Well, it’s almost December and my time to finish my demo reel and portfolio is running up. I promised my girlfriend I’d start applying for jobs by the end of December so that means it’s go time for my new reel. My new goal is to start rendering for my new reel this weekend, I have a few characters that I don’t think I can improve on anymore than I can without just wasting weeks and improving them by 5-10%.

I solved a big issue I had with my AO passes which was that they obviously only look at geometry when rendering so I created a new mental ray shader that is FG based and looks at my alpha channels so I can render hair and tattered clothing. That was a big win and it’s done right now. I’m still playing with render layers and the amount of ambience I want everyone to have. I think that’ll get tweaked as I render on a character by character basis.

Here’s a test I did today with my new AO shader, as you can see on the tabard it’s listening to the alpha I used at the bottom.

The character that is supposed to be my last on this reel (or second to last depending on how quickly I finish a project for school) is my alien general who is pretty much done being sculpted but I’m having this insane issue with one of his 4 shoes and it’s UV’s. They are basically useless and I can’t make Zbrush export any kind of normal map that makes any sense for them. I’ve tried everything I know and if I fix this problem today I can start texturing him tomorrow!

I’ve been identifying weaknesses in my sculpting, and one thing I’ve learned is that I smooth too much. I’ve been watching tutorials about how to use different methods to sculpt and I’ve been experimenting with them so hopefully I can take care of these issues soon. Anywho, this is the final sculpt for this guy, gonna be texturing him in Zbrush as soon as I fix this stupid shoe issue. Cheers! back to work I go.