Texturing the horse finished

I finished texturing the horse and I'm happy with the look of it. I created a spec map and a bump map to increase the gooey look of the internal organs.

Textured horse head render in mental ray

So here is the horse head with the texture applied, the material is a blinn and ive scaled back the specularity for the fur but maintained it for the internal slices etc by using a specularity map.I'm quite happy with the result of this just several more body slices to go.

Hand painted horse head texture map

The Maya fur system hasn't been working the way I hoped it would to avoid further problems and wasted  time I started texturing the horse with hand painted maps. I made a start on the head today using reference photos as a guide only. I rendered out an ambient occlusion pass as a guide for painting as the uvs dont always help in the placing of shades and details. Below is a link to a useful tutorial on that.

http://www.game-artist.net/forums/spotlight-articles/1317-tutorial-ambient-occlusion-maya-alchemist101.html

Zebra what Zebra? Or how a zebra becomes a horse

For my opening shot of the sting I planned on having a closeup of the zebras eye, we wouldnt know it was dead or infact gruesomely divided up into slices. I thought it would be quite haunting to have the sound of a zebra calling but faded and distant before the music kicked in. I searched the internet for a royalty free public domain zebra sound, have you ever heard a zebra? Check out this link then ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n332ObBv3cU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Hardly haunting hey? So its a horse now ;-).

I started playinng with maya fur to try and recreate those fine hairs on a horses coat. It didnt go to plan this is the closest I could get in maya without it crashing. I just couldnt get the fur to look fine enough. Ill try again tomorrow and see what happens.

Dissecting a model in maya

After spending that time modelling the zebra it was time to slice him up. I felt this would be an easier approach rather than modelling each section seperatly. To achieve the gruesome result I put the camera into orthographic view of the side and used the cut faces tool to make several incisions. I then used fill hole to create end faces and the interactive split tool to ensure it was all quads. I selected the end faces and extruded them in to create slight cavities. The plan is to later sculpt a bit of detail into them either using zbrush or the maya sculpt tool (we wont see much of the innards so too much detail wont be neccesary.) next step is to uv map it and texture it.

Here's a pic of of him all sliced up, im going to use textures for the innards as the camera wont get to close to them for it to show as geometry.

Zebra modelling complete

So the main model is done now, I poly modelled him from reference photos, now I just need to slice him up and texture him. I'll do that today with any luck.

Zebra modelling

here are some pics of the model in progress.

Dead Zebra in Progress

Just started this model for the original idea of the hirst inspired ident.

Meeting Sky Creative Art Director

Hi guys, so the other day we had an art director from Sky Creative come by to present the competition brief to us. Turned out to be very useful to have the meeting afterwards she listened to our ideas and gave us all feedback, I explained my previous idea of the damien hirst style sting and she was interested and suggested that if it was made to look different in someway it would be acceptable and considered a nod to damien hirst rather than a copy, she also explained the need for living holds at the end of the sting so it got me thinking I'm going to go back to my first idea but with some drastic changes.

Idea number 2

I did a bit of research on Damien Hirst and read that he was pretty quick to sue people for imitating his work, so In the interest of avoiding copyright infringement I've come up with another idea, there was a news article a while back about a German cleaner who mopped up an art exhibit worth over a million quid. Whether the installation is worth that at all goes back to my previous question. The piece of art was a bunch of wooden posts attached to each other with some paint dripping off it onto the floor. The cleaner couldn't distinguish the art from trash so cleaned it up. It reminds of how much I wanted to go and make Tracy Emin's bed for her.




I thought I'd create a similar piece and have a cleaner mop up the spillage leaving the word arts in the smear. I've quickly modelled it and its titled, 'tea at grandmas.' theres a pot of tea pouring into a bedpan overflowing onto the table and down to the floor. I even created an artist style justification for the 'sculpture.'

Sky Arts Sting, Ideas and Damien Hirst

I listened to the tracks and I then watched the previous winners, found here: http://projects.skycreative.tv/skyartsstings/video.php

They were pretty cool and I quickly realised that they were mostly filmed and only one was fully cgi. I've come to the conclusion that some actual footage might get me a better result. I've been playing around with a concept, more a question really 'What is Art?' some of the more modernists out there cause a lot of controversy as to whether their sculpture is art or a pile of old chairs. I wanted my sting to reflect that question.

I was inspired by Damien Hirst's cow and steer 'sculptures'.


My idea is to recreate this and have a camera track around the cow and on the otherside it is no longer a cow but the word Arts chopped into pieces. below is a previs shot I put together very quickly.

Short Shorts Assignment 1

So the first assignment for this module happens to be a competition sky creative are running for their sky arts channel. The brief is to create a 20 second ident for sky arts, it has a great prize and an internship as well as using your ident on the channel. So I've had to start thinking, the scary thing is there's not a lot of time between doing my final major project and the other projects I've got running.

So first things first I checked out the sky arts site for the brief and downloaded their entry pack, it contains all the music and the logo you need. It's available here:

http://projects.skycreative.tv/skyartsstings/brief.php

Now I'm off to listen to some of this and see what it inspires.

Hyper Smash