One Bad Apple...

Nobody like apples. Not even pears. Weekend Challenge entry. I actually won the competition, much to my surprise.

If you Want Something Drawn...

Draw it yourself. A surprisingly popular Weekend Challenge Entry.

The First Coins

After a hiatus, I decided to get back in entering the BA Weekend Challenge. The theme for this one was 'money' so decided To model the first coins, minted by the king of Lydia. Rendered in LuxRender.

A Most Excellent Adventure

The theme for the challenge was "time travel", so I entered a render of the phone booth from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright...

An M26 Pershing.

Cannon

My first Weekend Challenge entry rendered in Cycles. The design of the cannon is loosely based off a Civil War howitzer.

Shallow Seas

This is perhaps my most ambitious project to date, texture wise. The mermaid character in the scene uses two materials each with its own set of textures.

A vertex color map was used as a mask for the texture. I made extensive use of image maps when creating her – color, normal, alpha, specularity, and specular color for her ‘vest’. Her dolphin half is loosely based off Fraser’s dolphin, which in hindsight may have been a mistake, given that it’s a somewhat obscure species.

Shark progress

An updated version of my shark model, rendered with SSS.

Harpy (WIP)

A work in progress.  I modeled a fairly low poly character model and created a texture, a partial normal map, and an ambient occlusion map to help show color variations. The wing are still untextured, however hopefully I will be able to bring my experience with a similar project to bear on it. It isn’t complete by any means – I still need to finish up the normal map, as well as create a specularity map – but I do feel like I’ve pushed my boundaries.

As a mythological creature, a harpy doesn’t really make that much anatomical sense. Birds (excluding flightless birds) are basically blobs with wings, a head, and two stick like legs. The pectoral muscles on a bird are enormous in comparison to the rest of its body. Given this information, I decided to bulk up the the deltoid and pectoral muscles while maintaining an aesthetically acceptable form.

Ozymandias II

Several improvements on the previous version. A normal map and bump map have been added, the strand plants were replaced by splines, and the trees were adjusted.

Voyage to the Sky, 'Revised'

Ugh. This one was a real pain. Blenders' 2.59 render compositing system is broken. I tried a different approach, rendering three layers, then saving it as a high-quality jpeg. Next I added a world texture, using the jpeg as the bitmap. I then rendered the final layer.

The clouds... belch. That's what I get for using Blenders volumetric material.

Tripod

In 1898 the Martians visited Earth.

In 1968 we return the favor.

My interpretation of what a human-made fighting-machine would look like.

Waterfall, revamped

After a good deal of effort, I was finally able to revamp the Waterfall to my satisfaction. The new background was a major pain to get right, and the render node compost system decided to cease working. For the most part, at least hal of the thing was an exercise in frustration.

On the other hand, I did make use of a bunch of new techniques. Baking a shadow map for the ferns and creating an intensity map turned out rather well.

Normals

Working with normal maps for inorganic objects turned out to be less complicated then I imagined it to be. On the other hand, getting the normals to show correctly has been a real pain.

Another update

I've been working on updating more of my older works, and this and another piece. I would have posted it as well, but every time I try to render it, or even look at the material it uses, it crashes.

Update, part duex

After struggling with insomnia, I managed to make several corrections to the scene, including the water, the sub-surface scattering, clouds, and lights.

Updates

After getting some feedback, I've updated two of my WC entries. The re-render of the Fire and Ice uses an enviromentat map to show the fires reflection, while the Strange Creature used several new lights, textures, and a normal map for the creature.

I'm not really sure if I like the camera angle or not.

Strange Creature

If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds, and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you? - First Doctor

For this one, I wanted a amphibian or amphibious looking creature. The bitmap texture is actually gray-scale, color is added by a RGB texture node. The reeds uses a hair particle system while the ground is a sculpted multirez. The water may look like it uses a wave modifier, but Blender 2.49bs wave modifier doesn't allow for circular waves. I got around this by using a wood texture set to displace, then mapping it to an empty. The water also uses ray mirror and ray transparency.

Fire and Ice

The theme for this challenge was opposites, so i decided on a piece of burning ice. The flames used a standard particle system with the individual particles set to a halo texture. The texture itself was keyed to an ipo, allowing the flame particles to change color as they rose. Most of the water was modeled, except for the droplet hitting the surface.

Some thing didn't work out as well as I had hoped. The texture of the ice didn't show up very well though the coating of water, and the flame looks a bit unconvincing.

Kitchen

This was perhaps my most ambitious entry to the Weekend Challenge yet. Created using multiple objects, a ray mirror for the floor and pans, a particle system, soft body and alpha transparency for the curtain, and ambient occlusion to aid the lighting. I don't usually render at this resolution, but I wanted to show as much of the detail as possible.