End of Semester 1

WINTER BREAK HAS ARRIVED!

That means we've wrapped up the remainder of our projects, and I have a bunch of stuff to post for various classes.

So to begin with, my 2D Animation assignment. We were told that we had to make a scene involving a character who enters an area and reacts to something. The area had to have an actual background, but that was pretty much all we were told. For mine, I decided to do the simplest section of animation from my film. But hey, this is ACTUALLY a section of my film, and while I'll be reanimating this in TV Paint, this can serve as a preview of things to come.

Next up is 3D. Assuming you've been following my blog posts, you'll remember a post where I showed the untextured models for a mad scientist lab we were working on throughout the semester (and if you don't, it's here: The Third Dimension ). Well the assignment is finished!

The idea here is that an evil scientist has moved into an abandoned church and set up shop. With much thanks to my lighting class, I was able to take my original idea and turn it into pretty much exactly what I wanted.

And lastly, I took a class about the art and spiritual philosophies of India. As the final part of that class, we were tasked with the completion of a piece of artwork, of any kind, that related to our major. Seeing as animation takes too dang long to do, and I've got such a history in art, I decided to do a digital painting. The painting depicts a city from a movie/tv series I'm writing, and it represents the buddhist philosophy that "many roads lead to the same path". I won't go into deep detail, but basically there's a war going on and this city is the neutral party who are trying to find a way to bridge the gap between the two parties by accepting the world as a place of diversity.

Reaching Enlightenment

So this semester I've been sitting in on a lighting class that should be for third years, but I was interested in the subject, so I made an exception for myself and the teacher was fine with it, so woo!

We were given a set of pre-rendered fruit with bowl and cloth background. It was basically doing an oil painting, but with Maya. I thought it was pretty cool.

Anyway, first off we were given the following image to begin with:

Once we were given that, we were told to create three different lights in three different places and make the fruit look delicious. The lights were placed in places that made sense based on the principles of real lighting, we were just adapting them for Maya. Basically, that means we included a Key Light (The main light of the scene, coming from the right in my image), a Fill Light (a secondary light that adds dimension to the shadows), and a Rim Light (a light that comes from behind to illuminate just the edges of the visible objects).

Once we had that, we went into texturing. The orange already came with some texture to it, but the rest of the fruit were smooth and blank. We began by simply drawing a texture in photoshop and applying it to the Diffuse attribute in Maya.

I continued by adding textures to the entire scene, background, plate, and everything in between. He then began to teach us different things to add to the scene to make it look more realistic. Ray Traced shadows, different types of lights and textures, and different options within a texture to adjust the reflectivity, specularity, and a few other things.

And then at the end we added some final touches including ambients (both ambient light and ambient color), some procedural textures, and just some final touches on all the ways that light interacts with the texturings, and then Ta Daaaa! A completed fruit bowl!

EDIT: And now a version with the final Ambient Occlusion added to make everything just look better:

Moom Walking

BONUS BLOG! Because I'm done with my assignment of making a ball walk, I've moved on to playing with the full biped rig we're going to be using in the spring.... And next week we're going to get an assignment to make a ball with no arms, face, body or any other form of detail do this same sort of walk cycle! Yay back-tracking!

Jumping Jahosaphat

And now on the legs! This time 'round we were told to animate this mono-legged rig and make him jump. Specifically we were told to make him do 3 different kinds of jumps, and we were warned not to try to do flips because a bunch of previous students had tried and failed. Logically the first thing I did was include not one, but two different flips in my animation because apparently I'm psychotic and I hate myself!

But this time around he introduced us to a nice little button called an IK/FK Switch that would have been a WONDERFUL THING to have on the last few 3D rigs, because I wouldn't have had to animate everything backwards like I did. The IK/FK changes the way the motion works from having it so the foot leads the motion to having it where the ball leads the motion. On FK, the ball moves everything, and you pose the foot to make sense after that. On IK, the ball and the foot move independently, and while it can cause some issues and is less useful for certain actions, it made THIS animation a million billion times easier than the last 2 I did.


Also, as a side note, I've been approved as a member of the deviantArt film community, so all of my animations are now also available on my dA page here at http://xelioth.deviantart.com

Character Test

Test animation for my film character. We got an assignment in 2D Animation class to show a character coming into frame, picking up an object and then reacting to said object. We were given the option to draw either a Disney character or our own film character, and this time around I opted for my film character so that I would have a chance to explore him a bit before time to actually animate him IN my film.

So here you go, my film character in action. Hopefully the motion is clear, so I don't need to explain it, and just prepare to see a lot more of him as this year goes along. Haven't decided how much of my film stuff I'll be showing here, but there will definitely be SOME kind of preview posted.

Squirrel and Tree

Project this time around was to take the ball with a tail and make it live. I decided that since we were given a circus environment, I would take that idea, and have the ball do some tricks. Studied trapeze artists' swinging motions to get the feel of the flip through the ring. I'm pretty happy with it, and it made the class TA stop and gawk for a moment sputtering about how "this is great" over and over again, so I felt pretty special for that one.

ALSO! BONUS POINTS! I had some time for personal drawing for once! We had a class intro to photoshop, and while the newbies to the program were learning the basics, I crapped out this little drawing!

Drawn first in my sketchbook, scanned, and then traced over in photoshop. Color is all digital.

Great Balls of Maya

So I've done 2D Animation balls and NOW I've done 3D Animation balls. Yay Balls!!

I want to note that I deserve like 5 million extra bonus points for this chain animation. The only part of the chain that can move is the top of the chain. The ball cannot be edited whatsoever because of the way it's rigged. The way I had to edit the ball/chain was to move the chain to the position I wanted it, then turn the ENTIRE RIG around to put the ball back into place where it looked like it rolled naturally.

I don't know how to explain it more than that. Hopefully that makes my headache clear for you guys.