only the moonlight, the lamplight, and the nightlight?

Perhaps fix the curtain rings, and lessen the scale of the curtain rail?

One of the critiques I had was that the ceiling was too high. It was supposed to be like that, like in Britain? But I can see how it might look odd.

Here's a jpeg showing off my moonlight, which took a long time to reach his stage. Of course, it could always be perfected...


Again, here, the night light on the right would've made it look better, and drawn the eye around the composition.

Here are some random snapshots I took for myself-- not composed.



















AND HERE is my second project- the machine project!!



It's an ancient, wonky, sanskrit typewriter. This jpeg here is a little messed up. A lot actually. I spent a lot of time on the modeling and texturing, and then, for some reason, my Maya file got corrupted and the shadows were rendering awfully or not rendering at all. The highlights are speckly, and all sorts of things. Basically, my textures weren't rendering true.

It was my problem partly. I'm not too happy with my texturing. Yes, it gives the old ancient look to it. But firstly, it isn't accurately what I envisioned. Secondly, it's just too much texturing.
I'm pretty sure most people will not know without me telling them that the main body is made out of rusty bronze and not wood. The textures on the two sides, and the modeling of the lever on the top doesn't look too good to me either. All in all, I'm not happy with this particular rendering.

Here's another one... With the wonkiness more clear! I'm quite pleased with the keys and the sankrit script, and the typebars on top with the subtle wonkiness to them.


And THAT is my favoritest image! :D I like the way the paper fold along the paper feed, how you can see the scale on the platen, the wonky look of the typebars... The ribbon spools look a little out of place and "unrealistic" here though..

Anyhow, it was all well received in class and by the teacher. And I got an overall score of 99% in the class!!!

More to come!!

In India now, and extremely exhausted.

Asymptote

Almost done with the quarter.

So here's what I've been spending a lot of time on and finally finished. Well not finished. You never finish. As someone once said- (artworks) aren't finished, they're just abandoned.


Anyways. I've been devoting equally great amounts of time to all my projects in class, but considering the number of renders I've had to do until finally getting the lighting almost right and solving unexpected merged vertices problems in sneaky corners of the mouths making it look like there's a tiny hourglass lodged in there...and all that great stuff, this deserves to be put up first. Woo.


It's a pretty simple looking character. The clothing is not so elaborate. But I chose to design it that way because I knew the face, the rough look of the hair and the hands would easily take up the time allotted for the assignment (1 week, excluding designing the character) plus a little bit more :)

Here's the stuff I drew in prep for it (I have some satisfactory looking gesture drawings of Anya too but don't have them scanned with me so will post later): I modeled the head separately from the body, which is why the heads aren't so accurate in the first set of turnaround drawings. I realized issues with drawing the front view of a nose based on the side view and vice versa. And getting 3 dimensional eye sockets to work from two 2D drawings. Heh.





I'm still not entirely happy with the backlight. It makes the sleeves look really exposed and washed out during parts of the turnaround,

So her name is Anya. I don't know why her name is Anya. But I felt it was fitting. It's not even a British name, I don't think. But anyway, she's a British schoolgirl. Lofty yet mysterious. Rather, mysterious yet lofty. Yes, there's a difference. She's sort of based on a character (with a few major and a few minor differences of course) in a movie I want to make at some point in my life. The younger version of an older woman if you will. But anyway. I have a background story for Anya. I'm just not in a state of mind (aka. state of awakeness) to pen it down now.

And here....is something I got out of playblast by mistake. But here it is anyway.



Good night.

3D Update

It's been a while since I updated my 3D modeling stuff. So THAT up there is my final still life composition. 'Twas received well. But my exposure's too high. You can't see all the texture of the fruits I worked so hard on :S

The helicopter and pig were tutorials.. They'd probably be better if I didn't have to follow the tutorial. But I learnt processes, which was the main aim I think.




And THIS over here is the start of a major project we just started. We had to choose to model either a bedroom or living room. I'm doing a little girl's bedroom. You know, the kind with white wood detailed furniture and linen and all that lacey stuff. I'm excited about it- we have to put in walls and ceiling and windows and doors. I still have to model a dresser, a chest, a bed table and pillows, along with the walls and things. Then texturing and lighting! I don't know if I'm off to a good start or not- there's so much left to do!! It's due Tuesday after next. I think I may have focused on too much detail than I should've from the start. I had to work on the chair more than once. I've been having unlucky days. I'm just hoping when I go to texture everything the modeling doesn't go haywire. I feel like it'll happen anyway. wood wood wood.


I've started working on storyboards for Milo, the Firefighter. The teacher liked my first draft. I have to go over it and refine things now. I don't think it visually tells the story without me explaining it yet. The thought of making a scratch track for it is worrying me..

Anyway, apple picking time.