The Banquet

Nowhere near completion in most aspects, but I did create some bitchin' candle flame animations, and I'm pondering the multitude of camera movements I can create in here.

"Jamie"

She'll be inside the mansion, getting her face painted...

She's nowhere near textural completion, although I've run some extensive animations on things like her eyes blinking and her hair blowing, and I'm more than pleased with the results. Next I'm going to give the skin textures some loving so she and the hand look more life-like. I love her--so many possibilities...

Moths on bottle

This is the very opening sequence: moths are batting away at a bottle, trying to get at the flame. One is sliding up and down the glass flapping his wings furiously, the other is doing that bounce-bounce-bounce deal.

I learned a neat trick that will seriously lighten your render times in Mental Ray: the reflections you see are scenes I plugged into specular shading when I pressed the map button. I plugged the environmental attributes here under Sky, Floor, etc. I obviously need to lose those two light reflections on the bottle, but that's easily done when I uncheck 'Emit Specular' from the directional lighting.

Snail on Baguette

This is one of the interior shots of a snail climbing over a baguette. I finally found a texture that more closely resembles the inside slice, and I'm going to replace it. There are other wierd little doo-dads to fix like the plate buckling (soften normals perhaps?) Overall I like the lighting here. Mental ray all the way, baby.

Mansion Exterior

This is going to be one of the opening scenes for my game trailer. I've learned a bit about water and fog dynamics among tons of other things (it's all learning in Maya--oh yes ;).

I'm constantly reworking this scene but I did actually post an animation of the opening sequence in youtube with my favorite Chopin piece (it was initially going to be a DVD intro in case you're wondering about the long pause at the end):

Occult Project

Since my last 'den' project, my computer has been reformatted, stolen, and then destroyed along with my backup. Ahhhh! And so I started again with this brand new project.

This is my new interior scene for my current project: "Occult"

mental ray, fire dynamics were used, along with a lot of bump-maps