My Kowloon Alley scene is featured in 3D Artist, Issue 84 (August 2015).

APC No. 3

APC No. 3 front


APC No. 3 rear

Breakdown:

Updated Site Online Now

Check out my updated website featuring VFX work for television. lindenstirk.com

Sci-Fi Aircraft

 

    "Through the Breach"

    "Desert Flyby"

Lightwave 11.6 and After Effects CC

Celestial Art

Some more colorful celestial artwork inspired by the beautiful false-color images of nebulae. Created in After Effects.

Celestial Art

Some celestial inspired artwork created in After Effects.

Orbital Sunset

Created in Vue. After Effects was used for the lens flare and color correction. Click to view high-res.

"Orbital Sunset"

VTOL Othographic Views

Almost forgot, here are some ortho views.

Final VTOL Renders

My Vertical Take-off and Landing aircraft is now finished. This wraps up my capstone project and my final semester at Johnson County Community College. There are still lots of little things to change. I plan on working on both vehicles and an environment to showcase them in the future.

Here are the final renders and the AO pass for each one as well.

VTOL WIP Progress

I have finished by Vertical Take-off and Landing aircraft, but I haven't posted any WIP. So, here are some quick renders that I saved during the process.

More of the model completed:

A lot more detail in this render. The modeling, except for the tail fins, is done.

Here is the model with the UV's nearly done. I mostly used Maya for this because Bodypaint does not have a move and sew command, and Maya screws up BP UV's when the "Layout" command is used. Unfortunately, I did most of it in BP before realizing this. Anyway, in some areas the checker texture appears to be too big or too small, but those parts use larger or smaller texture maps. For example, the wing uses an 8K texture because it runs the length of the plane, but the landing is only a 2K texture because it is much smaller. I tried to keep the level of detail in the texture consistent since the most of the plane uses the same type of material.

Base Texture Completed:

Environment Concept

This is a design for an environment that I intend to finish this summer. I have modeled the foreground elements and spent quite a lot of time with the ice and snow shaders, but I will be doing heavy post work in Photoshop for this one. For the ice and snow, I followed several tutorials and modified them to get results closer to what I wanted. I am still working on them.

The background mountains are hardly visible, but here's what they look like. The terrain was sculpted in Vue and imported into Maya as an OBJ file. I could have done this in Maya by using a height map created in Photoshop, but Vue is definitely more intuitive. Plus I hadn't used Vue in over a year, so I wanted to test it out again.

Here is another environment that showcases the mountains better than the concept above. I tried to render the scene with my vehicle models, but my PC kept running out of RAM. I will have to composite them in later. The planets were created in Photoshop.

APC Texture WIP 2

Here's a view of the retractable gun at the front, and a view of the side where the plane's crane will hook onto the APC to carry it.

APC Texture WIP

Here is my first go at the texture. I played around with several color schemes, but I eventually went back to the palette of the original concept. I'm not happy with how it looks right now. I grossly misjudged how long it would take to UV the model. Consequently, I had only about a day to do the majority of the texture work. I used Bodypaint 3D to paint on some of the textures, which saved me a lot of time for things like the worn edges and scuff marks. For some reason, all of the windows disappeared just before I rendered. I'll fix that later.

APC Finished Model

I know it's been about three weeks since my last post, but I've been very busy lately. I'll try to update this site more frequently in the future. Here are a couple of ambient occlusion renders of my finished APC model. There is quite a bit of detail that I wished I could have added, but I had to move on to the UV's and texture painting.

VTOL Crane and Canopy

I was worried about how challenging the aircraft would be to model, however, everything has come together quite quickly, and it looks better than I thought. I added a rocket pod and some missiles to the side. I also changed the cannon from a dual barrel attached to the side, to a single barrel fixed underneath. It's looks better in my opinion.

Here is a view of the crane that will pick up the APC.Nothing is smoothed yet, though.

VTOL Modeling Update

With the APC is nearly done, I decided to get started on the aircraft. My intention was to work on both vehicles at the same time, but I got carried away with APC.

I decided to have two rotating engines on either side of the plane rather than twin engines at the top and a single lift engine in the middle. It looks a lot cooler and gives makes the aircraft feel more balanced.

Getting there...

Nearly done with the APC. Here are some quick ambient occlusion renders. They look nicer than the viewport screenshots.

More APC Views

Here is a wireframe screenshot and a view of the back.

APC Turret

I ran into another problem. The spherical turret design looked okay on the concept, but not so much in 3D. It's a different shape to work with as well.

Here are some quick block outs in the hope of coming up with a better design.

I finally just winged it and came up with this. I should do that more often, but I tend to overthink everything.

Final Kowloon Alley Render

Here is the final image with the ambient occlusion layer. Check out the gallery page for a higher res image. I changed a lot for this final render, including the lighting, and added a lot more geometry in the background and on the floor, and got rid of excess geometry. I've made hundreds of minor adjustments as well. I also updated most of my 200+ materials to the mental ray architectural material. It took a while to tweak the values, but in the end these materials gave me more realistic results.

There are about 700,000 polys for this scene. I could have optimized it even further, but I ran out of time. Rendered using mental ray and importance sampling.