fxCubed

Blog Moved – New Site Now Open

John Vanderbeck — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:35:06 +0000

It has finally happened. The new blog site is now officially open. Theres a few lingering details to take care of but thats it. I now declare it open :)

Please from now on use the new website. This blog here will remain parked and will not be updated anymore.

First Day of Classes

John Vanderbeck — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 19:52:40 +0000

I just returned from my first day of classes at The DAVE School. As was to be expected, nothing much went on today. At first we spent maybe an hour or two doing paperwork and getting to know each other. There are 15 people in the class, and it was interesting to see just how varied we all are in terms of background and experience, not to mention where we came from. Roughly half the class had packed up and moved here to central Florida to attend the classes. Three of which, if I remember correctly, moved here from other countries. Two from Brazil and one from the UK (There ya go Tom your represented now! ). All together it seems like a nice group of people and this coming year should be interesting.

After this, we all headed out on a walking tour of Universal's backlot and main park. Our first class project was for us all to ride the Men in Black ride. We split into two cars due to our size and Jeff, the school's owner and director, purchased the on game camera pictures from Kodak. I never got to actually see them though. I'm sorry to say that despite my totally rocking personal score of 131,000 on the ride, the other car beat us :( I smell a rematch sometime!

On the way back from MiB we stopped at one of Universals shooting stages. At least I think that is what Jeff called it? I may have the name slightly off. Anyway its basiclly like a big hanger with huge white .. god I can't recall the name and now I wish I had a picture.. thing, kinda of like how a chromakey screen would look, only it wrapped around one corner so it covered two walls. The thing was HUGE. It was interesting to see the place, even though there wasn't anything really to see :)

Once we got back to class it was some more sit down time while Jeff went over lots of orientatino stuff that was extremely boring (Sorry Jeff no offense! :p) but neccesary, and then we got off about a half hour early.

I was certainly hoping for more, since i'm just so excited to get running with this all, but what we did today was about what I expected. I was a little dissapointed though that we were unable to purchase out copy of Lightwave 3D today. I was looking forward to getting it, but apparently they are all out right now and need to order more, so it will be about a week before I can get my hands on it :(

I had planned to take a few pictures here and there of the school (and damn I should have gotten one of that shooting stage!) but I just totally spaced it! I'll try to remember to snag you all some shots tomorrow. I spoke with Jeff about this blog and asked about any restrictions on posting and he basically just said to post whatever I wanted so we're golden there :) It should be a fun and interesting ride so stick around!

Time for School!

John Vanderbeck — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 09:34:04 +0000

Yep, today's the big day! I'm so excited. I leave for my first day of classes in about an hour. I'll write another entry tonight after classes, although I don't expect a whole lot to happen today. From what I understand it will be lots of paperwork, some orientation, and then a walk around Universal. I imagine they'll probably stick us in one of the 'tours' that new Universal Employees go through. Did plenty of those when I worked there, but it will be interesting to do it from a different perspective :)

On the blog front here, I know things have been pretty stale. This last month i've been more franticly working as many hours as possible while I was getting ready for school, and i've still been working on the new website. Everytime I think I like it, I come back and decide I don't and start all over :(

New Website Almost Done

John Vanderbeck — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 15:30:20 +0000

I just wanted to let everyone here know that the new website for fxCubed is very nearly completed. I know its been a very quiet week around here, but I promise i’ve been VERY hard at work behind the scenes on the new blog. Tons of custom PHP code and lots of CSS work has been done and the site is about 90% complete. Theres a few bugs and little details left to take care of, and then we can move over there.

At this point however i’m going to unofficially let you all in to take a peek around if you so desire. There are however two rules if you want to take a sneak peak :p

1) If you take a sneak peak, then I ask that you go to the post titled “Site Preview” which you will find in the right side navbar under “Miscellaneous News” and post a comment or three giving your thoughts on the new site and any issues you may have found.

2) Please do NOT subscribe to ANY feeds on the new site yet. I’m still working on them and its very likely the feed URLs will change as I will be using Feedburner to handle all the new feeds for stats purposes.

Now that the caveats are out of the way, go take a look and let me know what you think:

The NEW fxCubed

New Site Coming Soon

John Vanderbeck — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 23:31:16 +0000

So after much debate, I decided to take advantage of the fact that fxCubed is in its infancy and move to a paid host where i’ll have full control over the site.

