FINAL

1.     Paul Debevec

He is head of the graphics laboratory at the institute of creative technologies. He talked about the progression of making 3d things look fake to making it look real and believable and how they have developed technology to make facial 3d models look believable and crossing the uncanny valley in particular Avatar and spider man.

2.     Tim Fields

He talked about the gaming industry and how its being fragmented out in that there are more opportunities for people to become a part of it. How different platforms are making it easier for more freelance people to work on new games.

3.     Blue Sky

Talked about how they were able to get light to interact with clouds in an effective and cheap render wise. Developed a cloud generator and created a library with different seeds. Having a team of a few people working on specific things.

Gnomon Tutorials

Lighting with Materials:

It was very useful in that it helped me learn more about shading and how to apply to a 3d model. The artist who made the tutorial was very good at explaining how to make the material and how lighting and shading should be applied.

Maya fluid tutorial

The artist Wayne Hollingsworth gave a very good tutorial on how to create believable fire. The tutorial taught me how to add texture to the Maya fluids and using the dynamic fields to make a smoke bomb effect. It also gave a good explanation on how to create oil and wispy smoke as well as how to create ground dust.

final post

The two Gnomon videos that I tried to watch but couldnt because my computer would not let me watch them. Were speed painting to matte painting with Rainart and Speedpainting to concept art by David Levy. Above are some things that I made by pulling the brushes from the dvds. In addition to my Final which is a snippet from characterizing the show Party down.

My two talks were Andrew Ellis Johnson and Hooper Turner. Both of them were particularly interesting. Andrew was very political. What I got from his work was a very comical approach. He also
pointed me to a group called improve everywhere.

Hooper Turner told me that I was a performance artist when I spoke with him one on one. He pointed me to artists that I should look up. Tom Sachs, Thomas Demand, Francis Bacon, Irving Norman, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Hirshhorn, Eves Kline, Olive Harring, Katy Smither, etc.. Very nice dude. Gave me his day in New York and how he manages painting and working. Very inspiring. 

That's about it. 

Andrew Ellis Johnson - I had a class with him, and he had us bring in images and interrogate them, it was very interesting to dissect pictures and try to come up with every possible reason for every single part of the image, from the color, to the text. The thing that stood out to me most about his art was that he used this idea or concept of interruption. The entire time during his lecture there was the sound of a goat in the background, and it was constantly making noise and disrupting the talk, so it was hard to concentrate at times on his speech that he was giving. The point however was to decide what was important, the goat interruption or the words in which he was speaking. His art is very bizarre and if you are not highly educated or know the background of his art, many of the symbols and purposely used physical pieces are not understood, and the whole of many of his pieces are completely confusing. 

Leah Duncan- Leah was much more abstract, and did many large scale projects. She likes to reach as much tension on a 2d surface as possible, she draws inspiration from Matisse and Picasso. Especially Picasso because he ignored perspective and painted loosely and confidently. It was interesting to hear her say that you should concentrate on what you want from a painting and then not try to clean it up or perfect it if the idea is already visible and understood.

 Thecla Schiphorst
My favorite of hers was a Dream Machine that her and a grad student had worked on. It showed a computer taking in images throughout the day of different places and then had a display as if the machine was sleeping and based off of the images it had seen that day connections were made and a series of images or short movies were played as the "dream". And she talked a lot about de-habituation which can re-tune thoughts and thought processes, which I found very interesting.

Final Project

Final
For my final I created a spaceship using industrial design techniques.
Blocked out some shapes with charcoal brush to generate some ideas:

Sketched out one of the designs in 3/4 perspective:

Drew over with cleaner linework and added values:

Artist Talks
Adrew Ellis Johnson
Paul Debevec
Tim Fields


Gnomon Videos
Scott Robertson- Industrial Design Rendering - Bicycle
  trace drawing using path tool in PS to outline all the forms then shade afterward
  airbrush lights and shadows using "preserve transparency" to keep sharp edges
  add more paths for absolute white specular, erase soft edges into them
  learned: metal flake texture can be made with color dodging the hotspots with same hue, lighter color

David Levy - From Speed Painting to Concept Art
  create complex brushes by compounding simpler brushes, and changing opacity, scattering, and angle jitter settings
  gives you free high detail, even with speedpaintings
  use same brushes really big to brainstorm design ideas for structures and vehicles
  learned: use sharpen filter before saving brush preset

Cameron Coker - Final

Cameron Coker
Final Project, Artist Talks, Gnomon Videos

I hope to work a bit more on this one...not only is it small but I really need to work on the shading, get some harsh darks and lights in there...

Artist Talks

Paul Debevec

Paul Debevec talked about his work as Associate Director of Graphics Research at USC ICT beginning as a humble graduate student making 3D environments from video shot from a kite all the way to doing high resolution facial maps for major motion pictures such as James Cameron's Avatar.

Electronic Arts

Andre Thomas and Chris David visited campus to talk about the skills required to be Technical Artists for one of the most successful videogame publishing companies in the world (that's EA in case you were wondering).
Electronic Arts produces games from numerous subsidiary studios including Insomniac Games (Ratchet and Clank, Resistance, etc), Crytek (Crysis, Crysis 2, etc), Bioware (Mass Effect, Star Wars: The Old Republic, etc), Maxis (The Sims, Sim City, etc.), and EA Sports (Madden NFL Series, FIFA Series, Tiger Woods Golf Series, etc).

Tim Fields

As a veteran producer, game designer, and team leader in the gaming industry Tim Fields gave an intimate, informal talk about his experiences and where he sees the industry headed in the future. Tim gave us a unique look at the role of social games and mobile gaming in todays market and even visited the seniors upstairs to check out our independent game design project.

Gnomon Videos

From Speed Painting to Concept Art with David Levy

A lot of good tips and tricks that helped me understand photoshop and all its tools, especially when playing with custom brushes, perspective, and Effects Layers. A lot of what I learned here I used in my final Knight image.

Matte Painting for Production with Jared Simeth

What I thought would be an intermediate tutorial on quality matte paintings in photoshop became a sobering look at the techniques that professional matte painters use to create their gorgeous backgrounds such as modeling the scene in Maya before using rendered images as a foundation in photoshop.