For the past few weeks I've been learning Rhino, and I must say that is one of the best and fastest tools to learn when it comes to 3D creation and more specifically product creation, taking into account that the learner has experience with 3D creation already. As it is a very peculiar tool when it comes to the process of making, where we have to take into account some factors in 3Ds max that in Rhino are completely absent whereas there's some factors that we have to take into account in Rhino that we don't have to in software like 3Ds max.
On the course of the past weeks I explored the software and the diverse tools, at the same time making some tests and other times making complete modeling of a product of some sort, that way of learning gave me opportunity to learn faster as I was making complex shapes in the first three days of starting with Rhino.
Bellow are some of the works that I did in the past weeks for learning purposes, made as I was exploring the multitude of tools and the different ways of modeling in Rhino.
Turbofan
Bottle
Glider
Skycraper - 01
Skycraper - 02
Those images came up as ideas and shapes that I wanted to create, I found that Rhino gave me the opportunity to work faster and at the same time gave me the possibility to iterate more as the work is being done. I look forward to work more with Rhino and create new things.
In the past month I was asked by Kushal Ponnam if I wanted to participate in a rendering competition for his class of Ray Tracing for Graphics on his masters at University of Utah. The project consisted in making a scene where it had to have at least one Utah teapot, and the scene had to be rendered using the ray tracer build over the semester from the ground up by the students, in our case by Kushal. I immediately accepted the challenge and we had 2 days for making the scene, including concepting, modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering and post-production.
After some discussions of ideas for the scene we ended up with the idea of using the teapot as a fish aquarium, and the idea developed throw the modeling phase to the final scene submitted, it ended up being three teapot's in total, one was dropping water to the main teapot where two fishes and another small teapot were located. We found that this concept was interesting and we choose to stay with it.
Aquarium Teapot Clay Render - 01
The stand for the objects came as an idea when after having the main scene modeled the teapots were floating in mid air, we wanted for the image to look quite clean and simple like it belonged to a museum. With this in mind I created some kind of stand for the objects, very geometric and museum like.
Aquarium Teapot Clay Render - 02
The next phase was lighting, as I was building the scene I rendered it using V-Ray just to have an idea on how the scene could look. We wanted the same position for the lights and camera as the ones I was using in 3Ds Max, so we transferred and positioned that information to the ray tracer software so it looked the most identical possible.
Aquarium Teapot Light Positions
The rendering phase took some trials and errors and the time was limited. The resolution was one thing that we had to take into account to keep the render time resealable, being the final output 692*800, but we manage to get a resealable image from the ray tracer, with global illumination and caustics.
With the image submitted to the competition we managed to won two Awards, Best in Class Award and Student Choice Award.
Image Submitted for the Teapot Rendering Competition
After the competition I decided to render that same scene in V-Ray, the result is as seen bellow.
Aquarium Teapod V-Ray Render
Thanks for watching, feel free to give feedback in the comment section below.
First of all, I must say that this was a really nice, interesting and challenging project to work on from the beginning to the end, being the first game that I worked on. What I took and learned from doing VoltCity was very enriching and will definitely help me in future projects.
VoltCity is a touch based game about managing power, it was made for the Electricity Museum of Madeira (Casa da Luz) by myself the artist and designer, and by Kushal Ponnam the programmer of the game.
If you want to play the game you have to go to the Electricity Museum in Madeira, but for now I'll give you some visual insight of the game.
Hope all of you enjoy.
ART/DESIGN
From the beginning of the project I knew that I wanted a very geometric 3D look for the visuals of the game and an interesting color pallete, which lead me to create what is displayed bellow.
All of that was possible with V-Ray, we used V-Ray for all the visuals of the game as we found that using V-Ray will gave us the desired look, being the final product a 2D game it looks like a 3D game. Aside from that, as I'm primarily a 3D Artist, I was able to do all the assets in 3D then render them to use as a sprite in the game.
Scene Viewport-01
Scene Viewport-02
Another must have in the game was a day/night cycle, with that came some trial and errors, but we were able to create a seamless loop along all the day/night cycle and have control of the time of each section of the day.
Morning
Morning Layers
Afternoon
Afternoon Layers
Night
Night Layers
Here I'll display some GIF's to demonstrate the diverse animations in the game, from the day/night cycle to the sea animations, light animations and the animations on the various assets.
All the animations bellow are playing at 24fps, while in game it plays at 5fps. That's for showing purposes, while in game it maked more sense to get that kinda feel alongside the art choices that we made.
City day/night Cycle GIF
Solar day/night Cycle GIF
Hydro day/night Cycle GIF
Eolic day/night Cycle GIF
Thermal day/night Cycle GIF
Waste day/night Cycle GIF
This looping video represents the game animations throughout the day/night cycle, running at 5fps.
Game World day/night Cycle
User Interface
The User Interface shown bellow is only the UI showed in gameplay, all the rest of the UI such as menu's, will not be shown here.
User Interface
User Interface + World-Day
User Interface + World-Night
Game on Hardware
Following there are some images and a video of the game running on hardware.
VoltCity on Hardware - 01
VoltCity on Hardware - 02
VoltCity Gameplay on Hardware
Thanks for watching, let me know what you think in the comment section bellow.
The idea for this project came up while talking to an artist friend of mine, Helena Barbosa. As we were discussing about different types of mushrooms we started imagining this little world where mushrooms were everywhere and among them a living one as the main character of our story. The initial concept for this world was basically the character sitting and chilling in another mushroom enjoying his drink, as you can see in the PROCESS OF MAGIE D'OR image, but as I started to develop the project in 3D I decided to do some changes to make it more interesting and more mysterious, in some way, to create more background story.
You can see the final result below, it was a really fun project and full of challenges to work on, looking forward to do more projects as challenging as this one to help me improve and make me a better 3D artist.
Criticism is more than welcome, Thank you in advance.
FINAL IMAGE, Click in the image to see it full size.
PROCESS OF MAGIE D'OR, concept drawing by Helena Barbosa.
Six paint overs of a Look Development from a futuristic race car concept. After preparing the asset for game engines I did some Look Development studies for possible car paintings, painting over the asset in Photoshop. Really nice way to come up with many ideias in a fast manner.
Some weeks ago I had this ideia/vision of an environment where the buildings and other human made structures where in ruins so I did a blockout of the scene to have a base to work on, this was the result:
