Love this one.  Simple but very complex at the same time.

I may have the final major parts done in by the beginning of August. After that I’ll need to build the train, carriage cars and some environmental props. Once all that is done it will be off to texturing, lighting and then I will call it done.

The end seems to be in sight. Let’s just hope all this work can translate into a job.

Platform view

And from the 31st Street Stairs.

Still can’t believe that they would tear this down.  People are stupid

Most of it came from just rethinking some of the design aspects and separating items into multiple objects so that I didn’t have to build so much detail into one part of the object simply because the other side required it.

Now, I think I should have the main building structure done by the end of the week.  After that it will be security fences and stairways.

Right now the focus is all on the thesis.  All my class work is done and I just need to get my thesis finished and submitted so I can have my piece of paper that says I can do the job.  So, I’ve broken out the thesis project and pulled it apart some to make improvements and correct a few things that I noticed were not the way I would like it.

First up was the ‘Birdcage”, the metal framework that supported the glass ceiling to Penn Station, I have just a few items left to build for it and it will be finished (construction wise that is).  Next up will be replacing the placeholder textures with the real one, so lots of Photoshop work in the future for me, as well as CrazyBump and maybe even some zBrush for it.

So here is how it looks now.

Now I just have to go over the concourse floor, ceiling, walls, railroad tracks, benches, luggage, trains and lights.

Yeah, it might take a few months.

Three classes, which you think wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s not that classes really it’s the projects.   Now, I don’t blame my instructors at all because all they did was give us some basic parameters to work with, I’m the one that decided what I was going to do with those parameters and set myself up for this major league work load.

For example.  In my environments class we had to do an interior.  Could be any interior we wanted; kitchen, bedroom, heck we could have even done the inside of a closet as long as we did it REALLY well (to justify the small space).  Me, I chose a warehouse.  An old rundown warehouse.  And not content with just that, I decided to put an old truck in their too.  Why?  Because I’m an idiot and I like cars.

It’s still not done, not really.  There are lots of things that I can (and will) do to improve this.  So, I have that one plus I’m still working on my thesis project of Penn Station.

I love Penn Station.  I wish to God it was still around but unfortunately they tore it down three years before I was born and we will never see another place like it again.

Finally, if I haven’t had enough interior spaces yet, there is my final one – the Altar room project.  Once again, I could have done something easy like a sword in the stone, a suit of armor, or even some sci-fi thing, but NOOOOOOOO…. I had to decide to do an altar room that represents the United States.  A Greco-Roman tribute to what our founding fathers crafted.  So now I have to deal with Grecian sculpture forms and modeling draped cloth as well as FOUR figures!

Three figures to represent the three branches of government; thirteen pillars for the colonies;  ten wall spaces for the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights; and finally, in the center of the altar, a Nike figure representing the American spirit which can only be defeated when we give up on ourselves.  The four braziers in the hall represent the four armed forces.  When it is done there will be a fire burning in them.

Love the idea, but man is it kicking my ass.  here’s a long shot of the altar room.  The coffered ceiling is referencing the Capitol Dome as well as the Pantheon.

And a close up of the figures

I have so much freakin work to do.  I need a drink.

I pulled out the old Camaro, and while there wasn’t really all that much wrong with it I knew that I could improve it with some tweaks here and there and also by approaching the paint job in a different way.  So, here’s how it stands so far without anything but the basic Lambert shader assigned to it.

Made some of the metal creases a bit sharper and more defined, changed the bucket seats out for ones I thought looked better, and generally just tucked things up a bit.

Here’s the wire framing on it

Personally, I’m still surprised that it came in at around 172,000 polygons with all the detail that had to go into building the tires out.

And finally, the very, VERY basic beginings of a texture job.

I’m hoping it will all be done by around Sunday.  I still have a steam locomotive to finish before school starts up again, and there’s also a train station that needs a lot of work too.

This isn’t a post to whine, it’s just stating the facts.  I really wish I could go and see my family.  I have a nephew who is five that I have never met and a niece I haven’t seen since she was small enough that I was able to carry her on my shoulders.  I miss them.  I miss my brothers, my sister and my parents.  They are the only family I have next to my wife and every year I don’t see them is another year lost.  Sure, we keep in touch but it’s different than actually being there.

