Mario E Hdz Devblog

More art stuff!

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:06:00 +0000

Quick Airbrush examples per client request.

Trio Sol

Xmas Calendar

Business Cards!

Flyers!

Greeting Cards!

Logos!

Shirts!

Banners!

Panoramas of recent adventures!

Threadless Design

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:34:00 +0000

After a few inane conversations regarding the role each animal would play in the event of an animal world war, I decided to sketch up a few spin off designs based on the ridiculous discussion.

I've always loved planes and have always thought giraffes to be one of the funnier/more interesting animals (next to penguins of course) out there so decided that if any animal was to have the role of fighter pilot it would of course be the giraffe.

So after a few iterations on Photoshop I went back and drew out the design by hand using Indian ink on standard printer paper which I later scanned back in to Photoshop (to get that hand drawn quality.) After a few hours over the course of a few days choosing colors and fixing tangents I finally arrived at a design that I found pleasant to the eye and charming enough for print.

This design is up for scoring on Threadless for the next 7 days, so show your support for giraffe fighter pilots by heading over the link below and giving it a few 4's and 5's so that I may get this printed for all to wear. :)

Score My Design!

Fish Bot

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:17:00 +0000

While still at the academy I was assigned to design a few characters that would be considered 'super heroes'. Admittedly I forgot about the assignment and conjured up a few sketches minutes before it was due.

Since it was a character design class gearing more towards fictional cartoon types I went for a design that would ultimately be appealing and funny to myself.

Thus Fish Bot was born! He is a gold fish in a robotic suit ready to kick ass and take names. And chew bubble gum.

Although Fish Bot grew popular with myself and a few friends, the graded assignment was returned with a whopping 'D'. Apparently Fish Bot was not super hero enough. Turns out fish can't fight very well, regardless if they are cartoon characters. Now I know cartoons must make logical sense.

Nevertheless! After having semi-finished Vince and giving him some proper animation cycles (more to come) I've decided to bring Fish Bot back, tweak it here and there and eventually model,rig, and animate in 3d.

The suit design is still in the works and proper front, side,back and 3/4 plates will be laid out for modeling in 3d. Color is not final. More of Fish Bot to come!

me

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:12:00 +0000

My name is Mario Emmanuel Hernandez. I'm an Academy of Art University graduate, with a Bachelor's of Fine Art specializing in Animation. Additional skills include designing characters, modeling, texturing, rigging and rendering. I Currently reside in the bay area and am looking for work in the game and film industries.

Resume

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 04:03:00 +0000

Mario E. Hernandez
human_io@comcast.net408.372.8791 - 408.355.0306
http://marioehdez.blogspot.com/

Education:

Academy of Art University; San Francisco, CA
Bachelor’s of Fine Arts, Animation specialization
Graduated: August 2009

Employment/Experience:

Sony Computer Entertainment of America
Employed as FOQA Tester 10/2009 – Present

• Responsible for QA on unreleased firmware in regards to previously released Software/Media on all Current Sony Hardware Platforms
• Test methods such as Regression, Ad Hoc, internal Sony Test Cases
• Responsible for full documentation on all bugs and errors found.

Sharks Ice @ San Jose
Employed as Skate Guard 08/2006 - Present

• Ensured guests received properly fitted skates while maintaining inventory
• Enforced rules of the rink while ensuring safety of all guests on and off the ice
• Maintained cleanliness of building interior and exterior

San Jose Downtown Ice (Seasonal)
Employed as Skate Guard 11/2003 – 01/2010

• Enforced rules of the rink while ensuring safety of all guests on and off the ice
• Handled and assisted guests with questions or concerns regarding the rink
• Managed staff of 6-8 upon request

Clartoons Animation
Animation Intern 08/2006-12/2006

• Helped in the creation of multiple 2d animated shorts
• Responsible for in-betweening, lip syncing, digital conversion, and digital coloring

Outside Activities:
• “Vince” 3D Character (08/2009 – Present)
o Designed, modeled, textured, rigged, rendered and animated character

Computer Skills:
Software: Adobe: Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects; Autodesk: Maya, Softimage, 3d Studio Max, Mudbox; Pixologic: Zbrush
OS: Windows, Mac, some Linux

References available upon request.

