Abigail's Digital Portfolio Blog

Brainstorming Page: Here I wanted to brainstorm about ideas for the ground of my project. I have a few things in mind for my options, and I want to compare the components, time, difficulty, and overall look of these ideas to figure out the best plan of action. Grass Image Texture Only: One option that I thought of was just using an image texture of grass with nothing else. This would be a quick and easy option, and would be the simplest out of the three. However, I don't really like how it looks in the final product, and it tends to look unrealistic, low quality, and two dimensional, which is not what I want. I could try texture painting the ground with this image to make it look more natural, but I still think it would look fake. Overall, I would not prefer to use this option, but it might be a necessary back up plan if the other options take too long or are too difficult.  Grass Particles: Another option I came up with was using a particle system for the grass. To do this, I...

 Inspiration Page:          One Artist that recently inspired me is the artist Casey McDonald who goes by Gothfrog on YouTube. This artist is a SVA graduate (School of Visual Arts), and she is .currently working freelance in NYC. She made this short film for her SVA Thesis as her final film.         This short film inspired me in a few ways, the first one being the nature components shown throughout the film. The story is set inside of a forest, and it even includes the different seasons as the story progresses. What I specifically was inspired by was the leaves. I loved how she made the fall leaves bright and colorful, and I thought it showed good technique too; how she gave the leaves a simple design but did not over-detail them since they were not the main focus of the story. I hope I can balance the background detail and not overpower the actual focus of my animation.           Another way this...

Process Page: Here is an update the progress of my project : Here is a picture of me working of my leaf texture with nodes . I was following two tutorials that I found; one was for the transparent background, and one was for a realistic look through mapping . I was able to follow them correctly, however, I was having trouble combining them because they both required a material output (you can only have one material output) . What I ended up doing was only using the node layout that had the transparent background . Even though I didn't exactly get the texture I wanted, I am still happy with how it ended up looking . This is a picture of me trying to figure out how to properly maneuver the tree bark texture so it looks natural . I was having trouble doing this though, so I decided to try experimenting with a different tree type . This is where I started to experiment with a different form of tree .  I followed a tutorial for this, and it is my second attempt because I didn't...