There are many reasons for my decision to do so, and i’ll be posting that in more detail later. Right now I just wanted to give everyone a heads up. Within the next few days, maybe a week, i’ll be moving this blog to a completely new website. In the meantime I will be working hard on designing and building that site so posts here will be sparse.

WordPress Problems

John Vanderbeck — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:49:42 +0000

I just wanted to take a moment and apologize to everyone who visits this blog. Apparently WordPress.com is doing various upgrades and what not and thos eupgrades are causing some serious problems with the site in the interim. You will notice things like pages suddenley not working and posts acting up.

Once again I apologize for this and hopefully things will be working smooth again soon.

Star Wars Landspeeder

John Vanderbeck — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:16:37 +0000

Got a free few minutes today to do a tad more work on the Landspeeder.

I redid the windshield so it would fit better into the chassis with the interior compartment, and then i laid the basics for that compartment.

Make it big in Games

John Vanderbeck — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:52:53 +0000

Ok, so it isn’t directly 3D related but it does have relevance. Game development is a hugely growing industry that employs many a modeler, animator, texture artist, and what not. Jeff Tunnell, an old friend of mine from the days when I ran in the GarageGames circles has somewhat recently started a blog dedicated to sharing information on how to make it big in games.

As with anything Jeff writes, it is well worth a read, a link, and a subscription if you are at all interested in the game development world. You won’t be dissapointed.

Blog Exposure

John Vanderbeck — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:10:34 +0000

A friend of mine, Danny Ngan, is a 3D Animator at Amaze Entertainment. He recently posted an entry on his Blog about fxCubed and so its only fair that I return the favor :)

Danny keeps a personal blog which is always quite active and entertaining. Something to check out :)

Praise for the Star Wars Landspeeder

John Vanderbeck — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:50:21 +0000

Woohoo! Ok well it isn’t much, but its always nice to see your work appreciated, and that is exactly what I saw this morning when I checked the blog on the subD site i’ve been spending a lot of time on.

The weekly forum highlights made mention of the Star Wars Landspeeder that i’ve been working on.

“It’s good to actually see someone improving post by post. John Vanderbeck has posted this Landspeeder in the beginner’s forum. Let’s see some more work like this!”

Though i’ve currently put the landspeeder on hold for a few days to work on sdome organic stuff, i’m anxious to go back to it and start detailing. Pretty much all the basic form is there now. Just need to do the details and then maybe texture it. I haven’t decided on the texturing as my focus right now is on modeling practice.

Star Wars Landspeeder

John Vanderbeck — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 03:15:19 +0000

Thanks to “Proton” from the Subdivisionmodeling forums, I was able to finally get the landspeeder’s windscreen to look the way it is supposed to.

Woohoo!

Star Wars Landspeeder

John Vanderbeck — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 14:39:23 +0000

Yet more progress on the landpseeder. This morning I completely redid the engine pods. They didin’t look right, and I finally figured out why. I was so rigidly following the blueprints in my individual views, that I wasn’t watching the overall picture. This caused me to match up the outlines right but end up with badly squashed engines. Redid them this morning, properly, and using what i’d learned last time to make them about 5 million times better :p

I also tweaked the chassis this morning, fixing the dimples, and doing some more overall tweaks to really bring out the right shape.

This thing is starting to look pretty sweet :)

Star Wars Landspeeder

John Vanderbeck — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 02:21:40 +0000

Redid the chassis yet again, trying to better understand poly flow in the whole scheme of things. This is a quick update render with the engine pods in place.

The nose of the chassis, top and bottom, has some nasty dimpling I need to fix. The cool thing is this time around I actually know and udnerstand whats causing the dimpling. Progress! :) When I cut and mirrored the craft in half, the mirror operation apparently merged a couple verts it shouldn’t have so I just need to fix those to remove the dimpling.

Anyway, obviously still tons of work to do but its coming together nicely and i’m still learning lots which is the most important part :)

Star Wars Landspeeder

John Vanderbeck — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 03:01:26 +0000

So I spent the last several hours, essentially constantly building this vehicle’s basic hull from scratch over and over again, each time doing it differently. It was in one manner frustrating to keep starting over, but on the other hand very rewarding. After doing it over and over in different manners I really begin to understand what worked and what didn’t and started to, eventually, really come to appreciate the flexability of Maya’s sub-d’s.

The first four or five times I did this, I started with standard polygon objects and boxed modeled in the basic shape with a good amount of general detail. I then converted to sub-d’s amd tweaked from there. This method though always gave me problems. On an idle thought I wondered if perhaps my problems were due to having TOO much detail in the polygon base.

