Whoo!  So it's the last day of the first week, which is both exciting and sad (to see how fast the time is going!  I want to stay here much longer.)  So a few little tidbits about the place.  They've got a shower in the bathroom, I'm sure for the late nights some people have to pull (or maybe they employ lots of stinky people?  Hasn't been my experience yet so far though.)  There's always chatter, whether it's about projects or making fun of each other.  It's good fun.  The humor stays nice and crude... which is great (I'm told it's really just the CG dept. that's this bad.)

As for my personal work, I've been working on finishing up my first project.  It's taken longer than I expected, but that's mostly because of UV mapping and texturing.  UV mapping is basically unwrapping a 3D model so you can put a 2D texture on it.  Think about in math when you create a cube out of graph paper.  You cut out a single figure, then fold it up and tape it together.  This is doing the opposite.  You "cut" seams, and unfold the model so you can paint a texture on.  I've finally gotten somewhere awesome with all of this, and I figure it's time I show you what I have!  These images are after I badass-ified it.  There should also be a small turnaround video of the model in the original pretty pink! This is for my mentor Fred's personal project, a small asset in a larger scene.  It's a toy pedal car for kids, and is obviously a bit of an antique.  The work I still have to do is getting the metal to look nice and old using procedural texturing.  After that I may be moving on to creating a character (modeling, texturing, rigging and animating!)

So, enjoy!

Photo gallery: 

Audio/Video: 

antique_car_turn_v0.03.mov