Demoreel and New Site!

Look! I finally cut together a demoreel!



I'm getting interviewed by PIXAR! :DDDDDDDDD Actually, Pixar gets a slightly different version of my reel. The Pixar version simply has no music... they're not very big fans of music in demoreels, apparently.

Which is why I got off of my lazy bum and finally cut a reel together.

Oh, I have a reel breakdown too! Check it out here (PDF).

The song in my reel is "I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool" by El Ten Eleven. I've recut it slightly to fit the length of the reel.

I also finally put together a personal site thing at www.yiningkarlli.com.

Speaking of new sites... I should probably get around to redesigning Omjii.com soon. Hm.

How 'Bout Them Apples?

Earlier this week my mom gave my roommates and me a gigormous sack of apples, so I've been eating apples all week. Which is good, because I love apples. :)

So I had an apple sitting on my desk, and I had Maya open, and I was a little bit bored, so... I made some apples in Maya!



Over the past few months I've developed a bit of an... odd... workflow for texturing/shading irregularly shaped objects (apples... muddy boots... hermit crabs...). I start with modeling and whatnot in Maya, as usual:





Then I go into Photoshop and use various reference (images found online, photos taken with my Nikon D60, etc) to paint a tile of the texture I want. For example, for the apples I took some photos of the apples and then extracted textures from the photos to create this texture tile:



Next, I bring the object mesh and the texture tile into Mudbox and use Mudbox's projection stencil tool to paint the mesh using the texture tile as the stencil. The nice thing about bringing things into Mudbox for texturing is that I don't really have to worry too much about UV mapping. Mudbox will automagically take care of all of the UV stuff as long as the imported mesh doesn't have any overlapping UV coordinates. So instead of messing with the UV editor in Maya before texturing, I can just use Maya's Automatic UV mapping tool to make sure that no UVs overlap and bring that into Mudbox. After painting in Mudbox, I got a texture image like this:



After texture painting in Mudbox, deriving spec and bump maps in Photoshop is a relatively straightforward affair. Once texturing and shading is done, I render out the beauty pass and z-depth pass and other passes...



...and bring all those passes into After Effects for compositing and color grading, and I'm done!

Watermelon Smash

For animation class, we were given an assignment where we each had to pick a random mixed drink name and use that name as the basis of a 10 second animation in After Effects. I picked something called a Watermelon Smash (it contains.... watermelon cubes... and I don't remember what else). So... here's a watermelon smashing something!



We were actually allowed to use anything we wanted for the actual animation, the only rule was that we had to composite the final result together in After Effects. I wound up doing the ocean, splashes, and sparks in Flash (with tons of help from Joseph Gilland's book Elemental Magic) and painting the boat and the watermelon in Photoshop. The watermelon itself is animated entirely using the puppet warp tool in After Effects.

I'm not terribly happy with the sound. That needs some reworking probably...

Here's a few stills breaking down how the entire thing was composited:









...and here's some random stills:

Recent Stuff

This is just a quick dump of recent things I've been working on, detailed posts to come later.

Raincoat Girl Turntable

I'm done with my character model! Until I can think of a better name, I'm just calling her "Raincoat Girl" :p

Here's a still:



Getting the hair and cloth sims to work right took aaaggggeeesssss. Thank goodness Marissa Krupen knows so much and helped me out a lot. :)

I wound up cheating on the subsurface scatter for the skin. I couldn't get it to look right on its own, so I wound up using a layered shader with the subsurface on one layer and a normal texture map on the other layer. I think the end result looks okay.

Turntable!

Raincoat Girl from Karl Li on Vimeo.

I'll post more stills later, but now I really need to study for that Finance final that I've been avoiding. >< I also have to make an environment for my character to go in to, and I still have that final project for 3D modeling to finish (I haven't even started...).

Character Model Face

Okay, I'm close to finished with the face...



I've decided not to give her eyelashes. They didn't look very good. I also noticed that in some Pixar characters, Pixar chose to keep the lips the same color as the rest of the skin... I kind of like that style choice, so I'm going to steal it (read: Karl is too lazy to paint lips). :p

Character Modeling In-Progress Render

I've finally got hair, skin, and eyes in a somewhat presentable form. They still need a LOT of tweaking though. I also still have to add teeth, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Also, nothing is rigged yet, hence the creepy blank expression...



