To Senior Year

Sometimes I remember I have a blog and I tell myself, "oh, I should really delete that someday soon, I don't remember what's on it, but I probably don't want that out there".

I'm a senior now. I just finished my second to last semester a few days ago, and I graduate in only a few more months. My life right now consists of: How am I going to get a job? How am I going to pay off my loans? How am I going to polish my portfolio? Where am I going to print my business cards? Is this tweet okay to put on my twitter? Should I friend this professor on facebook? What should I say when I meet someone in the industry? What am I going to do about my apartment? Am I going to stay in Seattle or am I going to move? What if I have to move back home?? etc etc

So I came onto my blog expecting to delete it in an attempt to clean up my social media presence, but I'm glad I updated so regularly in my underclassmen years - I needed a reminder of how far I've come since I first entered art school.

I can't guarantee I'll find the time to write much after this, but I'd like to. I know I'm in a weird spot in my life, and I really want this.

In the mean time, I'll share the finals I made as a senior.

These were from my concept art class. I really struggled to balance this class on top of my other projects because it was at the end of the week. I really wanted to push myself in this class, but I could only put minimum effort into these paintings.

This was my pet project though. It's a 3D sculpt made entirely in Zbrush. I wanted to make her realistic, but my classmates and professors pushed me to make her in my drawing style, so it was a super fun journey to explore my own style in 3D. I want to rerender her to fix the shadows and background before she goes in my portfolio.

I overscoped on this one! I misjudged how many weeks we had on our final project, so I chose to do a full character that I wanted to make game-ready, but I spent too much time on the environment (which you cant even see in the final render) that I just had to cut corners. The character was sculpted and posed in zbrush and the scene was lit and rendered in Maya. I still need to fix the rim lighting on the character - the lights were shining through the character but it's not a lighting class so I ditched it to polish the character for submission.




Overall, this was the one semester where I felt satisfied with all of my classes. I might be nervous about the future, but I really put my best into the past few months and I feel like I learned A LOT.
I'll have to post my other assignments when I have access to the files.

What to do in another world

I got to experience a really weird thing last week. I'm working on a new game team at school this semester, and we're working in virtual reality. We have tech that hasn't been released to the public yet, and it's really neat!

But, working in VR has a lot of things that you have to work around as you develop a game for it, especially with the specific tech we're using. Rooms can only be so big, you can't have horizontal movement, can't have chairs, and you can't have objects on the floor that players might walk through. 

I was warned what happens when you walk through objects in VR, but I wanted to experience it myself - can't be that bad, right? Nah. It was.

I put my leg through a box. My initial reaction was more along the lines of, "haha, this is strange, my whole body is telling me to move hahah okay, that was weird  hahahaha" but within the next 20 minutes, I felt so sick that I had to sit and stare at the wall for a few hours - retching, phantom pains, and the feeling of absolute dread. 

All in all, the after effects lasted for about 7 hours, but that was probably more on me. I couldn't handle the feelings of disphoria and depression, and I spent a lot of time pining over how bad I felt rather than how it was slowly going away.

It was a cool experience. Awful in the moment, but still a cool experience. 

I look forward to when I can share more about this project.

Green

I dyed my hair green

                                      

I like it.

Giraffa Aquatica

it's finals week! and here's my Bio final!

Bio was a fantastic class, and I'm going to be TAing for the professor next semester as he teachers the freshmen human anatomy. I'm super excited!

Anyway, for my final, I had to come up with an imaginary animal, write an abstract on it, draw orthographics of its skeleton, and make a final illustration. I chose to create a semi-aquatic water giraffe (a giraffe-opotamus?) 

I'm pretty pleased with the background too; it could be better, of course, but looking back at the first background I painted in photoshop this last semester, I'm glad to see improvement.

I haven't gotten a grade for it yet, but my professor pulled it out of the submission pile in class and made some very nice comments, so I'm crossing my fingers! 

The Diggs

I'm sorry it took me so long to put this up; it's been a few months. 

I still love my new apartment and my roommates are still pretty enjoyable (I don't think I'm still in the honeymoon phase yet? but they're cool)

The only downside is that the walk to school, I have to pass a fish processing plant, and on hot days, you can definitely smell all of it haha

Nighttime

this post is going to be extra dumb and fluffy, but I have so many good pictures

It's kind of weird that I don't see much sunlight anymore. By the time I get out of class, it's always dark, but I like it. When it rains, everything reflects off of the roads

and the overcast usually makes the horizon glow orange

and the fog is so thick, you usually can't see past your hand - the perks of living right next to a river. I'm always frustrated I can't capture it via photos.

bonus picture of my friend and I at 2 am

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