Vince! Texture Maps, Renders, Turntables and Animation.

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:12:00 +0000

Vince Turntable from humanio on Vimeo.

Vince Playblast

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 07:18:00 +0000

Vince in motion! Finally!

After various delays (moving from apartment to apartment) I'm back up to speed with Vince and managed to get a quick play blast of Vince doing a rough walk cycle.

This is mostly timing tests so nothing polished, but at least hes moving.

I've also changed the color and lightness of Vince's face to better match his arms as they were previously a lot lighter than the face. In addition I've also smoothed out Vince's face and removed excess noise as suggested by my cousin (thanks Lizeth) and a few other friends.

Vince's new face, lighter, smoother.

Although minor, you can see Vince's face now better matches the tone of his arms.

Quick render of Vince mid walk, with cell shade stroke to add a cartoon-like look.

   Vince Walk Playblast from humanio on Vimeo.

   2 step cycle.

More to animation to come!

Face Redux

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:40:00 +0000

Finally! After days and weeks of slow progress, Vince finally has a fully functional face with the range of emotions I was hoping to achieve.

With only minor tweaks and his body left to rig, I'm finally on my way to getting down to business.

Animation to come!

Face test revisited

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:51:00 +0000

As you know I've stated numerous times that by this point on my Vince character would be ready to animate. Once again I must admit, hes not quite ready. I've shown Vince to various people and many have pointed out problems with the model or texture and have since then put more effort into really polishing the areas suggested. The primary issue with the textures was a direct result of the UV layout. This forced me to redo the UV layout and consequently redo the texture maps, ambient occlusion maps and normals maps. Despite the additional time put into the surface detail the model as a whole looks a lot better and I feel more confident about rigging at this point without having to do unnecessary backtracking.

Previously I would texture the model, give it a quick look an make an assessment as to whether or not it was ready to rig. In the above image I've re-textured and rigged the model and jumped ahead to facial rigging. The facial setup ended up being the most problematic and was the primary reason for delay beyond the texture work.

These were all quick tests I rendered out after having rigged the face. For the most part they look pretty good, but the further down you go the worse the face behaves. As clearly evident in the last test, the eyes rotate through the mesh, the eyes clip through the eyelids when closed, the teeth protrude through the upper lip and mustache on certain poses and the lower lip behaves in an unwanted manner.

My particular method or pipeline for my Vince character has thus far been:

-sketch up a characted on paper/photoshop
-create orthographic proofs for us inside maya
-create the base model in maya
-layout the uvs
-refine the 3d model in zbrush
-generate normals in maya using the refined zbrush model
-paint the base textures
-create ambient occlusion textures
-refine all maps as needed
-rig the body
-refine the body rig/weights
-rig the face

The problem with this current method is that after rigging the body and refining weights, if I find that the facial rig isn't behaving as I'd like it to as a result of the mesh I'm forced to refine the mesh which then forces me to re-rig the entire body after having done all the refinements.

I should have been rigging the face first, testing the behavior of the rig, make changes to the mesh as needed, then finally rig the body and re-rig the face then from that point on refine the weights as need be, after which I could begin animating.

This problem cost me a lot of time rigging and re-rigging but hopefully from this point on I'll really have a character ready to animate within the next few days.

Be on the lookout for a ready to animate character in the coming days.

Glasses or No Glasses?

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:33:00 +0000

With or Without glasses?

Vince's Face

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:49:00 +0000

Previously I had mentioned that Vince was in the rigging stages and would be ready to animate within the next day or two. Well... turned out that wasn't really the case.

