Of Scouts, Graduations, Moving, and Jobs . . . .

So... I have been a bad blogger lately. I guess there are more important things than blogging in life so maybe my priorities were in the right place? Anyways, lots has happened since my last entry. The last time I left you I had just redesigned my blog. Pretty neat, huh? About the same time I also decided on a design for my portfolio site. It can be found here. It is still a work in progress since I still am working on finishing up the final renders for my portfolio in addition to the additional objects that I want to make for it. That being said, I'm happy with the design and layout. What I'm most proud of, however, is that I made it compatible on every browser that supports @font-face (IE 8 and up). That was really the only limitation. It works on mobile browsers just dandy and Opera, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Dolphin, IE, etc. So hard to do, if anyone was wondering.

In other news I got a girlfriend.... NOT! There was a girl that I liked who came into the lab every once in a while who I called Headphones Girl in my head because she would always be wearing a pair of white Sony headphones. Sadly, however, as soon as I decided to ask her out, she became scarce and I was never able to break the ice with her and thus set up a date. Small potatoes, I guess, in the grand scheme of things. She was really cute though.... Good at art too.

If you want the biggest news, skip this paragraph. I took senior project this past semester and for that project I decided to do a character from concept art in Maya. Here are some of the results.

This shows the original concept art on the bottom and the finished, final character on the top.

My favorite of the renders that I did. I added a dead tree for additional wasteland effect.

I spent about half of the allotted time (75 hours) doing the modeling and the other half was spent texturing.

Each piece of armor has its own 2k map with about 20 layers total of scratches, dirt, chips and paint.

I am happy with the result although he isn't perfect. Hopefully he will impress potential employers.

If you look closely at his exposed arm on this side you can see veins that I added in.

This is probably my favorite part of him is his air hose and the glowing terminals. It reminds me of Dead Space.

This is his life support backpack. Pretty neat, huh?

I continued the glowing theme with his grenades.

This probably showcases the maps on the armor the best.

This was the only main project that I finished during the semester due to time constraints. I did, however, do a series of 45 tutorials designed to take students through all of the necessary tools to complete the Maya modeling class as Dixie State University. They can be found here. They took a surprising amount of work and without the help of my two good friends at school, Bryan and Kraig, it might not have gotten done on time.

Stop scrolling here if you want to hear the biggest news. I'm happy to announce that I graduated from Dixie State University with a Bachelor's of Science, Visual Technologies emphasis, with Summa Cum Laude honors! My final GPA was 3.96. I am also proud to announce that I got a 4.0 my last three semesters giving me the hat trick that I was shooting for.

From the left,
Back: Kraig, Rob
Front: Tyler, Me

To go along with this would be the sad fact that I would be moving away from the St. George I love. In the last few weeks of school, however, this was changed. My mom got a job at Dixie Regional Medical Center and my parents move down to St. George this weekend! I'm helping them move (Boo!) but when I come to visit them I can see some of my friends that are living is St. George (Yay!). It will be great. I really like the house that my parents bought and I'm super happy that they aren't living in the Crazy Town (Spring City) anymore. There were just getting to be too many overzealous end-of-the-worlders who were convinced that there was going to be some horrendous disaster and they were going to be ready with their rifles and 100,000 years of food storage. News flash! If there was a calamity like that I would rather die than live through it, but that's just me. Oh-so-glad to be out of there for good. I will post pictures of my parent's new house later when I have access to a camera and the house.... :)

The last news of the day is that I have officially applied for two jobs!!! One is in New York (ouch! >_<) and the other is in Bellevue, WA (slightly less ouch!) The one in New York I would be modeling objects for a 3D printer to print, which would be pretty fun. It would be super daunting to move all the way across the country, however, especially for my first job. The other one is an environment/prop artist (my dream job!) for ArenaNet (they make Guild Wars). This is really what I want to do for a living and they use Maya so it sounds ideal, I just hope that (if I get the job) I could handle living in Washington state for 5 years minimum. I would actually feel safer living in California just because I could be much more sure that I would like the weather. I will be applying for more jobs soon, they are just so time consuming to apply for since they require you to sign your life away.

Anyways, if any of you read this entry from back to front, I am impressed. I should really update more often and then I wouldn't has such a long post. Although, honestly, most of this stuff happened in the past week so it wouldn't be that much shorter. Well, have a good day/night/morning/evening/whatever! :)