A homage to MGS4: Guns of the Patriots

It appears I start way too many projects, but this one is a follow up of that LEGO man with an AK-47. I'm planning on recreating the battle scene between Raiden and the Gekkos and Vamp. I really dig the LEGOs animation in the videogames and commercials, but I'm gonna go for a more stop-motion type animation. So everything will move according to the limitations LEGOs has placed on each parts; so no clavicle motion or spine bending on the LEGO man. I have some texture work to do on the characters, I'm looking forward to that. Oh and I wish had all these parts in real life, so that I can actually build it and see if it will physically stand upright; I'll look for the technics parts.

Updated cans

So here is an updated version of the Chairman Mao beer cans. I added color to the background so it doesn't get lost in all that black. Also I changed the label color to red cause the black label color seemed to get lost in the dark also and there'll be more contrast to the grayness of the can. Finally instead of using HDR, I actually lit it; I was always scared to light scenes, but this is just a simple three point lighting. I'll post more updates if and when changes are suggested to me.





Latest version: I just tweaked the "A Revolutionary Beer" on the horizontal can so that it is visible and legible. It's too bad alot of the colors get crunched down once you output as a JPEG.




Old version: I added a low intensity light at the bottom of the cans and I rendered the reflection as a separate pass, so that it can be tweaked in Photoshop.

Older version: The bottom of the cans were too dark and the reflections were too sharp.

Something old that's new

This was an old assignment from a design class that I took last year. The task was to create a beer can with for a fictitious beer company "Chairman Mao." After the semester ended and a few rounds of redesigns I came up with a bullet shaped beer can with the picture of Mao on the top of the can. Oddly enough I positioned his mouth right on the opening of the can. So not only are you drinking Chairman Mao beer, but it's also coming out of his mouth. Personally I like the bullet shape can.

It's been ages since my last update

Just as the title implies, I can't believe I haven't updated in a long time. Well last night I got myself a pencil and paper, minus the eraser which I found this morning, and did a sketch of these characters I've been wanting to create. It's basically a boy and a girl and a dog or a pig, not sure yet, but I have a dog in the sketch. So what I wanted to do was create these characters that have no eyes whatsoever, well more like have their eyes just covered by their hair. So here is the sketch. I can't wait to start modeling them. I also have to design the environment; that'll be fun.

demo reel

reel from oliver rosales on Vimeo.

Domino Rally

There was a project I did last year that involved domino rally. During that short project, my friend and I surfed youtube and came upon ads done by Domino Domain; they did the domino sequence in V for Vendetta. It would be nice to do the real thing, but the great thing about CG dominoes is the undo button. The only problem was having so many dominoes (exactly 3,160 tiles) that the simulation took too long to calculate. So, with a little elbow grease, I worked my way around the slow simulation calculation.

test dominoes

rubiks cube

The Rubick's cube animation was created using alot of group nodes per block to avoid Gimbal lock. You can do the same using Quaternion interpolation, but I felt that using group nodes were much easier. The only draw back was that I could only have four rotation then Gimbal lock starts.

test rubiks

stratocaster

My second instrument model. Didn't really start rendering it until I created the stand for it. Most of the objects are polygons except for the strings and the springs.

lego man with AK47

Lego man holding an AK-47. The roundCorners for mental ray is such a nice node to use, on simple hard edge models. It saves you from adding too much polygons on such a simple object; I still prefer beveling the object. I'm still trying to figure out how to attach the roundCorners to the occlusion shader.

My Toothbrush

My Oral-B tooth brush was a fun project to do. I couldn't find my camera at the time I started this project so I did the next best thing; I scanned it in.