As for my final project... I have no idea what I want to do ><. I'm thinking about maybe an old fashioned train station or something... that would be kinda cool.

Cloth Simulation Progress

I'm working on a character model right now loosely based on this sketch . Here's how the cloth simulation stuff is looking right now:









There is still much work to be done.

Ink Tree Drawing

I have a pretty sizeable backlog of things from the Drawing class I took over the summer, so I'm going to start posting a few things from over the summer each week.

One homework assignment we had was to do an environmental drawing with ink. I did a tree based on a photo I took at Peace Valley Park.

An amusing sidenote: for large format things, I usually depend on decent lighting and my Nikon D60, but this particular drawing was small enough that I decided to try using a large format scanner with it. Even with a giant large format scanner though, I ended up having to scan it in four segments and then stitch the segments in Photoshop. Photoshop is good at auto-stitching!

City Street: Playing with Z-Depth and Ambient Occlusion

I haven't managed to make any progress on actually finishing this project since my last post, but I have had a bit of time to play with ambient occlusion and z-depth mapping. So... same render as before, but now with depth of field and some ambient occlusion:



...and the z-depth map:



...and the ambient occlusion map. I did the leaves on the trees by transparency mapping the planes where the leaves went on the model, but because of that I wasn't sure how I was supposed to ambient occlude the trees. So I removed them for the ambient occlusion map:



I actually found an alternate way to render out the z-depth map, but I'm not entirely sure this is as physically accurate as the standard way Maya does z-depth:



Hopefully more soon!

City Street Progress

I've been working on a little city street for a few days now. I want to capture the kind of old European feel that one can find in places like Edinburgh.

Right now this is about 65% done. I think I'm going to try to make it look like an old postcard.

Clock Miniproject

Over the weekend I decided to do a little mini-project to try out some new tricks I've learned with rendering. I decided to try to make as photorealistic of an image as possible of a clock. Here's what I came up with:



The clock face is noticeably pixelated; I'm not entirely sure why that is. For some reason Mental Ray is not sampling the texture file at a very high frequency, I'll work on that next I suppose.

A little breakdown video of the compositing that went into the clock:

Clock Rendering/Compositing Breakdown from Karl Li on Vimeo.

Hermit Crab

The hermit crab is complete!

Hermit Crab Redux from Karl Li on Vimeo.

Modeled in Maya, textured in Mudbox, rendered with MentalRay.

I'm perfectly aware that no hermit crab would ever actually live in a conch shell that large, but I thought the image of a small crab in a huge shell was amusing.

Some stills from some different angles...





As the title "redux" suggests, the crab above is actually the second version of the hermit crab I've made. I originally finished about a week earlier with a different version, but then after getting some suggestions from Professor Scott White, my 3D modeling professor, I decided to redesign the conch shell. Here's what Hermit Crab Mark I looked like:

Hermit Crab from Karl Li on Vimeo.

I actually still want to change some things. If I have time, I'm going to go back and change the displacement mapping on the conch to get the groves to all go in a more uniform direction. Also 9 seconds into the turntable, you might notice there's a slight shiny spot on the conch. That's a mistake I made in the specular map that I definitely want to fix. I also want to try placing some small low intensity lights really close to the crab's eyes to bring out the gloss that's visible in the Mark I crab. In the Mark II crab, the shadow from the flaring part of the conch makes the crab's eyes look matte. The crab's claws need some color tweaking as well; the color doesn't quite perfectly match the rest of the crab.

The DMD director, Amy Calhoun, told me that no modeler is ever satisfied with a model. So true. :p

Hermit Crab Ready For Texturing!

My hermit crab is ready for texturing and lighting and rendering! I'm going with Mudbox for texture painting for sure. I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to get all the prickly parts of the legs done... I'll probably just do a displacement map or something.

Hermit Crab Progress

I'm working on a hermit crab in 3D Modeling class! The shell was really hard to make... I wound up making a small segment, duplicating special it, and then stitching all the segments together by hand. :p So... the crab itself is only some legs right now. I have a lot of work to do on this still... sigh.

I'm thinking about trying Mudbox for texturing this thing. The UVs on the shell aren't pretty, and I don't want to spend a gazillion hours unwrapping those UVs.... o_0

More later.