darren

This is Darren, drummer of local band ‘buscompany’. You’ll be seeing more drawings of the rest of the band members soon! Meanwhile, check out their music at www.myspace.com/buscompanyband  -hsulynn

a sneak peek!

here’s a sneak preview of a mini project of my own that i’m starting… stay tuned… there’s more coming…

-hsulynn

happy birthday ko

Yesterday was my brother Lih-Hern’s birthday. I call him ‘ko’, which means older brother in cantonese(i think). And because I couldn’t be with him to celebrate his birthday last night, I did the only thing I knew how…. draw out what I would have done. haha… Happy birthday Ko. Love you lots! x hsulynn

a comic strip

(one of Sam’s close buddy visited from the States about a month back and he was describing this incident that happened between him and Sam while he was here. and this is my interpretation.)

most people don’t know that i draw cartoons, they think i’m a designer. well.. let’s set the record straight once and for all. hsulynn is not a designer. she illustrates. design… illustrate… big difference. thank u. enjoy. -hsulynn

sam

Time to Fly

For my final group project at Media Design School in Auckland, my team members and I made an animation with live footage integration about a flock of Tui birds saving their tree from being cut down by humans. This was our first project that involved filming and I was fortunate enough to be directing this piece for the second time. Apart from directing and working on different stages of the production, I also got to experiment with matte painting during this project(look out for the sunset at the last scene). Hopefully, I will be posting up more of my painting and drawings here soon. Most of them are still work in progress.

One of the odd things about working on this project was that although the idea and concept of the animation came from the wonderful brain that I inherited from my two amazing parents, I actually have a great fear of birds. Don’t ask me why I didn’t think of my fear when I came up with the idea because I don’t know either. All I know is that, I had to be in a room full of feathers and pictures of bird anatomy for 10 weeks and I wasn’t very comfortable with that. However… I think it did help cure my fear a little bit because I can now walk next to a pigeon without ducking for cover.

So this animation is dedicated to people diagnosed with ‘ornithophobia’. You can do the impossible too if you choose to sit next to a feathered friend today

-hsulynn

p/s: Emil, Chris, Cam, Yoshi, Mark, Leo and Thandu, thank you so much for being such amazing people to work with. I’m so proud of what we’ve done together as a team.

melaka

I decided to explore the beautiful architecture of ‘jonker street’ in Melaka recently to gain artistic inspiration from what I used to take for granted growing up here. I guess being away from home for 4 years has certainly helped me see this old historical town through a new pair of eyes. After wondering around like a “tourist” with a camera, I was very much inspired to paint a picture that high lighted the rustic feel of this street that is rich with a wonderful mix of Malay and Chinese culture. Here is my interpretation of what jonker street is like at night through the wonders of my wacom tablet and photoshop. - hsulynn

Peaches and Seeds

During the first few weeks into my Graduate Diploma course last year, I was given an individual task to recreate a still photo that I took in the studio in 3D. I really enjoyed working on this project because I got to experiment with photography and lighting in the studio. The image above is the final render of what I created with maya, mental ray and photoshop. And since I put in quite a bit of time into creating this “masterpiece”, I thought I’ll share the process of it all with you.

WARNING: You are about to read material that might possibly put you to sleep. Fortunately, the writer of this blog has proved read this many times to make sure it sounds as ‘non-technical’ as possible. If not, feel free to use this to help cure insomnia or just enjoy the pretty pictures that comes with it.

STEP 1 – ’setting up’

To create the image in 3D, I had to first create the image I wanted in real life. That means lots of trial and errors in the studio, but also lots of fun learning from the failed attempts (honest!)

I spent quite a bit of time finding the right composition that I liked with the many seeds and fruit that I had with me that day, and I finally decided on the peach and sunflower seeds because of the contrast in colour.

STEP 2 – ‘modeling in 3D’

With the final image that I was happy with, I attempted to recreate it in 3D using maya. I started out by modeling the objects in my scene with the polygon tool in maya and also sculpturing some fine details using a 3D sculpturing software called zbrush.

‘modeling the seeds’

Because there were so many sunflower seeds in my original scene, I had to find a shorter way of creating variety with the seeds without modeling the thousands of seeds I had in the photo.  I decided to model 9 different shaped sunflower seeds (fat ones, skinny ones, etc.), and duplicated many copies of them.

‘placing the seeds’

Using a command script in Maya(Mel script) called ‘rivet’ and also the help of the nCloth simulation, I managed to drop the thousands of seeds I had in my scene in random places without spending hours on rendering and without crashing the computer.

STEP 3 – ‘texturing’

After much observation of the peach fruit, I notice that it is quite translucent in texture. The flesh becomes more red and orange when light hits it from behind. To recreate that look, I used a shader in mental ray called the ’subsurface scatter’. Using the shader, I was able to customize the different colours I wanted the peach to have when lit up.

STEP 4 – ‘lighting’

Althought I only used one key light and a reflector for the final image, lighting my scene in maya took a total of 10 lights to have it look close to the original image. The reason for this was because I was rendering each individual fruit separately because the result on the entire scene based on the key light was quite inconsistent. This being so, I had to set up 2 lights for all 4 wedges, and a main light and fill light for the entire scene.

STEP 5 – ‘compositing’

Thank God for whoever who created mental ray because without it, 3D wouldn’t look as realistic as it is today. Using this rendering method, I got to render out 10 seperate passes(shadow pass, beauty pass, specular pass, etc.) to composite in photoshop. The reason for this many passes is because I had used different shaders on the peach from the seeds, therefore, they needed separate passes by themselves. After much tweaking and editing in photoshop, I managed to come up with the final product you see above.

COMPARISON

Here’s a comparison between the real life still image and the rendered one. There’s plenty room for improvement, but I quite like how this turned out as it’s my first attempt - hsulynn

Incipiens

   ‘incipiens’    ‘the making of’

‘Incipiens’ is Latin for Incipience, which means beginning to exist. This animation is a group project that I was part of last year in my Advanced 3D Productions Graduate Diploma course in Auckland. A few of us came up with the concept of the story and I was given the opportunity to direct it. The story is (told in reverse) about the life of a man who’s struggling to be freed from the grasp of depression but fails due to unfortunate circumstances. Although the dark and abstract theme of this animation does not really reflect my personal style and taste, but it was something that my team and i wanted to explore and experiment on. We’re certainly proud of it as it is something different from what we would normally see in the 3D animation industry and the entire animation does in some way reflect a little bit of all of us individually.

The second video is the making of ‘incipiens’. Please excuse my ‘clueless’ expressions in that video as we were all very much lacking of sleep that day.

Hope you’ll like it! -hsulynn