Matte Painting Final

Today was a fun day.  Got to hang out with one of my classmates from my previous term and we had a good time catching up and also getting some work done for our individual classes.  At his request, you know who you are, I am posting an image shot of my matte painting final that was submitted to my Photoshop for Digital Production class that I took last term.  This was an interesting test of Photoshop skills which required me to use all the various tools including detailed masks, lots of clone stamping, and extracting the right elements from different reference images.  It was a lot of fun to put together.

While it was fun, it was also a rest time sink.  I had to make sure to manage my time wisely with this project and my finals for my other two classes, especially hard surface modeling (which you can view a couple posts down).  But this one, I really wanted it to be decent.  So I worked on it, got a critique in class the week before the submission date, went back, worked more, and it came out relatively good.  There's more to do with it.  I could still add in additional islands, or rocky pillars sticking out of the water, something to spice it up even more and give it a sense of uniqueness.  But this is the state it was in when I submitted it.

Fun stuff!

A Wood Texture with Shiny!

One of my three courses at Gnomon is Texture Painting where I'm learning some awesome stuff.  Just a couple days ago my class teacher, Eric, showed us some incredible stuff in Maxon's Bodypaint 3D.  Needless to say, at the end, I was just blown away.  But anyway, a couple weeks ago we had an assignment to design a texture using Maya's shader nodes.  The key was we (the students) were to create the color, specular and bump map only using 3 texture images (for me - the wood base, a grunge layer and a Yamaha logo image) and the rest were Maya nodes.  I didn't think it was possible until Eric demo'ed it in class and this is some awesome stuff I tell you.

So again, I had a clean, wood texture as my base, brought in a secondary image which I used to add grunge onto the wood, and lastly throwing on a Yamaha "sticker" logo on the wood and breaking it up.  After the color was done, I went into creating the bump and specular maps which really made the texture look damn cool, after several tweaks of course.  After a quick critique, I followed Eric's advice and threw in an eccentricity map as well which really made the texture look even better.  A little more tweaking and here is what I managed to get done.