Lost Woods

Expect quite a few of these low-poly renders, they're quick, easy, and fun.

Can't say how many among them will be fan art, however.

Low Resolution

Alright, so I love the guys over at Geo A Day and I decided that since I'm learning some Mayas as well I could attempt to mimic their work. 

My first scene is a little piece of scenery of nowhere in particular, I just wanted to practice on some trees, and mountains, and clouds, and everything else, basically. The Lighting was almost a disaster, but was saved at the last minute by the wonderful suggestions of my friend Quinne (who's blog I would link here, if she had one that I was aware of)

For the second time around, I decided to revisit an old favorite of mine and my friends. You see, I've been wanting to do 3D for a very long time. Back in high school, I asked my mother for a gift in the form of a program known as Bryce. Bryce generates landscapes for you, and you tweak certain parameters. For instance, you can generate a mountain, and then you can kind of tell Bryce what shape you want it to be, and Bryce does all the detail work. The same is true for the sky, the atmosphere, etc. You tell Bryce what elements you want in your scene, and it does pretty much all of the work. With the help of that program, I was able to make this image:

Pretty, yes? All thanks to the program, I assure you. BUT, it was a good way to understand the very most basics of 3D, because it did at least allow you to place the objects in space, and adjust their size and such, even if you weren't allowed to control much else at all.

Anyway, the Bryce work got me a ton of compliments from all of my friends and family because "Hey! That's gorgeous!" and if you don't know how little control over things Bryce actually allows, you might be impressed... But that wasn't enough for me. I want to actually be entirely responsible for the work that I do, and in that vein, I decided to revisit my old work. Now that I've learned some of the Mayas, I'm able to create scenes entirely of my own choosing, with my own lights and geometry. As such, I have created this:

Not quite on the level of Bryce, but much more my style.

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.