Final - Complete + Other Projects: Friday/Sunday

On Friday May 2nd, I came into the lab to re-render scenes for my Final that needed to be fixed. After those were rendered, I had short time left so I rendered an earlier project.

Today, I finished the editing for my Final and exported the movie file. My Final is completed. After the export, I finished up the Wordplay project and that has also been exported into a movie file. All that is left is the first Fly Thru project, which I will let render overnight due to it's large file size. Once that is complete, all my projects for this class will be completed.

Buffering - Senior Animation Show Reception Thoughts: Wednesday, April 30th 5:00PM

I visited tonight's reception for the Senior Animation show Buffering, and very much enjoyed the animations that were shown, along with the concept art. I appreciate Merryweather's piece Murder of Crows for the choice of medium - though cel animation is slowly becoming that of a dying breed, she chose not to let go of an important medium in animation's history and used it in a piece that took place in older times. Kristie Guerette's piece also stood out to me with it's fluid animation and cute art style and story. Overall, everyone's pieces were special in their own unique way and it was an enjoyable event.

Final - Editing and More: Wednesday, April 30th, 8:30AM - 10:45 AM

I have begun editing the scenes in Adobe Premiere. During my editing, however, I noticed some inconsistencies and some scenes ended too abruptly. So I wasn't finished with C4D just yet! 

I added another 2D animation so that two scenes would look more smoothly.

I will have to re-render scenes 3, 4 and 6, place them back into Premiere and my Final will be complete.

Final - Deadlines: Wednesday, April 30th

If my Final was due at the end of class today, I would most likely have my project completed. All the scenes are fully rendered and I don't plan to use a lot of audio files like my Factory project, so editing should take an hour at best and I can have my Final exported by the end of class.

Final - Rendering: Tuesday, April 29th, 7:30PM - 11:00PM

I completed all the scenes for my Final and have completely rendered them. There were a few bugs working with the 2D animations, but they were minor and I was able to work around them. I hope the camera angles I chose are interesting for viewing.

The scenes are ready to be edited into Adobe Premiere with sound when I come into class tomorrow.

Now I will have to come back another night so that I may render two other projects….

Final - Scenes: Monday, April 28th, 8:30AM - 10:40AM

 All the 2D animation and 3D modeling is complete, and now I have begun working on the separate scenes to render. I may have to tweak the waving animation (seen above) because it feels short. 

In the meantime, two scenes have been finished so far and I have about four left before I begin rendering.

Final - Last 3D Modeling + Scene Plans: Wednesday, April 23rd, 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM

The 3D portion of my Final is complete. I tweaked the area and some textures so that the main focus is visible. I have one more very quick 2D animation to make before I begin the Camera portion of the project. 

For the Camera portion, I will have to render multiple scenes. The scenes are as follows:

Scene 1 - Reach the bed, see doodle man jump from one paper to another

Scene 2 - Jump to next paper, look around

Scene 3 - Turn around, jump to last paper

Scene 4 - Wave to viewers

I'm already familiar with splitting the projects into scenes from working on my Factory project, so that process won't be too much of a hassle. I only hope the 2D animations hold up well throughout rendering.

Final - 3D Modeling and 2D Animation: Wednesday, April 16th, 8:30AM - 10:45AM

To work around time constraints, I used some preset models in C4D so I can start to have an idea as to how the 2D animation will play out in the 3D environment. 

I gathered paper textures from the web, but the 2D animations seem to blend into the paper a bit, so I will have to attach a light source to follow them so they emit a shadow. 

The bed looks rather empty, so I will be adding more objects onto the bedspread so it's more interesting to look at. I also changed the wall texture so the bed isn't an eyesore in comparison.

Final - 2D Animation: Monday, April14th, 8:30AM - 10:30AM

Having started my 2D animation part of my Final last night, I was able to work more on it today and begin importing it into C4D.

I made two separate .mov files of the jump animation: the simple one and one where the character is filled in black. That way, when put the first animation onto a new Material file and turn on Alpha, the inverted .mov file can be put in to make the animation transparent.

Doing the same for the head turning animation, the animations can now blend in with 3D objects.

Currently debating now whether or not to make a walking animation to go along with these. It would depend on the 3D surfaces' sizes.

Final - Planning: Wednesday, April 9th

Now that my Factory assignment is complete, I can now begin planning out my Final. My idea is to have objects scattered on a bed, and for a 2D character on one of the objects'  surfaces to hop along the bed until it reaches one it's content with. Due to time constraints, the 2D character will have to have a simple design and I have limited 3D modeling to work on. I'll try to work on the 2D animation this weekend since it will only be a few seconds of animation.

