old habits die hard...

i shall not name where this is from! /shame...

i haven't attempted to seriously draw anime-styled stuff in a while. Well, as serious as i could be on a horrible, narrow strip of paper (i.e. the bottom tear-off part of a credit card bill) lol! i intended to use brighter, neon colours but that all went to crap about 30% into the drawing. More colour-barfing! 8D;;

But this was fun to do! i need to get back to drawing more personal stuff!

shame!
graphite + adobe photoshop CS4
texture abuse from CGtextures.com

Fish! process part 3/3

After finishing sketching in part 1 and modelling in part 2...

Step 6: Putting the scene together
Here's what my final scene looked like before rendering:

i used a Free Form Deformer (FFD) to bend the fish body and fins (i couldn't get good results with the Bend Deformer) and added a Stick Texture Tag so the texture matches up with the deformed body.

i added random ice chunks by first modelling a single ice chunk, putting it into an Emitter, applying Current State to Object, and manually tweaking the positions of the ice chunks.

Here are a few of the scenes i tested out. With the help of my professor, i settled on a strong red light in the back to bring out the effects of Subsurface Scattering at the fins. My professor also advised be to add a cool light on one side and a softer, warm light to offset the cold one. A weak environment fog and depth of field were also used to soften the background elements a bit:

Step 6: Final image
In Photoshop, i tweaked the contrast and added a glow to the proteins. I also did the mock journal cover layout in Photoshop (yes, i probably should've used Illustrator, i know :P)
Only AFP was rendered separately and brought into Photoshop because using C4D's depth of field killed the (not very attractive anyway) glow.

Here is the final product!

Will be doing process posts for my surgical and neuro illustrations soon!

Fish! process part 1/3

Hello! Sorry I've been a bit MIA this month - been bogged down with watching too many kdramas school work and other unplanned things! Anyway, here is something i've been meaning to put up - a break down of how i created my mock journal cover.

Disclaimer: Since i'm very much a novice at 3D, i created this more for myself and it's not intended to be a how-to or anything lol! i felt the need to document how i did some things before i forgot! ;)

Project objectives: To create a mock journal/science magazine cover about antifreeze proteins found in Atlantic Herring.
Target audience: General public

Step 1: Find an interesting protein
Unable to let go of my fishy past, i looked up proteins found in fish species in the Protein Data Bank. i settled on an antifreeze protein in Atlantic herring.



Step 2: Sketching
Here are some quick sketches i did. i envisioned this dynamic illustration with a fish breaking out of ice. Looking back, i think my illustration would have had more impact with a whole school of herring.


ballpoint pen + col-erase pencils

Step 3: Final sketch
This was my final sketch from the planning stage. In hindsight i really shouldn't have worked this up so much, in order to encourage more feedback and changes at this point! i got really carried away because well, i like fish. :) Comparing my sketch and my final model, i was sad to realize how many drawing errors exist in this sketch haha...


Adobe Photoshop CS4

So that pretty much concludes the planning stage. Part 2, modelling...

Fish! process part 2/3

Continuing from the final sketch...

Steps 4 & 5: Modelling & texturing
To get a more accurate structure for the fish, I used some illustrations as references to build off of.



Click to see my attempts at modelling the fish and ice...


After completing the fish model, i tried to use BodyPaint to texture the fish, but i wasn't able to achieve very good results. Since the fish structure is pretty simple, i just painted a texture in Photoshop without bothering with UV mapping. The image was added to the color channel and projected flat onto the fish model. A bump map was also created for the fish scales.


Lastly, the protein structure data from the Protein Data Bank was opened up in Chimera. I chose to go with a ribbon representation in the end (the surface representation was too reminiscent of fish eggs according to my classmates). I then brought the protein model into C4D and applied a simple material.



That wraps up modelling! Now to build the scene...