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.