Fundamentals of Texturing and Lighting

This class was pretty cool! I worked really hard to make sure my work was high quality. The most significant assignment for this class was to take an existing 3D model of a wall/pipe/door, texture it and light it. The trick was that we could only use our own photo references! Yeah, so I went on a few extreme photo shoots, taking hundreds of photos in downtown San Francisco, looking for the grungiest streets, walls and sidewalks. This is what I came up with:

From Jedi's 3D Art

The hardest part, to me, was stitching these hundreds of photos together to create a single, high-quality image of the sidewalk. I wanted it to look really good! I think I'm pretty happy with the results. This, actually, isn't the final render, but I'll replace it when I get home. The final version had a better marriage between the wall and the sidewalk, instead of that unnatural, straight line you can see.

I should note that there was a *lot* of post-production in Adobe Photoshop! We had to be very careful to make everything look right and proportionate. Also, we had to have a clean slate wall and put separate layers on top of it for the graffiti and grunge. It was pretty challenging, but I'm really comfortable doing stuff like this.

CAPS – Computer Animation Production System

In the Fall of 2007, my animation class was called CAPS (Computer Animation Production System).

The final project for this class was to create and composite a 3D building into a photo background. We had to take all of the photos ourself too. Everyone was choosing relatively small buildings in San Francisco and all of them were in the daylight. I decided to do something different and chose a really large building to render at night time. My teacher warned me that I might be biting off more than I can chew, but I was up for the challenge! Here's what I came up with:

From Jedi's 3D Art

We also had to create a short video to illustrate how the render and compositing were put together. The video quality is pretty crappy, but at least you get the idea:

Adobe After Effects was used to put the video together.