John W. Vanderbeck

Technically the building project ended last week. Its over, and nothing I do at this point can change whatever grade I end up getting. Despite that however, i’ve been finding myself spending my spare time working on it. I was never very happy with the textures that I turned in. They just aren’t photoreal, or even close to it. I have been spending the last few days in Photoshop a lot trying to understand and learn how to paint photoreal textures that I can then use on the building. Unfortunately we received virtually no instruction on doing this in school. All we learned in regards to photoshop was the basics of how to use the program, and a few texhiques such as color correction, straightening photos for textures, and useing the clone tool to clean up textures. Nothing at all on hand painting image maps for photorealism. Anyway enough of a rambling rant. That is what i’ve been doing. Things are looking a lot better but i’ve still got a LOT more to learn. Here is what its looking like right now though.

On another note, we’re getting ready to start our final project of this block, the vehicle project. At the end of block one, every class models and textures some vehicle to finish off the hardware modeling course. The vehicle constructed is different for every class, and this time around we are doing the space shuttle orbiter and the boosters and tank. On tuesday we took a field trip out to Kennedy Space Center for inspiration, reference, and to get us in the general right mood I guess. I was all set to get started working on this then on wednesday, but it was a no go. Apparently we have all these plastic shuttle models that need to be put together for use as references. To be honest with everyone I was more than a little dissapointed by this. Now really I have nothing against building plastic models. I’ve done more than a couple in the past. Its just that i’m anxious to get started working on this shuttle in Lightwave and learning new things. As a result, having to build these plastic models is just feeling like a chore. It is made even worse by the fact that some people were helping more than others, and some basicly didin’t help at all, so by the end of the day I think we had like 1 completed shuttle out of I think 6 of them. so does that mean we still don’t get to start in Lightwave today? Do we still have to get the other 5 plastic models built? I don’t know but if this carries on much longer i’m going to get really frustrated.