Although rigging on Vince's body more or less finalized there were clearly some problems with his face. After running some tests with the facial setup it became apparent that any problem albeit minor, with the mesh, lighting, or textures were pretty obvious to many others who had seen Vince up to this point.

To make matters slightly worse, I was unfortunately well aware of the problems but wasn't trying my best to ignore them :/ . Well, as it goes anyone that paid attention was easily able to point out problems with the character which forced me to backtrack a few steps to make sure Vince was looking good. After all, if friends or family members could spot problematic areas with my character then surely any company looking to hire me would be able to point them out.

Enter Vince's Face. Although there were other areas that needed fixing, namely below the sleeves and minor parts of the body, the face had the most obvious faults. Closeups on the face would have not been an option as problems with the face would be more apparent.

As I've said before, the art style was directly inspired by Team Fortress 2. Similarly (at least I hope) to TF2, the areas of focus are in the the chest and face area. The lower half of Vince's body is darker with little detail which hopefully keep your eyes focused on the lighter values and details of shirt or face.

Ultimately this is the desired effect I'm looking for in regards to the viewer but any unsightly blemishes quickly become the area of focus even if the rest of the model looks fairly decent.

Above is a previously posted render of Vince. In this render the problems aren't very apparent due to the distance between the camera and the character but upon closer inspection one can see dark "cuts" just below the sleeves and a dark shadow just below the lower lip. At this distance I might have been able to get away with leaving everything as is but it would have led to some pretty uninteresting camera angles.

In the rigging phase these problematic areas are amplified somewhat due to the positions that force that area to become more visible. This is a low quality screen shot but you can still see dark spots between the fingers, more spots on his mustache, eyelids, and once again below the sleeves.

This was an early test for the facial setup that really the many areas that needed some attention. The dark regions around the mustache are hard to miss at this distance as well as the strange scaring along the nose,eyelid and dark shadow below the lower lip.

Another problem viewers had with the character were the eyebrows. Many mentioned that although they didn't look terrible by any means, they looked very painted on (because they were) and had very little depth to them.

This was direct problem with the model having no extra extruded geometry for the eyebrows and being in fact merely painted on. Simply extruding the area just enough to create the impression that the eyebrows are slightly elevated was a simple fix. While fixing problems with the mesh I also altered the mustached which was causing some odd clipping in some areas.

As I got closer to finalizing the face (again) I rendered out a few images starting with the first image on the left. Most of the problems have been ironed out but something still looked odd to me. The eyes, more specifically the eyelids.

Vince's right eyelids (your left) were very sharp and pointy, while his left eyelids (your right) looked a lot more natural after some adjustments. The profile render gives you a better idea of just how sharp his eyelids were. The final render shows Vince with adjusted eyelids and slightly reshaped eyes with blemishes gone.

Hopefully all these fixes make Vince more appealing as a character.

In the next episode: Vince's Body finally rigged!

P.S. Hi Adam.

Vince Progress

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 06:06:00 +0000

These past few days I've been working on getting Vince ready to animate. With only a few more adjustments left around the head and chest area he should be up and running within a day or two.

Rigging this time around has been more or less a painless affair but anyone that knows me well enough will tell you that I actually don't like rigging very much. Actually I kind of hate it altogether. Other than the satisfaction of building, rigging, and animating a character from start to finish I'd prefer there be an automated way for us animators.

Because rigging a character is a troubleshooting process, just when you think the rig is behaving properly, you move an arm and realize suddenly your character has bat wings. It's annoying yes but I'd be lying if I said it didn't provide some hilarious results at times.

Below I've posted a few images of the Vince and what he's looked like through out this entire process. I've always like to look behind the scenes of a project so I figure someone else might like it to.

Ambient Occlusion render. "Baking" an ambient occlusion map will add extra depth and dimension to a character. You'l notice that there isn't very much color yet the character is still readable. An occlusion layer overlaid on top of textures and normal maps often time will result in a nicer looking model.

This is the first texture pass for the shirt and pants. At this point normal maps have been attached and you can see it adds nice folds in his shirt and pants without adding extra geometry to the model.

