Something veeery funny happened a few days ago. It's this kind of stuff that you don't know where to put it, but when you are a junior like me who starts developing as a professional, sometimes this kind of work helps you much more than a very good portfolio. It's just publicity, but these kind of moments are what make working in vfx worth it!

This is the link to the news that became trending in twitter

Our job was to come up with a scene in AR for this news channel where we talked about the problem with illegal parties that are happening in the present day in Spain. Using unreal engine and a coded blueprint to insert people really fast, we download the full library of dances from mixamo's, stuck into characters and created this scene in order to give the narrative to the news.

Immediately, twitter blew up. We were receiving comments from all social media about how funny it was. Our bosses were mad at us as the news was heavily political based and it looked like we weren’t taking it seriously, but that wasn't the case. It was pretty amazing, I don't have a huge interest in social media, I consume it but I don’t normally post a lot of stuff so having something made by us become viral was a huge shock!. 

It was actually very interesting, not only for the people who commented funny stuff but also for the haters as well. Critics that sometimes made a lot of sense and some of them that were pure insults were very fascinating to read. It's just a small anecdote. It gives you a new perspective around the idea that AR and new technology is not only amazing by it self because of what it can do, but also its amazing for the fact that you can get your hands on it and suddenly create something that would wake up inside a lot of people a certain opinion, a certain emotion and blow up the internet for a couple of ours.

TOTAL TIME ( 12 DAYS)

Ok this is the kind of stuff I like to do after I finish a project. I try to think about the hole process and see what went wrong, what went right, what did I learn etc. The thing is I wanted to challenge my sculpting skills as I  never have the chance to do it that often. I always wanted to try some hair rendering , I would talk about that a bit more in detail later, but those were my principal objectives in this development. In the end doing fanarts like this are the greatest way to learn. You are doing something that you like for fun, but also for a challenge.

For this piece I had big troubles with my render times, something I need to look into in the future. My aproach for the hair was all geometry in the end and I think that was specially the error I made. Next time I want to try this external plugins such as Ornatrix or Xgen to see if I can get a better result without memory loss.

I froze my computer ten times while I was trying to render it xD!

I think my strenghts rely specially in composition. This is completly my opinion maybe Im wrong but its always something that I put a lot of time on to get coll shots that make a scene look better.

IMPORTANT QUESTION NOW!!!

I would really like to start working more on my diffusion of my work!. Get more people to see it. Im always lost on how to aproach it. Intagram, twitter etc. If anyone coul give me any advice around that it would be great!. Thank you so much for everyone who have been looking into this making off. I would try to keep doing it more often!

Stay safe poeple!!

WE ARE GETTING THERE!!

My god every fram takes up nearly 30 minutes. I must say I crancked up all the settings for best quiality but still, it is a long time. I still have to rework more the texture layout and give some lighting variation. The environment its done with kitbashing and would also need some texture editing to give it a much rough look. 

Some of the obstacles ive been finding have been speacially related to the shader build up with the textures created in substance painter. I don´t know why but the exports that come out of the software dont give the same effect in the Vray mtl. That is something I have to look into.

Skin shading was useing subtance painter following the tutorial from the oficial substance page done by Magdalena Dadela (https://www.artstation.com/intervain). Incredible an super easy to follow! 

Im a very impacient person. I always like to see very finished results every time in working on something. Of course this is a very bad habit, and something o work on, but at the same time It really helps every time you think "ok I must stop for today" to see all the flaws that must be corrected next day. This makes the development a bit more fluent. Right now I started working on some of the texturing, and I already saw there is some issues related to the topology of the mesh. Specially de UVS from the shirt. Im going to have to go back to that but its necessary. Im working around VARY render engine in the end. Im very used to it and I would really like to try something new but for now it works ok for the look dev.

Skin texturing is going to be the next challenge. Im not very used to it and it something that requires to stop and think and prepare for it. Skin imperfection, wrincles etc everything to give it the most realistic look possible.

I like this long term projects, they give you this sense of purpose to not stop learning stuff and be able to develop portfolio a long the way.

Okay so after the full sculpting of the clothes (no completly finished as the hard surface parts I have to do them still). Im trying to decide which render engine to use because I feel like im always using the same ones and I would like to experiments with new ones. My favourite choice is always VRAY but maybe its time to use something new. Still this first renders are starting to build up the vibe that the final image is going to get and also to see how the low poly model is working with its projection. Im not very happy with how the hair is coming out. At leas the head one, maybe is something I going to end up reworking on.

Keep updated!

Ok ok so lets say I am lacking a lot from practicing making characters. Specially hair. Funny thing is that maybe this is not going to be the final model for the hair as I saw other tools such as ORNATRIX or the hair and fur modifier in max that is simpler to use. Still I think im a bit of a dumbass because I really wanted to see first blocking outs of how the "final" concept woul look like so I jumped inmediatly to using fibermesh inside of zbrush. After a long night of fighting I managed to understand how the hair composition was going to look like and adding the crown gave it a much more polished look. I also started adding some of the final details in the face, the lips need a bit more working but overall I dint want to saturate the face with too mcuh texture.

