Animation Progress 3 / Final Update

Since the Maya renderer didn't render the image plane for some reason, I had to add it into the Premiere project. Then, since the Maya models rendered on the normal black background, i had to add them to Premiere at a lower opacity so that the background was still visible, giving them their unintended ghostly appearance. I guess the story now is that these two kids died playing rock, paper, scissors at this playground, and are now doomed to play it forever. I added some effects to the background to try and make it stick out a bit, but since I'm going with this ghost-ish theme I thik the slightly diluted colors works pretty well.

Animation Progress 2

Since my last update I've made a sizable amount of progress. Instead of doing three games of rock, paper, scissors, I decided to one game since the fingers were getting a bit unmanageable. Instead of that, I create a little bit of a story with more movements than just the game playing. I also added a camera with some movements to make it a bit flashier. I'm going to render it and export it into premiere to add some more visual effects.

Animation Progress #1

I've made some good progress on my final project. I've got one round of rock, paper, scissors set up, so the rest should be easy from there. The only problem is sometimes I forget to set a key before rotating a hand or fingers, which causes them to be rotated in previous frames. There's so much minute movement going on that it's really easy to get lost in. After I finish up the rough animation for Monday, I'm going to add in a static background image for some flavor. Maybe a park or playground scene. I added a texture to one man to help differentiate them. This is what it looks like so far:

Animation Final Storyboard

This is the storyboard for my Animation final project:

It's absolutely terrible, so I'll write out the steps in text form.

1. At the start, the two men will face each other and assume the starting Rock, Paper, Scissors position.
2. In the first match, the left man will play paper while the right plays scissors. 
3. In the second match, left will play scissors while right plays paper
4. In the final match, left will play paper while right plays rock, leading to a win for the left man
5. After winning, the left man will make a fist pump wile the right man will jump up and down angrily.

I've already started building my animation, but I'm going to wait until I have a bit more done to post an update.

Animation Final Project Concept

For my final project Im going to use the Lowman rig and have two of them play a game of rock, paper, scissors. They will play, and the camera will focus in on the hands to really show the animation, and then after the game the camera will zoom out. The winner will do a fist pump type motion, and the loser will hop up and down angrily.

Storyboard and more updates soon.

Lowman Animation

Our assignment for this week is to make an animation with Lowman or another rig. I decided to use Lowman, and I made him jump. I just used keyframes and the various controls on his hands and feet to manipulate them how I wanted. The video of the animation is below:

Animation Examples

This weeks assignment was to make a couple of animations using a few different methods. The first animation I made used motion paths. Instead of making the curve and then assigning the shape to it, I move the shape around myself and used the Set Motion Path Key tool to set the specific keys I wanted. This is the result:

The second animation I made used regular keyframes. I made the simple animation then used the "Flat Tangents" tool in the graph editor to smooth it out a bit. This is the result:

Chess Bishop Tutorial

1. Go into the front view
2. View -> Image Plane -> Import Image and import a reference image
   
3. Use the CV curve tool to trace the right side of the bishop. Don't trace the side with the slit, as we'll do that later.
4. Select the curve you just made and use Surfaces -> Revolve
   
5. Delete the reference image and the curve.
6. Move into the perspective view and create a cube. 
7. Transform the cube so that it is inside the bishop where you want the slit to be, and is also the same width and depth of the slit. The cube should take up most of the diameter of the bishop
8. Deselect all objects
9. Go to Surfaces -> Booleans -> Difference
10. Click on the Bishop and press enter.
11. Click on the cube and press enter.
12. The tool will run and you'll have a bishop.
    

Chess Knight Tutorial

1. Open up the front view.
2. Go to View -> Image Plane -> Import Image and import a reference image:
   
3. Select the CV curve tool and trace all the way around the knight. Don't do the ottom of the base, as we'll add that in later.
   
4. Now we are done with the reference image so go ahead and delete it. Go into perspective view.
5. Duplicate the curve. Edit -> Duplicate and move the duplicated curve slightly in front of the original.
6. Select both curves, then go to Surfaces -> Loft. This will give us the outline of our knight.
   
7. You can now delete the curves, as we don't need them anymore. Go into the outliner and delete them.
8. In order to fill in the hole, we need to convert this object to a polygon. Select it, then go to Modify -> Convert -> NURBS to Polygons.
9. Now go to Mesh -> Fill Hole
   
10. Not too bad. You can either leave it as-is, or create a cube or sphere and edit it to form a base that the other pieces have. After that, simply group the objects and move them into your project.

Midterm Production

I decided to start with the actual board, since that seemed to make the most sense to me. I created a simple NURBS plane and then expanded it to fill the grid. I then applied a lambert and the 'checker' 2D surface. The default grid is black and white, which would have looked fine, but I wanted to make it look a bit more like the chessboard I found and posted in my pre-production post, so I edited the colors a bit to reflect that. I also added another plane around the edge of the grid for a border.

