So when I last finished I was just starting my internship at Visual Goodness. I have been at visual goodness for four months now and I have done a lot of cool projects and met a lot of great people. Though the best of all I have learned a lot. The first thing I worked on when I started was a simple piece of wheat or so I thought was simple. Who knew wheat was so intricate or was going to be so scrutinized to the nth detail. The projects when I took it on sounded simple create, 3d wheat so that in can be composited in a web site for post. What made the project harder than what I initially that I had to do it in 3D Studio Max. Now at the School of Visuals Arts we are taught one main program and that is Maya we never came close to even touching 3DSMax. To say it was different was an understatement though I pulled through and with my basic knowledge of Max I managed to create a pretty good looking piece of wheat. You can see the final product here at http://www.postcereals.com/shreddedwheat/index.html.
After the Post Shredded Wheat project I called into Jayme’s (President of Visual Goodness) office in order to discuss the next project. I was told Steve and I were going to be creating a series of banners For Samsung advertising there new high resistant flash cards. Samsung wanted three banners in all showing the strength of their new flash cards. The first banner involved a Godzilla creature stepping on a flash card, the second had a bottle of champagne explode all over it, and lastly the client wanted to have a realistic fish land on a card. Steve assigned me the responsibility of Creating, Modeling and Texturing a realistic Rainbow Trout.
My job over the next few days was to find as much reference as humanly possible and then to start modeling of the fish. Luckily after the first project I had convinced the company to let me use their only copy of Maya telling them that my work would get done quicker. So I started off with the base mesh which got done surprisingly quickly. Then I threw the fish in to Zbrush to take it over the edge and make it as realistic as possible. The art direction on the piece was probably the hardest I have had in a long time I didn’t know at the time that Jayme was a fisherman and knew everything about Rainbow Trout so it was a hard sell. I learned the most on this project when I got to texturing. Now school didn’t teach us that much about texturing so it was a good thing to learn I figured out how to do the entire texturing pipeline with Max, Zbrush, and Photoshop. Things like combining displacement maps and normal maps are second nature to me now.
here are some other Projects I have been working on:
So I was told a couple of time now that the presentation of my art work was sparse and that I should start a blog. So once again I'm going to try to start, create, and update a blog. So here goes:
Hello my name is Bryan Brown-Goebeler I am a student at the School of Visual Arts though I haven't been to school in the last 3 months I still am a student there and will be planning to start up again in the fall. I decided to take a break for a while and I really believe I needed it. Do I regret my actions? Some days I do most days I don't. It put me in the current mindset I have today and I wouldn't return that for the world. The leave allowed me to sort of restart and focus my art career. Senior year broke me down and showed me what it took to be a true digital artist. What it takes to succeed and what I need to know to truly be successful.
So I'm going to start out and tell you what I have been up to for the last three months. When I got home I was incredibly depressed and relieved at the same time. Life at school was nonstop work and I was able to come home, gathering up the pieces of what was left of my artistic mind. At first I was burnt out and I could not even look at my computer which is a major problem for a computer animator. I started slowly and came up with the hypothesis "If I drew one thing a day that personally I believed was good every day, than that day was a successful day." So I equipped myself with my weapons of choice a blue mechanical pencil and Hi-Tec C #03 pen. I found myself drawing everywhere friends houses, diners late at night with a cup of ice coffee, or stuffed in a two seater on the train on the way to New York. Drawing allowed me to figure out what I really was missing at art school. It turns out the fact that I hadn't drawn in four years really had a major effect on me. More than I realized that I had lost my sense of art at art school and it surprised me how bringing myself back to my most basic, most loved form of art really nurtured me back to myself. I had become so tied up in IK handles and proper edge flow I'd lost what I loved most about art and why I wanted to be a digital artist in the first place.
Drawing really made me anew; it allowed me to gain back my creativity and eased me from the stupor that was being burnt out. Once I got out of my rut I was again able to come in contact with my computer. I decide that I was going to make computer art my own like I did with my drawing and see where the computer as a tool was going to take me. So I decide to do a little bit of freelance work and see where that would take me to see if I liked doing computer animation as a job or if I just liked it as a hobby. So luckily shortly after it was definite I was leaving school I got a call from a friend of mine was looking for a 3d artist to do some work for him. I had to create a model of a custom car for an intro to a website. I had never done hard modeling before at school. For the most part we had only really concentrated on character modeling and organic creature creation to further our senior year thesis. So I gladly and excitedly accepted the job and started to work right away. It was a nice learning experience for me and showed me what it was like to work for a client personally doing professional freelance work. I quickly finished up the model and had to deal with my first revision which where I admit hard to take at first but I took the criticism. Not well at first but I swiftly realized it was just a challenge to do superior and to better myself in the process. I went ahead biting the bullet and again finished up modeling and texturing the car I will be putting up with this post. I handed in the work and the client really loved the work I did he saw the time I put into the piece and appreciated the effort I had made.
It was now the middle of January and I had gotten it into my head that with all the new fangled time that I now had not going to school the best thing I should do was do more artwork and try to at the same time get a real internship in the city in my field. Doing what I had trained to do with the last 4 years of school. I applied all over the place using craigslist.com, hotjobs.com, moster.com, and krop.com. I sent multiple emails every day and followed a multitude of different leads it was hard to say I wasn’t persistent.
In the mean time I was still drawing and for my birthday in January I decide to ask the parents if they could give me the money to take a figure drawing class at the local community college. Of course they said yes and supported me in my further mission to hone my traditional skills. So I trekked out to Raritan Valley Community College to register for a figure drawing II with Richard Gabriele. Figure drawing has long been an infatuation for me and I figured it would help out with my understanding of form as well as further me in my journey as a skilled sculpture and 3d modeler. While I was establishing my future plans in the traditional realm I had not found my internship that I needed to help validate me coming home prematurely. I decide to try out the School of Visual Arts job boards which had helped me out in the past. I again persistently blasted out my resume and email to per posed employers. Nothing came back my way till I sent my Resume and to a small web based interactive 3D shop called Visual Goodness. Speedily with little turnaround time got an email and an interview with Mr. Stephen Hallquist head of 3D at this quaint little shop. Two days and a weekend later I had the job and I was starting on Monday as the first 3d intern for Visual Goodness. So here I am today this was post one I will finish my story in the second post in the coming days I hope you enjoy the start.
