Cole Harris--SketchBook

Well I’ve been around here for awhile, posted a few works every now and then and thought it was time to start my own sketchbook thread. Maybe thats a little elitist of me, who knows. Thought it would be convient considering I’m very ADD when it comes to my work, I start something then start something else then stop that and work on the other one and so on and so forth.

Anyways I thought I would kick this off with my Blender Guru underwater competition submission WIP, I know I’m a little behind…Ok allot. Well I’ve had a few ideas so far, first thing that came to mind was an underwater city (I’m a big BioShock fan) so that could be cool, second idea is kind of stupid its pretty much fish playing poker kind of like that famous painting of dogs playing poker but underwater (obviously).

I’m pretty sure I’m going with the first one so I have allot of work ahead of me, to say the least! So I imagine you’ll be seeing a lot of updates over the next few days and hopefully I’ll finish in time.

Anyhow hope I haven’t bored you guys to death, I promise this thread will get more interesting very soon. I thought I would post some WIP’s from a few of my other projects just to tide you guys over so:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16257863/MP4-12C_1.png
Thanks!

yodas gotten ancient O.o

Yoda IS ancient :stuck_out_tongue:

Yoda is GOD! :smiley:

Dog fish playing poker could be really cool if done right. I am sure you will be able to pull it off! Good luck with the comp!

Well as I’m sure you can tell I didn’t finish my entry for the September Blenderguru competition in time. But I thought I would give it another go for the December/Christmas competition, no promises this time…

Anyways I spent a few days pondering different concepts and what not, and came to the conclusion that I want my entry to be as cliche as possible, I know, let me explain. You see the first thing that came to my mind when I saw Andrew’s post was an image of Santa standing near the fireplace bag over one shoulder glass of milk in hand reading a letter sitting on the mantle only light coming from the lights on the tree and the moonlight through the frost coated window. I immediately wrote that idea off because I thought it would be to unoriginal to “cliche” but recently it occurred to me that that might be a good thing because it has a sense of universality to it, every kid in the world (well almost) probably is familiar with that cliche image as well its everywhere from bedtime stories to movies even songs depict similar images. So long story short thats what I’ll be making!

First thing that I had to do was decide what I wanted my Santa to look like there are many depictions but all seem to sing a similar tone big round guy, wrinkly face, red cheeks, snow white hair and beard and lets not forget the all important fluffy red suit with matching hat! What I ended up finding to be my favorite Santa was the one created by Coca Cola in the 1930s which looks like this:
http://xaxor.com/images/Coca-Cola-Santa/Coca-Cola-Santa17.jpg
So I decided to model my Santa from the various Coca Cola Santa images I found across the web. So far all I have is the edge loops built from the front view and the next step will be to find a side view reference to shape those verts too.

So the next biggest thing to tackle will probably be the christmas tree, uhhggggggg! There are a few ways to approach this, first would be to create a single needle or group of needles and use dupliverts to clone them over the surface of the tree this is the probably the fastest to render method but placing all the faces over the tree could be time consuming. Second method would be to use particles and weight painting to define the location of the needles on the base branches of the tree this is by far the easiest method but could be very time consuming to render. Last method would be to use hair particles as the needles this might look good from a distance but wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny, plus it would also take awhile to render. After some deliberation I think I’m going to go with the first method as it provides the best balance of detail to render time.

Last thing I’ll touch on in this post is lighting as its probably the most important part. For my lighting I will have 3 sources the first and most prominent being the lights on the tree which will be created from point lights which will be duplicated using dupliverts inside the bulbs which will be arrayed across the strand. Second will be the light from the dwindling fire inside the fireplace, most likely created from an area light. And lastly the slightly blue faint light coming from the window to emulate the moonlight, again an area light. Of course this is all subject to change as things rarely work out like I think they will.

So I apologize for the long post I cant imagine this is very interesting to any of you, but what the heck its always a good idea to catalog projects that way if by some chance they turn out really good you have journal of progress to show people and share your methods.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16257863/branchrender1.jpg
Heres a branch from my christmas tree, and no thats not all I have done. So far I’ve completed santa’s clothing, the mantle, the window and the couch, but you’ll see all that soon enough!

may I please ask how you ade that branch? It looks VERY awsome, also is it cycles, or BI?

Hey dude thanks! Well its pretty simple really, but very tedious. I started by creating one of the small branches with a simply cube and a subsurf to round it out, I then created one needle and created UVS for it to match with an image I had. Next it was a simple matter of duplicating the needle over the branch and giving each one a small bit of variation (rotation, scale, position, shape). After I had added needles to the entire branch I added some simple materials for both, the needles have a color texture from an image I found and a bump made from a grayscale of that image they also have a bit of SSS set to .04 scale. The branches have a color map made from a tileable bark texture from cgtextures and a greyscale version of that for the bump. To scatter the small branches ove the large one I used duplifaces to do this I parented the needles (one object) to the small branch, make sure that both have there Loc, Rot, and Position zeroed out or it wont duplicated properly. Then I parented the small branch to a plane and under the object settings I set duplication to faces this duplicates the needles and branch for every face that the plane object has. Then its simply a matter of creating new faces and positioning them across the large branch and giving them random rotation. Anyways sorry for the long explanation but thats how I did it, oh and its rendered in Blender Internal. Heres an image of the branch in the editor:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16257863/editor.jpg

thanks man, can’t wait to see more progress on this.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16257863/ColeHarris_Christmas.jpg
Well I did manage to finish, just barely! It didn’t turn out quite how I wanted it to though. Sadly after I finished the tree I realized that my oh so meager 4GB’s of RAM were just not enough to render all the polys in my scene so I was forced to basically ax half of the objects I had spent so much time to create. I wish I had done some tests or something before I spent all that time creating furniture and Santa and different presents and tons of other little things, but alas it was not so:( Hopefully soon I’ll have access to my desktop and I will be able to do a render and see it how it was meant to be seen, until then let me know what you think of what I have so far!

Oh and I also just wanted to say congrats to all the other people who have entered there are some really great entries!

Been working on creating a McLaren MP4-12C heres a quick render in cycles:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16257863/MP4-12C_1.png