This is what it looks like with the board and the black rook I've already created:

I then duplicated the rook 3 times, and added the texture for the white pieces. Then I made the pawns and did the same. This is the result:

Next I made the bishops. This was the most difficult piece yet because of the slit that bishops have in their top. I made the piece like normal using the CV curve and revolve tools, and then I had to do some research to make the slit. I watched this Youtube video that showed how to use the Boolean Difference tool to make it. I did that, then I had to figure out how to use the NURBS version of the tool. It wasn't too difficult, and now I've got bishops that look pretty realistic:

My next piece was the queen. It didn't really cause any trouble at all and was nothing new, so I'm just going to post the picture:

I then made the king. It was a little more complicated than the others but still not terrible. I first made the piece with a flat top using the CV curve and revolve tools, then to make the cross on top I used two cubes and transformed them to look like a cross. 

The last piece I had to make was the knight. I was specifically holding off on the knight until last because I knew it would be the most difficult piece to make. All of the other pieces are cylindrical and symmetrical, so using the CV tool and Revolving worked perfectly. The knight is a little different. I drew the outline of the horse like normal, except I drew the curve all the way around. Then I duplicated it and used the Loft tool to make the outline. This left me with the outline of the knight, and I only need to fill in the hole. I learned that I had to convert my NURBS object to a polygon. I followed these two tutorials:

• Convert NURBS surfaces to a polygon mesh
• Fill holes in a polygon mesh

This gave me the horse, but I still needed the base. For this I used the CV and revolve tools like normal, which gave me a round base, Then I positioned the horse on top of the base. I wanted to combine these objects beyond simply grouping them, since they will never be separated and should really be one object. I found a tutorial on combining polygons, so I had to convert my NURBS base into a polygon and then use this tutorial: Combine polygon meshes

I ended up with a pretty decent result that fits in with the rest of my set:

The only thing left for me to do is camera and lighting work. I made a camera and looked through it, then simply set keyframes while moving the camera around. Then I smoothed out the animation on the animation graph. For lighting I just added a couple spotlights. Then I batched rendered and made the sequence into a video, which is below.

I had a really fun time making this project. A lot went right, and there was never a time where I felt frustrated or lost. I'm really satisfied with the models I made. The only thing I would really change is the lighting. I feel that with enough time I could alter the lighting to make the pieces really look great. In the future I would like to maybe animate the pieces to make a full game of chess.

Midterm Pre-Production

For my midterm I've decided to make a chessboard. Since this assignment is heavy on modeling and relatively light on animation, I figured making a chessboard with all the pieces would be a good idea and would let me practice modeling more. I also know what a chessboard and pieces look like, so I don't have to do too too much research before I start modeling.

I'm trying to base my chess board and pieces off of the ones in this image:

I'm using these specific images as references:

pawn

bishop

king

knight

queen

I already have the rook modeled from last week's assignment (see a few posts below), so that's two pieces out of the way already.

I needed a refresher on using the CV curve tool and the Revolve tool, so this video was pretty helpful. It also pointed out using a reference image, which I had never thought of but is obviously really helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt4oMqSL0iE
I ended up using several tutorials and help pages during this assignment, including:

• This video on using Boolean Difference
• Convert NURBS surfaces to a polygon mesh
• Fill holes in a polygon mesh
• Combine polygon meshes

More NURBS Models

Our assignment this week was to make another NURBS. I learned some things last class that made it a lot easier to make complex objects. I followed along with the pencil tutorial and this was my final result:

For the homework I decided to create a rook from chess. This wasn't too hard. I used the EP curve tool to draw one half of the piece and then used the revolve tool. Then I added a lambert texture and made a dark color, like the black pieces in chess. This is the result:

NURBS Model

This week's assignment was to make a NURBS model of anything we wanted. Prof Sanders said that nurbs models work best when used to model common household objects, so I decided to make a champagne glass.

 It wasn't too difficult to model. I started with the top bit, which is a sphere with a 180 degree start sweep, and then rotated so the "closed half sits on the origin. Then I stretched the half-sphere to make it resemble a champagne glass.

For the neck I used a cylinder and made it taller and skinnier than the default. I lined it up with the bottom of the sphere.

The base of the glass is just a flatted cone with the tip slightly inside of the cylinder so it's hidden from view.

Animation I - Bouncing Ball Textures

I worked on adding textures to the ball, ring, and floor. I didn't have too much trouble doing this, but I had a bit of trouble adding the face texture to the ball. I finally got it to work after some fiddling. I also didn't have too hard of a time adding the squash and stretch.

Final result after rendering:

Animation I - Bouncing Ball

So I've started making my bouncing ball animation. I haven't had too much trouble since I'm really just following the tutorial, but there were a couple sports where the numbers for object placement were off so I had to improvise.

Here's the graph of the balls animation.

I tried to make each of the bounces smooth and natural.

Next, I added squash and stretch, and bend, to the ball. This was a little difficult as it required doing some things the tutorial had different instructions for.

Animation I - First Model

This is my first model. It's a basketball court. I used planes, cubes, squares, and circles. The markings on the court are the 2D shapes, and the stanchions, backboards, and rims are 3D objects.