DarenDoc’s Slightly Nifty Musings Inc.

Ok, here goes.  After a bunch of you contacted me to learn about texturing in 3d, I decided to try my hand at producing a tutorial about that.  It’s sometimes random and unfocused… but it’s a start.  Hopefully, I’ll do more of these if you like where this one is going.  Part one is above.  Part two below.

After all this chat about TMP, I wanted to integrate that into my “modo-izing” of older model files…

so I present a preview of what’s coming up.

I am still in the process of going through old files, and I decided to try and bring in my Poseidon model to Modo and see what I could get out of it.  Modo handles Lightwave objects fairly well, with only a small hassle sometimes of textures not making the transition intact… or once converted, mild adjustments to the settings are needed to give the same result.  So, when I brought the 225,000 polygon (small count for its relative detail) model over, I was expecting a bit of work still yet to be done.  Well, it came across pretty clean, and I only needed to tweak the luminance of some of the textures, and did some test renders of the old girl.

So, here’s something for the folks who were asking for more Poseidon…

Oh, the video above was not made during the Production, but afterwards… when I wanted to have something to put on my portfolio… thought it needed a nice beauty shot.  And, one last sidenote, I believe that in the Guinness’ book of world records for 2007, there is an entry for “largest CG model used in a film”… or something like that.  The winner was ILM’s model of this Poseidon… with a poly count of tens of millions.  But, the funny thing is, for the photo used in the story, they used one of my illustrations.  Makes me grin.

Click to Embiggen

Click to Embiggen

Click to Embiggen

An early attempt at integrating the augmented key art, the New Title logo, and a tag line...

Believe it or not, it’s been nearly 10 years since we got the greenlight to work on the Director’s Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with the great Robert Wise.  For Producer Dave Fein, Restoration Supervisor Mike Matessino, and myself, it had already been 8 months of prep and dealings with the studio to get the project approved.  For those of you who haven’t gone through my personal website at www.darendoc.com, I invite you to take a look at this page I put up that gives you a little taste of what went on…

TMP:DE

I’ve been spending this week going through old projects, hence the batmobile yesterday, and today’s entry:  The Proteus from “Fantastic Voyage”… I started this 3d model back in 2000, and have basically rebuilt it over the past couple of days…. it still has a lot to go, but I think it’s coming along nicely…

No Raquel Welch yet, but click to see ginormous.

UPDATE:

I thought I would come up with a quick little environment and see how it was working…  the darn frame took 3 hours just to render.

the proteus braves the wonders and terrors of the bloodstream. (click to embiggen)