CMPA_Assign4 - Cyborg Jewel Thief

Today we have the 4th project for my Computer Arts class at SCAD, and this was a fun one.

This took me a total of 24 hours to make over the course of 3 days. The initial photograph I took about an hour before the first class that was focused on this project, and the rest of the work was over the weekend. I was a very tough ordeal, had to work until 5 in the morning to finish it, but it wasn't like most of my previous "All-nighters," it was more leasurly, and I never felt like I wouldn't get it done. Which is always a good thing for me. The better I feel about the work-flow and my work pace, the better I feel about working on something.

So what you see here is a photo taken by me, a large set of 3 windows from a photograph I got off of Flickr (Attribution at the end of this description); and literally everything else you see besides a lot of color grading, was created in the Freeware masterpiece known as BLENDER. Blender is a fantastic piece of software capable of producing realistic results with minimal effort on the part of the artist. Absolute Noobs could download the newest pack for the program and start making great stuff like this with only a few tips of the trade and working in the Cycles Render engine. It's true that the internal Blender engine renders faster and was initially quicker for rendering Aniation; but the Cycles engine is more usable for realistic lighting and realistic interaction of objects and textures and everything else. And if I was going to do an animation, I really should just get used to the long render times. I mean, PIXAR and Dreamworks have to wait days just to get 20 seconds of footage or even less. So I really can't complain. lol

Anywho, again, this was a lot of fun to make. I carefully thought about lighting and reflections and how light would bounce around the scene. So something that you don't see here is a dummy model of myself I molded for reflections, light bouncing, and as a guide to help me place the robotic fingers within the scene. Therefore everything in this scene is fairly close to scale, and close to actual distance from the camera lens. Meaning that it's pretty accurate to if everything was really there; and that always helps sell the image.

You can bet that I will be doing more of these kinds of images since I now have a great camera and I am becoming more skilled at using Blender. I have no idea what the next creation will be, but you can be sure it will be even more whimsical and creative than this one.


Enjoy, and please comment and critique.




Attribution:
Background Image: "Three Large Windows" (Attributed to) ~Maxwell Hamilton of Flickr - [link]