So I started again and this time I started with a sub-d instead of a polygon. I then boix modeled out completely in sub-d’s and I shockingly discovered how very little detail I actually needed to get the right shape. Probably less than 20% of the detail I had been putting in when in standard polygons.

Using this new method I very quickly roughed out the shape of the hull, and then I started playing around with and learning how Maya lets you “Refine” the sub-d in the areas you need, moving up and down sub division levels tweaking as you need to. This resulted in my getting almost the perfectly desired shape, yet only having the detail where it was needed.

Here, now, is the latest version of the base hull created with my new knowledge.

Star Wars Landspeeder

John Vanderbeck — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:27:49 +0000

My latest project is a vehicle that should be a really good test of everythign i’ve learned to date. It is a Star Wars ™ landspeeder built using top/front view blueprints.

Animated GIF Test

John Vanderbeck — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:01:38 +0000

Ok yeah they’re annoying. I hate em, and I swore i’d never use them. But I think they may be useful in the case of showing a series of steps taken to build an image.

So this is one I put together while working on a Star Wars ™ landspeeder. Or at least trying to :p

Speed Modeling – Lantern

John Vanderbeck — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:43:53 +0000

Another speed modeling excercise on subdivisionmodeling.com

This one I only had about 45 minutes to work on unfortunately, but the majority of the lantern got finished.

Speed Modeling – Sword

John Vanderbeck — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 02:27:42 +0000

Did this for a speed modeling excercise on the subdivision modeling site.

The excercise was to model a sword, real or fictional, using sub-d’s in 3 hours or less. I chose to try and model the funky sword from Bloodrayne. Should have done something simpler though :p

I used up all 3 of my hours and while the basics are there, unfortunately theres lots of problem areas. Obviously I still have a lot to learn when it comes to sub-d’s

Retro Spaceship

John Vanderbeck — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 21:48:23 +0000

I did this up for a weekly contest on www.subdivisionmodeling.com

It was done with absolutely zero reference material. I just started 3d sketching as it were, developing the basic flow as it grew. I then converted it to sub-d’s and tweaked it from there, cutting in details such as the wing fins and laser blasters.

fxCubed logo

John Vanderbeck — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 03:49:41 +0000

Working on some ideas for a logo for the blog site. The current idea is a sort of Lego(tm) based logo look. Would give the concept of “building” which is certainly relevant to the site.

This is just a VERY quick blocked out test of such a logo. I hate the “F” though.

Creepy Cartoon House

John Vanderbeck — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 02:40:06 +0000

This is actually the image I had done up for submission with my application for the school. It isn’t anything stellar and is one of the very first scenes I have ever done. But it was good enough to get me accepted :)

Windows in Time

John Vanderbeck — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 02:35:28 +0000

“Windows in Time” is a project that I am working on for a 3dbuzz.com contest. The theme of the contest is a building of some type. The contest ends February 28th 2006.

“Windows in Time” is a building’s wall featuring several windows, each a different style from a different era.

Welcome to fxCubed!

John Vanderbeck — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:00:19 +0000

Hello, and welcome to fxCubed.

My name is John Vanderbeck, known on most forums as “jwvanderbeck”.

fxCubed is my new blog dedicated to one single purpose; Providing a visual record of my journey from that of a fresh new student in the world of digital animation and visual effects to that of a professional in the field.

I start classes on April 3rd, 2006 and graduate sometime in March 2007. Throughout that time you will be able to see, visually, the things I work on and how my skills develop and grow. You, the reader, will be able to follow along with me, gain insight as I gain it, learn as I learn, and no doubt struggle as I struggle :) You get to be the fly on the wall of my life.

Along the way I will not only post images and videos of projects I work on in the field of digital animation and visual effects, but also work to provide insight into the field and what i’m learning.

Once I graduate this blog will continue to serve as a record of my attempts to land my first job, and then continue to grow with me as I mature in the industry.

It is my hope that not only will this serve as a useful networking tool and repository of works for potential employers to view, but that it will also be of benefit to anyone else intersted in learning the world of digital effects and perhaps taking the same journey that I am about to embark on.

PS: Even though my school does not start until April, you will occasionally see stuff posted here before that date. I am currently using the Maya Personal Learning Edition to do some self teaching and get comfortable with the work. I am still extremely raw though so perhaps I should state “Viewer Discretion is Advised”? :)