I can’t complain though, this is the path I chose.  I’ve always been wandering.  Out of high school I went into the Navy and traveled the world.  After that I moved from California back to New Mexico, then I moved to Seattle, then Ohio and now California again.  Something has always kept me moving around and looking over the next hill to see what is there.  It’s not a bad thing, but there are times I do wonder how things would have been different if I had stayed home in the first place, but as my wife likes to remind me “If you didn’t do the things you did, then you wouldn’t be who you are and you probably wouldn’t have met me.”

She’s smart that way.

You would think that with the end of the semester I would have some down time but, sadly, no.  I have some freelance work coming up, I have thesis project stuff to work on, and I have work at the bookstore as well.  So, not a lot of rest going to be happening around here but that’s OK as long as it eventually leads to getting a job doing what I’m in college in the first place for.

Speaking of which, here’s a shot of what I have been spending my time on.  There’s a HECK of a lot more to do on it, but I think I can have most of the modeling that needs to be done wrapped up by the end of January.

Problem with the class for me is that it turned out that the only ideology they talked about was the socialist ideology, which I could really give a shit less about.  If I was a wanna-be communist, then I might care about all the “workers murals” and other crap like that, but I’m not and I don’t.  If it wasn’t a required class I would have never wasted my money on it.

God damn required classes.

Anyway, I have gotten further along with some of the features on the Camaro.  We now have studio lighting, and new tires.  Even worked on the focal length for the camera to bring it into better focus.

So now we have a few version of ‘the car’ – the first computer modeled car I have ever made:

We have the original grey model

Then we follow that up with the first color version

And now we have the studio colored version with newer, and better tires

One day I may even be finished with it.

The fact is that I have been obsessing over the car. There comes a point in making a model that you are so close to being finished that you can taste it. You start staying up late and getting up early so that you can work on that one last section that needs to be tweaked. Or, you just want to work on it a little bit longer so that you can finish this texture on that one part.

I think every modeler does it. We latch onto it until we are sick of looking at it and just want it done. Then when it’s close to being finished we set up shots and do render after render as we tweak away at the lighting, the ambient lights, the textures, and the cameras – essentially everything. We want a model that someone will look at and not realize it’s a computer model.

I’m sure I’ve driven Michael, Jennifer and Gatakitty nuts with all the shots I have sent them saying “What do you think of this?” or “Should I change this section over here?” My wife has gotten used to me saying “Hey, hon, would you look at this with me for a moment?” Half the time I am sure she has no idea what I am talking about since modelers speak in a foreign language that sounds like this.

“So, I moved these vertices over here and then went ahead and split this one. I was going to smooth it but I decided that using the approximation editor was a better way to go. Now, I did tweak the specular on that one part and gave it a light to highlight the ambient occlusions but I don’t think we need to use any more samples in final gather….”

Yea, I know, but trust me it all DOES mean something… really, it does.

Anyway, what it has resulted in is that I’m working on the interior of the Camaro now and in about a week it will be just down to minor tweaks and nudges and so far this is how it’s looking.  With the second image I had added the dials and the dashboard glass.  The logo on the steering wheel is my company logo for when I do independent work – I like it.

I’m also close to finished with lighting it on the outside. See, computer lighting doesn’t act like regular light. Regular light follows the laws of physics, and for computer lighting to do that would require a lot of processing power and a lot of time so instead we fake it by using bunches of lights. You have a car sitting on a shiny floor and normally light would bounce off the floor and give a reflected light on the car but with animation, I have to actually set a light on the floor and it’s only job it to cast a very subtle light onto the side of the car from below to mimic how a bounced light would work.

In all I have four lights for the interior of the car right now, and that will probably go up to six or eight. The exterior has 7 and when I’m done will probably go up to 12. It not that many really, in the Fellowship of the Ring, they used around 40 lights just to illuminate the inside of the Balrog’s mouth – now that’s a lot of lights.

Anyway, I’m not dead, just a little obsessed.

Now, I just need to tweak that one spot on the center console…