Still as the development goes on there are more changes to come specially if there are so many alternatives to achieve the same result. Keep posted to see the development and remember! any opinions, critiques or ideas would be very apreciated during this journey! 

Thanks ti everybody! stay safe.

Hello everybody.

I have a new idea coming up for a personal proyect. So at least 90% of the people know about this series in netflix called SHERA right? Well, guess what, I loved it! So I wanted to create a piece of fanart in relation to this show. The character of Catra was one of my favourites and for a few weeks I wanted to challenge me a bit more into creating 3D characters. At my recent job Im more of an enviroment artist and I hardly have the chance to do anything related to characters so I have to give my self this kind of challenges once in a wile to not lose practice. 

So the idea is getting this shot from the show ( I really don´t know why I like it so much but this is scene lives rent free in my head)

So the idea is to make some kind of more realistic render. By the time I started doing it I allready have some of the basic shapes imported into zbrush and started pulling the clothes an refining the expresion. I wanted to experiment with this software name DAZ, at least to pull out a cool base and pose to start sculpting from it. The four first hours of the proyect gave this result.

Im going to try to keep this project uposted and sho the process. Any critice along the way will be very apreciated.

Thank you everybody and stay safe!

Today, 20-03-2020 I sat down after what it looks like the craziest month of my life. I wanted to write a post about this long ago.

The story started with the fact that I got a job. YEAH!!! A job in the vfx industry, as a very early junior, just doing 3d models and renders and compositing. A small TV series in Spain and everything looked awesome. I was called a Thursday and 4 days later I was allready packing my bags, and getting on to a 6 hours road travel to another city by my self. Excited and also a bit scared as everything just went son fast.

I got into the office, they told me what to do and the next day I was allready in charge of some scenes that needed to be finished by Friday. I had to get into it very fast. The COVID-19 news where allready talking about china and Italy. It was a bit overwelming. I switched from not having a job and being on my own pace to suddenly have to pull 3 renders of 12 hours in less than four days. Everything went so fast.

After the first week I felt I was getting the hang of it, and the next week I was given my new scenes. Also, COVID-19 already had the first cases in Spain, the news where starting to cover it. I'm still having a bit of a hard time trying to keep up with deadlines but I try my best and suddenly.......alarm state is on and everyone has to work from home.

Thank god I have a good computer, but In three weeks I had to move out of home, start another job, suddenly I can't go to my job and I have to stay inside the house I have in my new city. Yeah, pretty weird month and also very fast pase.

Its not a sad story or anything, just an anecdote. I wanted to leave it here just to remember it in the future. I am lucky that I allready had a home where i could stay and i good computer to work with, but Im a small %

So this year I discovered that a school in Malaga ( Spain) was going to do the Global game Jam 2020 in their installations, so I decided to pack my bag and off I went to participate. When I arrived It was a bit overwhelming because everyone had already made their teams but I got immediately accepted by a group who needed someone for 3D. We were a group of 5 people, two 2D artists, two 3D artists,s and a programmer. The mechanic was decided we were only waiting for the theme of the Jam to be able to start developing the art around the game.

The group got along right away. The other 3D artist was a Blender fan, so I had to adapt to him and that helped me to push my self to use blender when it was required unless I had to do a full asset by myself self then I would do it in Maya.

In our game, I had to do all the assets and environments of the game. There were a lot of things that we didn´t have time to implement but we didn't care. That is what happens in game jams. We where really excited about creating a 3D game and the development turned out to run pretty smoothly. The final product was very satisfying. 

Thanks to this kind of event I get the opportunity to awaken curiosities about game development that some times I forget and also try no techniques (I got to make the whole level in unity).

Even in the hard parts such as staying the whole night to make a game, this kind of place is always super fun for me.

The game we made:

Pistochin bizarre adventure

Gameplay video Link----------> Pistochin bizarre adventure

Download Game-----------------> Pistachin 

Password: Zg5KbKNI-Xun356oOcRw3pu37i-i3iFB1_v53gCK1VY

Genre: Platformer

Mechanic: Climb on predefined paths to get 5 principal objects

Story: Pistochin is a little piston who has to get all the tools in the garage to be able to repair himself.

Jam theme: Repair.

Cinematic. Animation before the game starts.

My role was 3D Generalist.

A full night working with a chill sunset to present the last day of the jam!

The team working

UPDATE!!!!

WE WON TWO PRICES FOR OUR GAME!!!

BEST GAME DESIGN

BEST GAME

AT LAST ITS HERE!!!!

So this is my final project for this 4 intensive but very fun months. As you may have noticed I love sci fi things so this turned out to be super fun to make. I learned a lot about the process and now I feel really confident to do more of this stuff on my own or may be for some other project. I had a wide of programs to work with and every single teacher that came to teached us was super helpfull!

Im very glad to have taken thisa course. It a must do if you really want to get into the vfx or animation world. I probably would be back again because they have a lot of cool courses that actually are super help to learn. 

For now I leave you with my final project and its making off. Enjoy it and please feel free to add any criticism!

Thank you ver much!!

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