Desktop backgrounds

For the past week after Emagine i feel like i need to pursuit something else in my 3d modeling abilities so now i am pursuing smaller projects such as desktop backgrounds to test myself in the ability not to make things look as life like as possible but to make something that could never naturally. 

So far i have made two backgrounds

This one above is rendered in 1080p 

and this one is rendered in native 4k resolution.

Soon i will create more with greater diversity and complexity. as of now these were my two test ones which each took me a day each to complete. 

Halfway

Well through multiple troubleshooting renovating my room and takeing care of my new pet snake I have reached frame 438 out of 1000. Hopefully at school I can construct a film of at least a minute with the footage I get.

Well the heatsink fan has failed so I went to microcenter and got a 92mm replacement fan. Also news on rendering  cutting down the 20000 to 2000 frames as reviewing the footage looked like slow motation. Sadly o don't have the time for that.
Also the change of fans has changed temps from 68c to 52c Much much cooler and makes the computer more effective of temptress reduction

Days go on

Rendering for 3 straight days and nights and only 298 frames to show for it. This is some intense stuff. with my heatsink fan failing recently my temps bumped up from 55c to now 68c hopefully i can at least get a cooling pad for my laptop so i may start some rendering there. This is insane how much power is needed to push this out.

Working from home is the best

Working from my desk at home is acturally a nice feeling your acomplishing something then just burning time of another day.

Im happy maya is finally working with my computer and not asking for keys or haveing to get some weird file decoder to transfer the encrypted files to a jpeg.
Everything is comeing together now just need video editing software.

One whole night of rendering

One whole night (10pm - 12pm the next day) only ended up with 123 frames. take account my computer specs are all up to date and highest of thier class.
I will have my computer running until all of this is finished but i only hope thats within a week long effort.

Soon this break i will buy a cooling pad for my laptop (hp envy 2013) so it can make use of it and render on there with another student version i will aquire in any means. hopefully this will cut rendering times down at least a 1/4th

for referance this is my laptop
http://store.hp.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/us/en/mdp/Laptops/envy-15#!&TabName=features

it is rendering. but only as fast as it ever could

Revalations

I got maya to render on my desktop at home. i may be able to get this finished before spring break ends.
EDIT: sadly since the student version dosent allow rendering it appears my efforts were in vain...

Things are coming along well i m getting stressed for Emagine though. i do plan to turn it all white and rely on shadows and natural lights to give color to this. then only later on will i retire everything to aactural environment. In a sense my ability to make lights has reached its peak as i have used metal ray and certain adjustments to give a very nice shadow to everything.

Holidays

The holidays as you get older seem to just become stressful and not as enjoyable as they used to be. i sadly havent done a single thing. i wanted to at least get one project for Ap art studio made and then i hope to worked on my maya project a bit. i havent been able to be at home one day this break. bounceing from house to house seeing family and friends. its enjoyable but as soon as you get back to the chopping block you find yourself stuck. Hopefully ill get this sorted out soon.

Happy holidays and a happy new year

Final post of this semester

So much work done but yet i feel like this project will take over four times the amount of hours ive poured into it. This project i love yet loathe at the same time. This on scale is the largest project I have ever made and i hope to make it the most impressive work here at Olathe Northwest. I have high expectations for myself and i know my peers always watch me and want to see what i can pull out of my head next.

 This quote i find myself makeing circles around all to many times. I have failed very many times and i have also created works i am proud of. its find funny in Maya i like to create very real and clean looking objects and enviroments but in my Three dimensional sculptures in AP art studio i tend to lean towards more crazy and odd work that involves alot of emotion and thought for it to be understood.

Hopefully winter break i can isolate myself enough and get a idea or some burst of motivation to pull through and finish this and another project for my AP class. It turns my mind works in what i find a unhealthy manner of long pieords of being dormant and not being creative and then theres the big rushes i get that last only a day or so where i just overflow with information and create something i can love and create with passion. Ive had a few of those days here in ecom and some on this project. I find myself getting distracted with social interactions and its healthy to be social but i end up doing it at the wrong time. oddly out of school i just end up isolating myself from anything except my room lit by monitors with multiple processes going. anything from test renders to video rendering with minor tools ive gotten free online, streaming content, uploading, downloading, and simply just filling my mind with recent events and keeping up with the world's affairs.

Maybe i should start texturing and lighting, i enjoy the process of lighting the most as i find the menal ray and specular shadows to just be a beautiful thing to control. those renders i will have to do at home mostly because at school although these macs do have a great amount of RAM and a fine processor these computers only succumb to thermal throttling. At home i have my pc which i built that sustains heat well only because i gave enough of my cash to noctua and evga and got a computer that can render full 4k and still keep temptures down to about 45-50 degrees Celsius. 

All and all i see this project to show my time to shine and i want to make it more then anyone that just passes by my desk to just think of it as a bunch of shapes smashed together. I can create my own world in this program and i want to make it something to be spectacled at. 

Even something as this looks very well done and is a interesting view of a staircase i do notice something wrong. do you? I realized the end caps of my stair's railing has suddenly disappeared. Admiting ones errors is the first step to fixing them. I am just happy i caught this early on.

Well winter break is here. This is the time to set back catch up on my thoughts, get rest, revise my priorities and work more solidly on my skills in my practices of art and getting this project either finished with creating polygons or just start texturing by the time i get back to school. I want this to be something to be proud of and ill make it happen. Happy holidays and stay warm this winter.

improvements on the entrace, it acturally looks secure as i plan to make this a public archive and that data must be stored very well. also i think a small conferance room is a nice add on as it does add a room that people may rent out to hold meetings and such. i only hope i can make planes that can have glass go through them. otherwise ill just have to keep trying. 

