Here are a couple lighting test renders of the main room for my senior film.

For the past week or two now, I’ve been working on getting the character rigged and ready to animate and will soon start animation work. I’m looking forward more and more to seeing the finished film.

Here are a few more test renders for another part of my senior project. Pretty soon I’ll be moving on to lighting.

For the past few months I have been spending quite a bit of time working on a short film for my senior project at Huntington University. I have spent a lot of hours on modeling and some on character building. Now, I am working on texturing. Here is an in progress test render of a shot in the film.

I still have more texturing work to do on it and quite a bit of lighting work, not to mention animating the character in it too. I’m happy with the direction it is heading in though.

This past summer I was working on a freelance project that involved modeling an area of downtown Huntington, IN for visualization. For more on this project, visit http://www.neilzehr.com/environments/pages/downtown.html .

I used reference photos to model several of the buildings in detail and a satellite image to get the layout of several blocks. After doing all of the modeling in Maya, I brought them into Vue for some landscaping and lighting.

Here are some of those renders:

I’m working on a little animation for my 2D animation class of a little racoon-ish character walking through the woods.

Here is a sketch of the character.

I”m working on a background in Painter. Here is the background in progress.

Here are a few images of a puppet model I made. Eventually, I’m going to make an animation with him playing his little puppet piano in a puppet recital hall.

I’m in the process of working on a new landscape image. I wanted to do a scene with a view of a lake in the middle of a sunset with a bird preparing to land in the water. I came accross this image of a lake that inspired me.

Then I started working on trying to make a sunset and the lake landscape in Vue. Here is what I have come up with so far. I plan on working on the lighting and sky some more, adding more vegitation and rockiness to the lake, and hopefully model and texture some kind of ducklike creature landing.

I recently worked on a scene of a fancy country estate home. The first two images are photos I found that had the kind of feel I wanted for my house.

This next image is the piano model that I built in Maya with the help of my photo reference and a chart of piano keys.

The next image was a test render of my country estate home in Vue to see how my textures were looking.

Once I was happy with my house, I worked on the lighting, put some plants in the pots, and built a landscape for the image. I also used a grass texture for this that I made in photoshop to get the look I wanted for the grass.

Once I saw how this final image came out, I felt like the front porch was too rough and bumpy. Also, I wanted to try a different lighting situation with some soft shadows and light breaking from behind through the tree. Here is what I ended up with.

I have been working on using the digital landscape program Vue along with models that I make in Maya. Using these two programs together, I have enjoyed being able to do whatever kind of landscapes I want.

This is a scene I built of a cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

The first image was a test render to see how my lighting of the scene and texturing of the cabin was coming.

The next image is after I put in a fence, built the rest of the landscape in Vue, and worked with the lighting some more. I experimented with creating my own grass and leaf textures in photoshop.

The last image was an alternate lighting scene to show a brighter day and to show off the texture on the chimney better.

Welcome to the process of Neil Zehr. Here you will find more about how I go from idea to a completed project.