This is a shot of Vince, with rough pass at textures and added normal and occlusion maps. I'm sure its obvious it doesn't look that great. The normals look too "hot" and artifact because no proper lights have been added to the scene.

At this point Vince has been properly textured and all the maps have been hooked up to a rim shader. Overall it has nicer quality but you can see that the normals (clothing folds) aren't really showing up too well. On top of this, the rim shader isn't working properly and there is no enough lighting contrast.

Light test number 2. Immediately its noticeable that the rim shader is now working properly. You get a nice bit of light on the edges of the character and creates a nicer silhouette, but again no normals, no clothing folds, and the model is still looking a little flat.

By this point I've lit Vince in numerous ways and finally decided to use a method to fake Global Illumination. Although its results in a darker render, with odd shadows its heading in the right direction and all maps are working as they should.

Finally! After fiddling around with some parameters I managed to render the image you see above. The render to the left was still a little dark so after some contrast and color correction I achieved the render you see on the right.

Rigging Problems! I hate fixing this stuff. The shoulder joint is influencing areas below the armpit. As a result when you lift the arm, everything else follows. Also his teeth, tongue and eyes don't seem to be sitting properly inside the head.
More rig problems! Broken teeth, jaw, eyelids, and too many other problems to list.

Rig updates to follow in the next few days.

Vince Innards

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:46:00 +0000

I've decided to take a break this weekend and leave the rigging for this coming week. However, since I do plan on rigging Vince's entire body as well as the face it seems best to provide Vince with some good dentures and tongue for licking. Behold Vince's innards O_O.

Hilariously weird looking.

Vince!

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:26:00 +0000

A few months back while I was still at the Academy I was assigned to design, model, texture, rig. and light my own character. At the time I was still working for Sharks Ice and regularly bumped into Vince, a mechanic/Zamboni driver/handyman who does a bunch of work for the facility(which goes mostly unnoticed and unrewarded).

He's always been a genuinely funny guy, with great features and characteristics and it dawned on me that Vince would be the perfect guy to base my model on.

It took roughly 3 months to have a finished model with so-so textures and a rig that was semi working. After the semester was over I was a little bummed out that Vince didn't live up to my quality expectations. His rig was mostly broken, which led to mediocre animation, and since lighting and shaders aren't taught to the degree that I'd prefer I was left to learn it all on my own.

I put a lot of work into it and really wanted to use Vince for my reel and unfortunately it wasn't up to standards. Well, it just so happens that I'm currently not working (although apparently still employed) and decided to spend everyday working on Vince up to the level that I'd like him to be.

I've now worked on Vince for roughly 3 or so weeks and have managed to tweak the mesh, completely redo the textures, add normals and occlusion maps and finally got a nice rim shader working for him. I deliberately went for a TF2 art style so that I could keep the model simple, clean and readable while still retaining a lot of character appeal.

Next step is to give him a proper rig and finally get him animated.

drawings

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:13:00 +0000

Website Design

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:45:00 +0000

sketches

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:27:00 +0000

Animation Short

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:26:00 +0000

3d bits while in school

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:48:00 +0000

3D models and tests

Custom Tomb Raider Skin

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:35:00 +0000

Custom Textures I made for Lara Croft in Tomb Raider Anniversary

Nature shots

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:58:00 +0000

Bass Lake.

Fortini Trail. Great for biking.

Panoramic Shots

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:18:00 +0000

Couple of Panoramic shots.

Beach in Hawaii.

Panorama of a bike trail I like to bike.

Brother

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:12:00 +0000

My brother manipulating gravity while reading outside my home.

Almost done!

noreply@blogger.com (HumaN) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 06:37:00 +0000

After some hosting gone bad and a few hard drive failures I have some work ready to go up.

Hopefully this page will hold out until I get a full blown site up.

Check back soon for some sketch work, school work, photography and just plain ol art work.