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Me: Eric Keller

Hi and welcome to my Blog. This is a hastily compiled record of my digital art and computer graphics experiments. I am a freelance CG artist living and working in Hollywood CA. I have written several books on Maya and ZBrush. Below my blog you'll find links to the books and tutorials I have authored and co-authored. I also occasionally teach at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood.I named my blog "Bloopatone" in honor of my first dog "Blue". She passed away a few years ago and I still miss her even though she was very grouchy and liked to bite me!

I'm proud to be an instructor at The Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood. Take a look at the work of our students and instructors on the Gnomon School Blog and the Gnomon Workshop Blog

Here is a link to my Artstation Page

Here is a link to my Demo Reel:

Eric Keller's 2016 CG Demo Reel from Eric Keller on Vimeo.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Gasteracantha Hasselti weekend render project

In my quest to achieve more photo real renders I created a ZBrush model of Gasteracantha hasselti (a super cool spider). This one was a little difficult to get a render that did not look "CG". I modeled it in ZBrush then exported, textured, and rendered in Modo, but I didn't like it so I rigged the whole thing in Maya, added hair via Paint Effects, created new MIA shaders, and rendered using mental ray. I even did a short animation but the movement just wasn't right so I'm not posting it. I may try again after some study of spider movement. I need to step away form this critter for a while, do something else, come back and try again.

Here are some still images that came out pretty well. Don't ask me about render times. The DOF is in camera in the mental ray renders which took forever. The only post process I did in Photoshop was slight color tweaks. In one of the renders the spider had "angry eyes" which I fixed with a few dabs of a clone brush.

Here's the mental ray version with hair:



The Maya rig:


 Here is the Modo render (DOF added in Photoshop) Notice that without hair it loses a lot of realism.



Here is the ZBrush model:

 Next up I need to revisit some ant models that have been on the back burner for the last 18 months!

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