patreon on pause!

1. hey ya'll! I'm getting ready to head back to NY and that involves shipping my massive painting home and prep to ship out all the backed up gifts from the last few months (I know... my life is a train wreck)

I am feeling on top of the world as of late. I've warmed up to being alone (not codependent) through a book called Attached. It simplifies the spectrum of human interpersonal relationships through something called attachment theory. Basically, there's secure and insecure attachment and by understanding which one you are, you can better diagnose why your relationships with people feel anxious or avoidant plus how to cope. Overall, a fantastic read and if you're not a reader, I highly recommend this video to start! School of Life is my fave youtube subscription and I watch a video a day quite literally to gain perspective on some of my more neurotic moments where the world feels like its caving in on me. 

Ok beyond educating myself on the tools to cope with my turbulent emotional mood swings (uh undiagnosed bipolar anyone?) I've been exploring how to motion track.

Heavily and I mean HEAVILY influenced by Ian Hubert's work on Dynamo (here's a video if you need a refresher on what this man is capable of), I decided in my last 7 days of living with my parents in SoCal what better way to go out with a bang than to plan an impromptu shoot with friends using this skillset? I'm lucky my friend Juliana has lights, a camera, and I've purchased a decently sized green screen to jump in and film on Friday at her house. 

2-3. I actually was so fixated on this project I decided to put together a quick (unprofessional af) deck, which I've shared a few pages from so you get why I'm juiced... Ian does cyberpunk sci-fi world which is sick but I'm really pushing for something different if possible! 

4-5. For my field tests (manic hyper fixation until 4AM), I used some footage I filmed off my hand held Sony Panasonic FDR-AX33 of Dom in our living room back in February.  There's no green screen here but I used this as my base for learning how to track the scene and build an environment ontop of! The first test, I barely got a wooden house around him but I realized the 2nd shot that's angled gives me way more space to worldbuild outside of the house. Please excuse my shitty thrown together assets (especially that low res sky image), I was in a rush to demonstrate that I could even do this haha! I also managed to cut out 

6-8. As you can see I didn't really model anything, all the models were just imported from previous projects (or off cgtrader) and the only part that required real work was building the house. I followed this tutorial and my favorite part about this was cutting out the mirror. The tall rectangle window in the background is actually one of those big ikea mirrors in our living room. It was giving away the fact that you know, this is not a fictional space up somewhere in the sky but rather a renovated NY apartment so I used the knife tool in blender to handcut that area out to reveal the sky. Bonus was that I cut around the shoes on the floor to give it a sense of realism and added wood around the edges to make it look like a window frame. It's super hard to see tho... but it got my brain all excited at the possibilities. All very janky but... it worked! It even made it look like the lil guy on our mirror (PJ Berri) is hanging onto the corner. Absolutely insane for a 2nd try. 

Some takeaways~

Blender is nuts for freeware. If you haven't heard me say this: try it! 

9. I still can't model for crap but luckily my friend needed some Sonic models so I've been practicing from the painful basics.... polygonal modeling. Yup, that's from a cube! Modeling!!

UV mapping is easier in Blender than in C4D for me and while I haven't let go of Substance yet for my hyper real textures, I've somewhat adopted Texture Paint in Blender. I did learn for 1 day how to bake textures from a high poly model to a low poly model in Blender but I am human and forgot everything I learned LOL I had an extremely high poly version of the plush dude and needed a low low low poly one but I didn't want to redo all the UVs and textures. I followed this tutorial. So YEAH don't beat yourself up for not remembering how to do everything. I'm convinced I just have to keep going back to youtube every 15 minutes of doing anything. 

Anyway I am super juiced to get back to NY and do 3D things on my big brain PC. I've been struggling on this Mac because my new HP laptop.... got delayed in production. Twice. I've been here nearly 2 months and it's STILL not here. /sigh

Oh and lastly those juicy big prints will be done Monday the 5th. Getting really amped to send those out!