Thing-a-day.com

This last piece was inspired by the results of the last photoshop tutorial I did for yesterday’s post, some of the other artist’s work I’ve seen on thing-a-day, a hand one of my students modeled and my own desire to make new art. Everything was modeled in 3D using Maya and Zbrush and rendered in Zbrush. The shader / material is courtesy of Arran Lewis. No photoshop manipulations although it looks like I did.

Well its over. I never could have predicted or preconceived any of the work I did for this challenge. This was the beauty of thing-a-day for me. The spontaneity that is often suppressed by daily routine and habits has been restored. Thanks to all those who commented on my work and those who inspired and challenged be to pursue new directions. I would like to keep tabs on several artist I’ve come to know from thing-a-day and hope they will continue to keep tabs on me. All of you can always find my work on my website: http://elliottmitchell3d.com/index.php and look for me in a few days on ZBrushcentral.com and CGSociety.org forums. I’ll most likely be posting under my real name, Elliott Mitchell (unfortunately MrT seems to be taken).

Just a heads up, I am looking for freelance work and other employment options as of a few day ago. Please e-mail me if you have any leads, jobs, advice or need of consultation.

One amazing observation I made was the global interest generated by thing-a-day. I have had 1400 visitors to my website since 9 days ago when I put up a counter. I have been randomly sampling visitor’s IP addresses who visit my site after seeing my work on thing-a-day. In the last few days visitors from the following locations have looked at 4 or more pages on my site:

Karlsruhe Germany
Moscow Russia
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia
Curitiba Brazil
Gothenburg Sweden
Dublin Ireland
Osaka Japan
Paris France
Falmouth UK
Chandigarh India
Sarajevo Bosnia and Herzegovina
Seoul South Korea
Lisbon Portugal
Vienna Austria
Tokyo Japan
Macau Macao
Stavanger Norway
MONTREAL CANADA
Vancouver BC
Amsterdam Netherlands
Canberra Australia
Rajkot India
Stockholm Sweden
Hong Kong China
Laxou France
Istanbul Turkey
Athens Greece
Villejui France
Basel Switzerland
New Brunswick Canada
And all from over the USA

“Be well, do good work and keep in touch.” - Garrison Keillor

I wanted to redo a still life I created as a demo for an intro Maya course I taught last semester. I used my own original photographic textures for the wood and background. I hand painted the textures for the fruit in Zbrush and Photoshop. I modeled the wood block and fruit in 3D. The scene is lit from the background image.

Doodling a character for an animation. Little Indian girl, still needs a name.


(I’m rusty with people and faces, so this was a good exercise)

Other doodles:
<– Mole men in the office
<– Large owls
<–Small owls
<– Gerbil powered solar system model

And this is my 3d assignment for tomorrow, playing with dynamics. It’s nothin’ special, but it’s not a big assignment:
embedded by Embedded Video

Today I wanted to redo Ron in stone and show a softer and warmer side of his personality. Yesterday’s post he was bronze and looking imperial. I sculpted his head a little more and re-textured it using a material courtesy of Arran J Lewis that I found on zbrushcentral.com. I wanted to do this because Ron (my boss) wanted the unpleasant job of informing my students that I was not going to be teaching beyond this semester. After 7 years of teaching I’m going to try to pursue some new directions in my 3D/film career. The students were stunned and I felt awful. I think this piece reflects the unpleasantries of being a great leader.

I wanted to rework a head study of my boss Ron Maggio that I started in Maya before I had access to Zbrush. He is an Italian American and loves ancient Roman history. All hail Ronaldus Maximus!

Worked on another head I started last year. I used the same bronze material as last post. This is in no way a low poly head (350 million polys).

Trying out a new bronze material I found on ZbrushCentral courtesy of Christopher Tackett (aka KrakenCMT).

I don’t know WTF this is.

I did this real quick. I’m still working on a skin shader in whats left of my free time.

I only spent about 10 minutes on this. I want to figure out the sub surface skin shaders for the future. That is where I’m putting my effort today.

I didn’t get my post up yesterday. I when to an friend’s art opening at the Fitchburg Art Museum. New England/New Talent running February 17–June 1, 2008. It was pretty cool for the most part.

Anyway, I have been getting tired of zbrush’s shaders and rendering so I decided to create a sub-surface skin shader in maya. I downloaded and went through a tutorial SKIN SHADING WITH MENTAL RAY from Gnomonology. Thier tutorials are incredible. The tutorial required I download a 3rd party shader call mix20layer. Unfortunatly mix20layer is not compiled for Maya 2008 64 bit. So I emailed the creators of the tutorial and the shader for a workaround. I expect I’ll hear from them soon. I posted the graph of what I have so far for the shading network. I’ll post a rendering of the incomplete skin shader later tonight.

Ah love ya!

1 hour on a bad hair day.

1 hour today. I stayed home sick thinking I would have a mellow day. Wrong. My OS was destroyed by an app gone mad. I spent the second half of the day reviving my computer. I was passed out sick the first half. Luckily I recovered my system with minimal re-installations.

This image is rendered in Zbrush as a plastic material. I’m not happy with the rendering or lighting. On the positive side, I have a lot of heads to rework in Maya later on. This head a day is like a groovy sketchbook.

Today I needed a rest from 3D. I went mountain biking with some friends in blizzard like conditions through the wilderness today. We were lucky to make it out after 5 hours of riding on a couple of feet of semi packed snow with no injuries or mechanicals. Tonight I forced myself to work on my website. I hope it’s done by next Thursday for an art opening. No animations or videos up yet.

I know this might be a little questionable, but hey, I’ve had a rough week!

Blogged at greetingarts.typepad.com.

On our way back from lunch, I spied a man sitting on a bench outside his house drinking a beer and wearing a gorilla mask.  It was the funniest sight, and I was caught without my camera.  By the time we got home, go the camera and drove back, Gorilla Man was nowhere to be found.  I took some random pics on our journey there and back home of people, and caught one of myself purely on accident in the passenger side mirror.  I wanted to take a picture of the person on the right corner, but in a moving car things shift and I spied myself instead. If you want to read more about my misadventures, check out my blog. 

I also tried 3d papercraft unsuccessfully.  The results of that you can see here.  Basically, what I realized is that I need to pick a design that’s a bit more solid and linear than something impressionistic.

Today I just feel burnt. A long work week from hell and my website was broken for much of the day. I did manage to bring back up my site and struggled to find the energy to make another head. I’M ON THE EDGE! Please excuse my lack of effort today.