One of the on-going projects I started late last year was to absorb as many photographs that I touched me and try to recreate those scenes in CG. I wanted to start with this photograph by Jem Southam (“Landscape Stories”). Southam’s photographs are sublime and my choosing of this particular one was more of restraining myself as to give justice to this effort of recreating a piece of art.

As you see above I did not do such a good job regardless. Good thing it’s still a work in progress.

The colour-corrected version is something I was just playing around with; the original was how it was initially graded in Nuke, since I was rendering everything in floating-point (FP).

The colour-corrected image explains that there’s always that bit that wants to exaggerate, to take things more dramatically. It is very easy to do that. I find that that image looks okay; it has drama, it has depth, it has a bit of the unevenness that makes it organic. But it’s not sublime. And I don’t nearly – not by breadth of the Tasman- capture the subtleties found in Southam’s picture.

Well, back to tweaking…

Finished the base model of the weapon that Mardonier is holding. This will be sculpted at a later time. This is closely based on the Croatian HS2000 (marketed in the U.S.A. as Springfield Armory XD).

I discovered this pistol through researching point-and-shoot methods, which originated from my reading of Ghost Force by Ken Connors, who briefly wrote about SAS shooting – how SAS men shot intuitively rather than using the sight. The HS2000 was purportedly a pistol designed with point-and-shoot in mind. And it looked cool.

It was also in that book that inspired the removal of front and rear sights (seen below); the reason for their removal, as explained by Connors, is to facilitate quick draw – by removing the sights the chance of snagging at the holster is reduced. (Clarification: Connors did not mention, let alone endorse the HS2000, in the book)

I removed some elements from the HS2000, such as the accessory rail, and trigger safeties, because I thought of making it more old-school.

So, what the hell have I been doing all this time?

For starters, I finally quit my teaching job – a risky move, which might be construed to be a bold decision, or if time convicts, a dumb play. There it is, I suppose.

Of course, the reason why I quit was simple: want to get back to working in CG. Whether I’m working for a company, or working on my own, I want to be working on it, not about it, if my drift is catching you.  I did enjoy teaching, for sure, but there comes a time, for a person with a disposition like myself, after looking at so many students advancing in their craft, and producing excellent work, that the inevitable envy questions me: “What about you?”

Indeed, what about me? What have I produced recently? What new things have I learned about my passion? I couldn’t write off teaching as a useless endeavour – far from it: I’ve learned what teaching was all about, and I was getting good at it, too; I learned that I could test logical workflow techniques, albeit untested, on students and they could be the guinea pigs that provide insight on how to revise such techniques or methods; I’ve met great students, who were also great and big-hearted people, who excelled and inspired me in the way that I hoped to have inspired them.

But still: I was getting really hungry for cutting it deep with my craft, and I knew that the longer I spent in teaching, the worst it’s going to get; the less time I’ll have, more frustration, and an ever-deepening situation between what I desire as an artist and what I’ll have at the end of the day.

This week is my first week off the job. The first order was a modelling reel (because it is the easiest to do), and I decided to do “Mardonier”, a character that has been in my chest for over a decade now. This character is full: I’m currently writing a small novel around him but, obviously, I can’t talk about that now.

Shown below is the final base mesh which was derived from another project I shelved for now. Face mesh was an old one I did; needed lots of topology reworking, and revised it to match Rainer Maria Rilke, which was the rough basis for the character. I’ll put this over to Mudbox to focus on Rilke’s likeness there.

Everything except the shoe was also a topology rework. The shoe was based off the Merrell World Rambler, World Compass (Traveller), and Downshift. Great-looking shoes; it wanted me to buy a pair (or two).

Beethoven, Mozart, Atticus Ross (Book of Eli), and Wallflowers have been my fickle friends, but Wallflowers the less fickle of them all.

Re-worked the legs a bit; didn’t like the Case backhoe crane design: just didn’t aesthetically fit in with the rest of the stuff. Now I’m trying to bring all the parts together, resizing stuff, extending portions and creating connective elements. Lots of stuff to be done at this point. Most of the stuff is just block-out and now I’m trying to see how helpful this block-out method is going to be. I just want to bring it to a point where I’ve put every possible blocked-out element and then see just how effective it is. Will I end up re-blocking nevertheless? Would it be better to block a local area first, then detail that area? Or block out the whole model and then detail the whole in another pass?

I think I’m just tired right now. Asking all these stupid questions to myself.

Picked up on Freddie Aguilar. But also listening to the John M. Keane’s CSI soundtrack.

As I said I was pretty busy a few days doing my reel. The video below is DBX; I created this model in 2009, but did this scene on and off for the whole of 2010 while I was teaching in Lifeway.

DBX Forest from Lernwel Ang on Vimeo.

For the reel I added new a model turnaround of a Resiklo robot.

Resiklo Robot from Lernwel Ang on Vimeo.

And the reel in its entirety.

Lernie Ang Reel 2011 HD from Lernwel Ang on Vimeo.