Tag Archives: Adobe Illustrator
Love New Brunswick Poster
I had to take a short break my Cinema 4D training to design this poster which was commissioned by coLAB Arts for the upcoming Love New Brunswick Music Festival at Boyd Park in New Brunswick, NJ.
Back to Learning C4D – Adding Materials and Lights
Here’s the next step in the evolution of my Cinema 4D office. A simple light over the desk has been added as well as floor trim and crown molding which is conveniently not pictured (the profiles were created in Adobe Illustrator, imported into C4D, and extruded using the Extrude NURB). The windows were created using two Boole objects. I still need to add materials to the vase, desk, and the office chair. I’m kind of curious to see how the desk will appear when I assign a texture to it. I think that the texture on the desk will probably need to be mapped so that the texture is going in the right direction when applied to the desk.
In the next post I should be adding more textures, more lights, and shadows. This is getting a lot more fun the deeper I get into the tutorial.
Learning Maya, Adding Detail
My Maya project, recreating a Jean Tinguely kinetic sculpture, is coming along. Modeling in 3D space is just a different kind of thinking for me, though it’s very similar to sketching in a way. With a sketch, you rough out the drawing and build the drawing up until it has the detail that you want. When you’re working with Maya, or any 3D program I would assume, it seems like you have to take a similar approach. You start off with a simple object (a cube, sphere, or cylinder to name a few of objects) and then add detail by pushing and pulling vertices, edges, and faces until you get the detail you want. The thing that I’m still getting used to is how many different ways to push and pull vertices, edges, and faces there are. To think that I thought Photoshop and After Effects were complex programs. Maya might be edging them out.
I think my 3D object has come pretty far compared to my first posting, now I just have to add the “arms” and make sure that I can animate it. I think that once I apply a texture to it and put it in an environment with good lighting, it’s going to be a nice portfolio piece.
Learning Maya, Step 1
Most recently I enrolled in the Mercer County Community College 3D Animation Certificate Program. My first class in the program is 3D Modeling 1 with Autodesk’s Maya. Wow! Maya is powerful and there’s just so much to know. Our first big assignment is to create a machine which later in the semester we’ll be animating. I was going to do Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots but the instructor said that a lot of students create robots, cars, or guns and that I should create something “different”. After seeing some examples of projects done by the instructor’s prior students I was inspired to create a 3D model of a Jean Tinguely kinetic sculpture that I saw while visiting my friend, Joel Radvanyi, in Basel, Switzerland. I’ll be showing from time-to-time the steps taken in creating the model. So far I’m at the stage of creating the basic shapes that make up the sculpture and once I get everything laid out, I’ll be getting more intricate with the shapes. One thing I can say is that I’m not a big fan of Maya’s drawing tools so I’ve been drawing some of the shapes in Adobe Illustrator and bringing them into Maya to be extruded and revolved. Anyway, here’s where I’m at today…