Ben Mathis week

It's always a pleasure to have a professional from the industry come into class and go through their general work flow on a project. I wonder if it would be possible to get other people to come in and do such things as when it comes to an art based course, being told by the pros how they do it, isn't always descriptive enough.

That boy does like his keyboard shortcuts though.

Seeing how he did things was quite eye opening such as how he had the basic model for a skeleton done in around one morning then the entire model done by the end of the second day, tweaking and all. 

He really knows some niche stuff that I may not have learnt otherwise such as using layer adjustments instead of applying the same filters to the layer itself. Now I just have to find a way to get it to only apply to an area. Thinking about it, using a normal selection may be what i need. It makes complete sense as there have been times that I've wanted to use an original image but adjusted it for a lil too much to make it unusable again.

Turning off the bounding box in 3Dsmax is also a helpful thing. I say helpful but that thing hardly had a purpose anyway. If it does maybe itll become apparent but I don't think ill find myself saying "I wish that bounding box was here. IT would make this so much easier"

His texturing was pretty first class too. I'm glad he likes having pixellated textures too as thats almost a special thing of having a low poly model. Its an extra style that adds more than it takes away. And how he painted it was quite impressive too, I may have missed some of it but I did keep looking up at his final result as he was going. His little talk on the antialiasing and mip maps (painting the texture sheet the primary colour in the texture instead of black) is bound to be useful in the future.  I was also surprised that you could paint in 3D in Cinema 4D. I used that very program in College but considering that our tutor had no idea about what he was doing, let alone 3D, we didnt get very deep into that one. But perhaps it didn't have that functionality back then...I'd like to get my hands on it now though.

Wish I coulda seen him using mudbox, that woulda been the icing on the cake. Then again, we already got more than our monies worth as he gave us insights into the industry, how to meet people and approaching them for jobs. As always its not a what you can do as much as a who you know kinda business. Better make sure I don't make any enemies on the course  .

All in all I would have worked on that WoW project too but considering I'm not a stickler for WoW I didn't want to join in. It wouldve been the 100th Night elf female dark knight anyway. These Game artisans competitions are pretty good sometimes. I still have to finish my mini racer, along with a pixelly texture. That and my Sackboy of Persia but with all this work I set myself up for doing over christmas, hope I can find the time before the new year deadline.

Roll on tomorrow where more art is bound to happen