Rag

Submission

Handed everything in today, which is a huge weight off of my shoulders. No time to relax though, i must keep on the ball of this ever changing world of CG, and practice modelling. Plus i must start thinking about a story for next year, the BA year, where we make group films. I can't wait for that!!!

Finished Compositing : p

Finished compositing today, ready for handing in the 320 x 240 tomorrow. My showreel came in at 2.06 minutes; bit long maybe, but i chose an upbeat soundtrack that will have everyone jammin. I'm very pleased with it and after two terms, every rotating model is now burnt into my brain!! Shabba

Jims Chicken

I've been given the new and improved chicken run cycle from Jim Bending (jamesbending.co.uk). This one has much better animation. I modelled the chicken for him as he was running low on time for the completion of his film. I'm going to show the wireframe, shaded and textured versions all running next to each other. I also figured out how to give the chickens shadows in After Effects. This was done by duplicating each chicken animation, adjusting the brightness/contrast until the animation silhouetted and then scaling them down to shadow proportions beneath each chicken.



I also modelled Jim a mouse, but sadly he didn't have time to include him in his film.

Jia's Character

Jia asked me to model the head of a character she designed for use in her animation. I was given the character profile drawings to work from, something that i don't usually use. I hate working from images on planes, i prefer to model freeely. The character is a completely different style to what i usually do, and so was quite a challenge. Plus the lips and eyelids had to move!! The head was modelled in Silo, and it was decided that the hair be left to Jia to model, as she wasn't sure how she wanted it at the time.

Cowboy Concept

Just completed the concept painting for the cowboy character using photoshop and a wacom. This is going before the 3d model in my showreel along with the original pencil sketch. I don't think the 3d interpretation is far off. Back to compositing.

The Joy Of Painting - Without Bob Ross

Hiiiddy Ho. After a lot of colour experimentation and rendering problems, i have finally finished him. As well as painting the colours, i also discovered that you can paint bump, and specular maps using the 3d paint tool. With high quality rendering turned on, you can also see the effects of both as you paint in real time, although it nearly kills the computer. (thanks Rag!!) Using this i bump mapped dents into the crash helmet, making it look like he's had a tough life, and painted specular colours on his boots, belt, skin, lips and finger nails.

The character is also lit using three point lights with orangy glows and the now overused global illumination. Now for the joys of rendering. Boooo

New Title Sequence

Just been busy creating a new title sequence for my showreel in Maya. I liked the old one from my first animatic, but its time to jazz things up and make this look uber professional. I modelled a giant block with lots of other extruded blocks coming out and duplicated it twice. I then assigned thick, black outlines to the model using the Toon options and its ramp shader. It was then animated coming towards the camera at speed. The red and pink colour isn't final, i'll experiment with the hue/saturation in After Effects.

The Trouble With Textures

Had a bit of trouble figuring out the 3d paint tool lately. Some of the textures that i've painted wouldn't render, and just appeared completely black. Anyways i finally realised that you had to save the texture after applying it..duh!! All is well now. I've been using my wacom pen to paint the textures as its 10X's easier than using the damn mouse and its pressure sensitive. The mod/knievel character is almost complete, though i'm still playing around with colours and types of materials. Here's a test render.

Done

Whoohoo....he's done. I've now modelled the cape to finish off the character. It took quite a while to make it look like it was blowing in the wind, but i think it does the trick. I wasn't planning to texture my characters, but thanks to a certain Mr.Richie Hoyle, i have now discovered the joys of the 3d paint tool in Maya. The 3d paint tool allows you to paint directly on to your model, without the need of laying out all of those evil UV thingy majjigers. It's just sooo much easier to texture this way....you can see what your texturing for a start!! Obviously the results aren't as accurate as the Photoshop method, but it does the trick. It'll be good to show some form of texturing as it would add some life into my models, but for the moment i'm just going to experiment with the 3d paint tool. For the time being, i've bee doing some lighting tests with ambient occlusion and global illumination, which are really good at picking out the detail in a model.