Character Animation 2:

For our first major project we had to do an animation that included at least three steps and followed a prompt that was given to us. I chose one where the character is to be texting and then bumps into a glass door, but I decided to make him look down at his watch which is broken. I filmed the reference to where he dramatically falls to the floor, but I decided to cut that part out to keep it simple. I had the most problem trying to make him seem like he slams into the door rather than just bumps into it. The antenna were fun to animate to create weight and emotion.

The following is my pre-pro which includes exploratory thumbnails, breakdowns and a storyboard for my project.

This is the final product:

VSD- Final Project


For our final we rendered all the things we textured during the month [except for week 1, which was a reminder of how to light things in Maya] into different passes. What I did was the stain in the front of the box, added the sticker, UV/Textured the scrapper, made the bottle look transparent and the "soda" look like soda from a jarrito [Mexican drink].Once we rendered the lights in Maya [warm light, cool light, key light] we broke them apart in Nuke and put them back together adding grades and color corrections. I have to admit I enjoyed Nuke a bit more than the hypershade in Maya because it is easier for me to understand. The sticker on the box gave me the biggest problem because the first time around it wouldn't show up and I didn't know why that was happening. Apparently I had some issues with it being a surface shader and not showing up. I managed to fix it later on for project 3. Here is my before and after picture for my scene, the one on bottom is the render straight from Maya and on the top is the one edited in Nuke with grades, color corrections. I also added a ramp and changed the colors to give it an instagram filter feeling. The darkest/shadows being dark blue and the lightest a light warm orange. We were asked to make a vignette which was to make the surrounding area fade to black. [The little confetti is from NukeX PLE version, who has the money to buy the real thing anyways.] I gotta say overall the caustics was pretty interesting to learn, The light coming from the bottle and the little ripples were interesting to make. Wish I could have worked faster to add in some spheres to give it its fizzy feel.

                                          After:

Before:

Here is also a picture of the sticker up close: [Drawn by Luisa Reyes a.k.a Gunmi] 

VSD- Visual Development

For project 2 we created UVs and textured a scrapper. I took longer than expected with the UVs, but I did enjoy it because of the final outcome of it. It was a nice reminder of the tools that I could use to speed up my workflow. I took the parts of the scrapper that were seen and made them as big as possible in the 0 to 1 space then scaled down the parts that were hidden to take up as little space as possible. The scrapper had several pieces to it and despite the little inside faces of the bolts on it I really liked making the UVS neat using the cylindrical mapping. Here is the texture for the scrapper.

I will upload the finish product in my next post along with a few other things I lighted and textured for class.

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So much blogging today hot damn! So to the next project! My most recent project for now is the MeltMan. (It probably won't be the most recent for long though) We were given a scene with a high res poly melt man. He had the goals already set up so it was easy to handle the soft bodies from that point on. I like to stick with the basics and learn them real well before moving on to the harder more original things. I made him melt and then added a glow to him to make him look radioactive. I added some lighting and got to model the barrels real quick. The render took about 2 hours for 120 frames that were then taken to after effects, composited together and then added the little clip of music. See for yourself how it came out! Critiques would be very much appreciated.

More Animation- More Poses

This time we were given Bugsy to pose in silhouette form that expressed a list of feelings that were given to us. I have to say I had the most fun with these because I got to act them out and reference from myself. I hope you can guess the emotion just by looking at the poses! If you can't guess, here's how they were arranged: standard, surprised, angry, happy, sad, disgusted, balanced on 1 foot.

As anything that goes in Maya you have to plan it and you got to pre-pro.
Here are my little sketches I had for the assignment:

I had 4 poses for each emotion and then picked the one I thought had the best silhouette. The elimination battle went on and here were the winners:

Congratulations winners, you made it to the final phase and appeared on my video for strong poses. 

P.S. The line of action is your best friend. 

For our animation class we had the task to explore an create dynamic strong poses. We had to go our school's library and find a picture which we had to redraw and then draw Bugsy in it in the strong pose. I used a piece by Achille Devéria called Heures du Matin.

Original:

My redraw:

 Bugsy in Pose:

This was my first adventure through Maya for making particle effects. We were given a scene that was textured and lighted for the most part. I created the smoke, the steam coming from the lava bucket and the sparks that come out from the grinder. I had some trouble getting the spark color to show up in the render even though I did add an RGB PP ramp. I might have missed a setting or a step when adding them in. The whole scene was composited in after effects. I got a sound clip for both the fire and the sparks, but the fire was too low to be heard. I had lots of fun, but got worried when my fire didn't look so nice. Just don't forget those samples to be turned up! Any critiques would be greatly appreciated.