I've been neglecting this blog quite a bit. but not my project. this has been a great amount of progress.  everything from the beginning of the archives to a lecture hall. even a tall hallway of books. also i finished the stairs, back to work wool

That isn't a laptop sir

Well with progress of modeling that ti99 i thought i might as well use it more then just a not exact model (I'm still missing a power cable and a few expansion cards) but i thought of making a college lecture hall and having the professor with his personal computer for his work. those monsters of computers had to be somewhere so i modeled a desk that looks like the norm 1980-early 2000's teachers desk. i even put detailed the edges with bevels to give attention this is shaped and bent sheet metal nit cut wood.

Ive been neglecting this blog very harshly. i have finished remodeling a TI 99 computer and i didn't put any updates with it or even notify it on my blog. thats a shame because i learned a lot doing this and how maya 2015 has changed a bit.

The end of junior year

I made a mechanical locking knofe which i was going to animate but sadly i dident put enough time into it. i do have these screenshots though.

Final

Ryan McDaniel

Ecomm

Hours 6-7

This year in Ecomm

            I have done a lot but yet so little it seems. In Maya you can finish whole project but the time it takes can almost be unbearable. This is the tedious task of an animator thee dimensions or not.

            This year I have completed only five projects but I made these projects to the best of my ability. I created the hut, the haunted house. the haunted hallway, the motherboard and lastly the animation, which I’m working on and cannot be finished within this year. I’ve learned many effects and dynamics including dramatic shadow effects and even basics into smoke. Sprite animations are quite hard to learn though as they like to be very difficult. I have also gotten electricity to work very well as it uses two polygons to conduct power. I also find it entertaining oh how my haunted house project I almost reached 300K vertices and 100K faces.  I find mayas soften tool amusing on how it takes a shape and just makes it collapse upon itself if it is even semi circular. I cannot say I did make a lot of profit in maya this year as I did learn a lot of polygon and texture sculpting skills. Especially the essentials to how a tillable texture is very important as it keeps a repeation without showing the reputation of the lines between the borders of the original texture. This has many struggles on how to create those polygons to create the desire shape. Everything from cutting, dividing, wedging and erasing.

            I will say I think my hardest project this year was the hut. Because I did add to much detail and made it falter by doing a small mistake. The thatched roof would look great if well… thatched. So I added a fur effect to the roof and then It created the perfect matte thatching. Only bad thing is I had a red light on the interior of the hur which was the hearth. This caused the whole polygon to reflect the light. On the outside the thatching gave this awful red orange glow from the red light making the whole roof a massacre of vibrant color. I also took png files of trees and put them on polygons cuaseing a square with the image. I learned this would be a bad descision. The polygon still caused a giant square shadow. So to solve that as best as I could I took the polygon. Add divisions a thousand times and then cut the shape out by removeing the squares one by one. This took a massive amount of time. And I regret it as it took A LOT OF TIME. Maya is only depressing in one sense on how it just takes foever to render anything. Personally the school shouldn’t of invested on a Mac but a pc with a GPU that pushes 4 GB and over 12gb of ram at least. The GPU to render video/maya and the 12gb in RAM to have after effects run super fast. Oh well my techie rage can only go so far, I would love to have all mini Itx builds all around this room, it would be great.

Anyway this has been a great year. I will be sad to have to leave here as this room is full of my friends and a well instructor. Animation this year I also learned how to position a camera properly in maya as that was very profitable to keep my renders well and in check. Also speaking of framework keeping the settings up in maya such as anti aliasing and anotophic filters make the shots look very crisp and clean. The projects this year have been mostly new things to me but sadly I don’t understand smoke, I would love smoke because the smoke would of made the interior of the hut look much better as it added to the hearths burning coals.

I wonder one thing about Ecomm. How will we advance? Such as academic classes slowly advance even in the most basic courses how will Ecomm change? Especially with how freshman will learn as this is very difficult learning. Especially a lot of students complained about the shift from sketch up to Maya. Why not just start with Maya and do very basic tools to do so. Especially learning the importance of a surface to a polygon as a surface just loves to mess up at some points. Oh how lighting effects have a separate shadow option and needed to be pointed out specifically. Maybe real time demonstrations showing key shortcuts could possibly be better then just tutorials via pdf? Oh who knows I may be talking about something I know little about. I only wonder if there is a way to improve the years in Ecomm. I love this class and a way of improving definitely wasn’t the extended subjects having to do with consumerism and consumption, this is Ecomm not economics class but I do see the importance in it. It’s just been already busy so much. Especially animation, which has nothing but constant tedious work. Welp I only hope to have another excelant year in ecom.

Well i got bored one day and started this project. I took a photo of a from online (sorry no source for the photo it was to long ago) Its a Ju-87 dive bomber and i thought it would be fun to try and re touch it. i don't think my skill is near up to par but i just thought it would be fun to go back to photoshop since i was head deep in maya for such a long time. 

This is the photo after i decided to touch it up with a bit of color. i think its to monochome right now and as i look at it more i notice the grass is still way to dark in some parts. Anyway if i have an update ill give it but if i drop it expect no word of it haha.

After effects

After finally getting enough jpeg images to do this finally. I can start adding the images to a sequence so i can get some raw video footage. this footage i will edit to get the best shots out of all the footage.

Render frames

Since the way i animate is taking the individual frames and smashing them together in after affects into a sequence. this is what i have recorded so far for my animation this in only a few seconds of footage though sadly. even though i rendered for hours. I will do one more camera render today then i will edit the shots i want to use in my film for my 3D environment design. Hisss snake in the corner >:3