Welcome 2013 – Christopher (aka The Creative Sheep)
Posted in CreativeInfo | Comments Off on Welcome 2013 – Christopher (aka The Creative Sheep)

Hello, welcome to 2013. It has been a long time since my last post, I have been busy. I can guarantee that 2013 will be (hopefully) a better year. I will be re-establishing myself, if you are not already aware “The Creative Sheep” is my branding, that will not change, everything around it will. I will start to begin by writing more frequent posts every two weeks from this point forward. I’ve had these two funny music video clips sitting on my HDD for a long time.

Los Mono – Promesas
Los Mono – Se Puede

I hope you have had a good Holiday
See you soon 🙂

Planet Surface & Difference between Displacement and VDMs ?
Posted in Mudbox | Comments Off on Planet Surface & Difference between Displacement and VDMs ?

Hi, everyone. Here is a Planet Surface that I quickly created one day in Mudbox. Stay Tuned for Tutorials to come soon.

Planet Surface

Planet Surface

I’d also like to mention the differences between Vector Displacement Maps and Displacement Maps. If you are unsure between the differences. A displacement map works by displacing the object or the surface normals, whereas a Vector Displacement maps works in a similar fashion, except it can get areas that not along the surface normals, a common example is a human ear. Looking at a ear face on, is along a surfaces normals, there are parts, specifically the top of a ear that are not along a surface normal, that is where vector displacement maps work, beautifully.

Mudbox Artist, I will be posting VDM maps here, don’t forget to drop by ever so often. You can also find me on Autodesk Area Forum under the Avatar “FalconCrest” and I can also be found on the Si-Community Forum as well.

Don’t lie to a Frog
Posted in CreativeInfo | Comments Off on Don’t lie to a Frog

I found this YouTube video very interesting, it shows, not that we or atleast I didn’t know this, how intelligent the creatures that live around us are.
Smart Frog

Quest to Master Softimage ICE
Posted in Learning Softimage ICE, Mudbox | Comments Off on Quest to Master Softimage ICE

Here is my recent ICE tree using Arrays. The Softimage docs are crude in terms of explaining the math, at times it can leave you scratching your head, and consistently going online to find the answer can be annoying, but I continue on my quest. I wish ICE would show the actual math in each node after it’s evaluated so I can see how it’s done, I know you can visualize data but seeing the math would help too.

icearrayresult
icearraytree

Pixar’s SubDivision Libraries – Released
Posted in CreativeInfo | Comments Off on Pixar’s SubDivision Libraries – Released

Pixar is releasing their closed-source proprietary SubDivision Surface Libraries to the public. This can open many doors in the 3D community, I look forward to it.

What do you want ?
Posted in CreativeInfo | Comments Off on What do you want ?

This is just a quick update. I am quite busy working on my portfolio, and learning new techniques and tricks. I will be throwing some tutorials online but, I want to hear from you, what do I need to make this blog more alive, what do you want to see ?

Procedural Rocks & MiA_Material Render Example
Posted in CreativeInfo | Comments Off on Procedural Rocks & MiA_Material Render Example

Here is a render of some rocks I created in Softimage, it was more of a practice with using procedurals to create rocks.
rocks

Softimage contains, three common Accurate Architectural shaders. The common one is simply referred to as the Architectural shader, the other two is the Mia_Material and Mia_Material_X (Mia stands for Mental Ray Architectural) These same shader can be found in Autodesk Maya, for those more familiar with that 3D Animation/Visual Effects Software. I’ve been using the standard Illumination shaders (phong,lambert etc) for a long time, until recently have I begun to only use the Arch shaders as they are physically accurate and more control, although they can be a bit daunting for the complete novice.
mia_material

Here is a quick WIP I did in Mudbox it looks like a landscape you’d find in the classic game ‘day of the tentacle‘.

Computer Animation from the Past
Posted in CreativeInfo | Comments Off on Computer Animation from the Past

If you thought doing Computer Animation in present day is hard, it still is but not has hard as seen in this video. You had to program quite a bit, although it is not seen in the video, and yes, you still do have to program some things.