havreberg.com

So that’s over. The finals I mean. It went pretty horribly, but architecture ended up better than I hoped, so that’s good. I’m not going to bother getting into details. Because no one reads this anyways, and I don’t need to record for posterity my anxiety about my grades, which will be resolved in four days.

So I’ve been working on a self portrait model. The idea is to make a 3d version of the self portrait I did for painting last spring. But I am also kind of wanting to make a completely realistic texture and everything. I only have until the end of August to work on this 3D stuff to resolve the incomplete from spring. I’m not sure what direction it will take. The goal was to finish the head this weekend, and I’m kind of close… it needs ear detail and some tweaks around the nose and mouth. And I want to add more eye detail like tear ducts. Maybe that amounts to one efficient night’s work. And I am supposed to spend this week making the body for the self portrait. I will probably end up just going straight to the distorted body instead of first making a realistic body as I had planned. Perhaps in the interest of time. Because I am a tweakaholic and if I’m going for realism, this self portrait is the only thing I’ll finish (if I finish it) this summer. Then it’s on to two more models I can hopefully finish each of the next two weeks.

I kind of want to do some cartoony stuff… Bring some characters to life. But at the same time I want to make cool detailed monsters. I suppose I am nowhere close to either goal. I am just very pressed for time…. I need to make a nice bunch of work before next spring so I can get an internship to get my foot in the door. Spring is a thousand years away, but I have just seen what a semester’s worth of non-3d classes can do for 3d productivity. Which is to annihilate it.

So I suppose you can see one of the most recent pictures of the self portrait . The texture is just a modified planar projection for testing purposes, which is why the hair in the back of the head is slightly nonexistent. I have been struggling a bit with perspective/orthographic issues and made some (slow) progress when I finally decided to take some physical measurements. I suppose people develop an eye for this sort of thing over time, but just starting out it’s kind of crazy to think of making a likeness from a few images when I can barely get a resemblance staring at myself in the mirror for hours. Hopefully this doesn’t mean I’m simply not cut out for this stuff, but rather that I just need practice. And hopefully I’ll have the time to practice and improve in the coming months. I’d like to maybe do portraits of some friends or family members, or maybe some interesting-looking celebrities. And caricatures. And the list goes on… because I want to do anatomy-based rigging and cartoony facial animation and general animation exercises… To some extent, the sky is the limit. But to another, February is. Because that’s probably when I need to have something to show if anyone is going to take a chance on me.

It has become apparent recently that I sort of wasted the last 4 years of my life. Hopefully this trend can be reversed.