Senior Project Sneak Peak

The year is wrapping up, and so is my senior project (cross my fingers). I’ve finally started rendering some stuff out and I’m pretty happy with how it’s looking. Here’s a couple stills from different shots

Senior project continues, and I am taking a break from paint effects to work on lighting. Here’s my first attempt at night lighting… still needs some tweaking, along with some ambient occlusion but I think it’s off to a good start!

Senior Project Update

About 1/4 way into the second semester and I’m still plugged away at my senior project. I’m finding it a little hard to stay motivated right now, but I’m trying my best! My biggest concern right now is creating all my garden elements: flowers, vines, trees etc. Here’s a couple animation tests I’ve been working on-

New Environment

So last semester I took at 3d environments class and really liked it. So this year in Advanced 3d I decided to build another environment for my clown puppet. The last one was a living room, so I figured why not a kitchen! I tried some morning lighting and sunset lighting. Click for a closer look!

Pirate Ship

Animation Studio- Time is running out! Only 2.5 weeks to get the whole thing finished. Lets cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Here’s a render of the background for our pirate ship scene. They’re built in 3d in Maya. We used toon shading, which is why they look more like illustrations than 3d scenes. Thanks to Drew Vosburg for his wonderful illustrations that I used to texture this!

And a stormy version

Blend Shapes

My first attempts at using blend shapes to make facial expressions in Maya. The character is really simple so I didn’t have to actually move the face shape, just the eyebrows and mouth. Like I said, very simple. but I think it works.

Studio Character

Well this week I have been working all kinds of hours on my Animation Studio project. Basically theres three of us, and we have one year to get this film done. First semester was all pre-production but now we gotta buckle down and get production underway! Anywho. Here’s a quick turn around of the main character. I think she turned out pretty darn cute… much better than our first attempts to model her.

Nesting Dolls

Inspirational Design Project- create Russian nesting dolls based around a specific theme. My theme was Viking Bears. On the insistence of my professor I am gonna post all the steps in my progress:

Step 1: Sketches

Step 2: UV Maps and painted textures

Step 3: Add some texture

Step 4: Map that onto my 3d models and try out some different textures:

Step 5: Ambient Occlusion Pass

Step 6: Take a background photo and an HDR image to light my scene.

Step 7: Composite my characters into the scene: Add the ambient occlusion layer, some shadows, and some reflections, and Voila! It’s complete!

Here is an alternate version with a shiny texture on the dolls. For this one I had to render out two different passes with different reflectivities and then combine them together to get a look I liked.

Toon Shading

For my j-term project this semester I did some toon shading tutorials. And I must say, Toon Shading= Awesome! Definitely going to be using this a lot in the future. My goal for the 2.5 weeks was to get through the tutorials, and then work on coming up with a look for the second half of our animation studio project… not quite there yet, but we’re on our way I think. Now that I know what toon shading is capable of, I think we should be able to get a nice look worked out. Here’s a couple quick examples of shading styles I came up with.

Tried giving this one a little bit of grain and texture.

This one has a sort of watercolor look to it.

Very very simple colors, but I think the lines look sort of cool in this one- maybe we could incorporate this line style with a different shading style.

Stripes- This one almost has a corrugated cardboard feel to it.

Happy Halloween…. in January

So it took me a little while to finally get this up. I realize Halloween is long over…although there is some talk about Valentines becoming the new Halloween… in which case this is just a litle early! Anyways, I made this for Motion Graphics class. Our assignment was to use the puppet tool. I was a little more interested in the whole idea of 3d scenes and camera moves and stuff, so I focused a little more on that- but i DID use the puppet tool as well!