Factory - Editing: Monday, April 7th, 8:30 AM-10:30 AM

All the scenes of my factory have been fully rendered and have been implemented into Premiere for final editing. I have collected sound effects, but will need to find some more. The Title and End cards for the video have also been added to the timeline.

The title is beta; it may or may not be final.

I should have the video finished by next class. If it is, I'll render my other projects and have them edited in premiere as well. I will also begin planning my Final.

Factory - Rendering: April 1st, 9:30 PM - 11:15 PM

Scenes 1 and 2 of my Factory have been fully rendered. Scene 3's modeling and camera angling is complete and will be rendered. The scenes will be ready for Premiere. For now, I will search for audio files.

Factory - Modeling Almost Complete: Monday, March 31st, 8:30 AM-10:40 AM

Scene 3 is almost complete. I had to make a change in plans, but I think it will make my factory project more interesting. This scene will be chaotic; the machine distributing the cans will be malfunctioning and the belt will need to be stopped.

The peas and carrots are interacting perfectly with the environment. The cans are getting there; they've been moving a little wonky when the emitter spits them out.

This scene fells a bit empty, so I'll put something underneath the belt to give it some atmosphere.
This week I will work on re-rendering Scene 1, and Scenes 2 and 3 will be rendered afterwards.

Factory - Small Update: Sunday, March 30th, 7:00 PM -10:00 PM

Scene three of my factory is now under construction, and I'm already in a bind on how to make the belt stop moving periodically for the cans to be filled with vegetables. I didn't get to spend too much time on the factory because I was also spending the evening rendering scenes 1 and 2. Scene 1 is fully rendered, however scene 2 requires more time because the lab closed when the render wasn't even halfway completed.

Factory: Progress - Wednesday, March 26, 8:30 AM-10:50 AM

Scenes one and two of my factory are complete to be fully rendered (save for one tweak needed for scene two that won't take too much time). Scene three involving the cans will be worked on during the weekend and the rest will be completed during Monday's class. All three scenes will be fully rendered and ready to edit by the due date, April 7th.

I wasn't liking how the cogs looked like they were floating in midair, so I took off the Boole and turned the cylinders in the cogs into rotating poles. The poles actually aren't rotating yet (this is what needs to be tweaked), but I can have that taken care of right away. 

Decided to use the bowl I made in my practice file for holding the carrots when they fell. I wanted to put a hole in the bottom of the bowl, but when I looked underneath I noticed that I didn't have to because...

….some carrots were strangely already falling into the tube underneath. Weird, but it works!

Lastly, I finally modeled the tin can for the peas and carrots and now it's ready to be used in scene three. All the models I made are what I need to be put into scene three, so it won't take a lot of time putting scene three together, I can just have more time to focus on animating a can falling over on the belt.

Factory - Rendering: Monday, March 24th 8:30AM-10:50AM

My factory is coming under way, with one section of the fly thru completed.

The peas are falling perfectly into the funnel tube I made, and the fly thru for this section of the factory is complete. I may go back to fix the fly thru later just in case, but for now I wanted to jump into the next section.

Since the section with the carrots is going to be made up of mostly close up shots, I don't need to render a bunch of objects. the carrots fall through the cogs easily, so next time I will add something underneath for the carrots to fall into. The cogs seem a tad bland, so instead of the extruded NURBS I used to make the cogs hollow, the cylinders will just end up with a texture to make them into rotating poles for the cogs to rotate along.

Once that is taken care of, I can jump into the final section of my factory, but I still need to render a can model.

Factory - Building: Wednesday March 19th; 8:30 AM - 11:10 AM

My factory is coming under way. I made some good progress today, despite not getting the can model made.

 The funnel at the end of the conveyor belt will be used for the peas to disappear into. There, when I make the final shot with both peas and carrots falling into cans, they can reappear via Cloner/Emitter.

The conveyor belt is slanted so when I add the tags to the belt the peas will move with gravity.

On the side of the machine are these cylinders moving as pumps.

Rendered WIP.

Factory - Object Test

Because my factory involves objects flowing into one object at a time, I did a test animation using a bowl and spheres to see how I can get the peas and carrots to stay into the cans.

It was hard to find the right settings that kept the spheres into the bowl, but the settings weren't as complicated as tutorials made them out to be.

After making the bowl, I had to give the bowl and the floor a Collider Body tag and set the bowl's shape to Static Mesh. There, the emitted cloned peas and carrots should now be able to stay in place when I make the cans.

While I'm off to a slow start with my factory, this exercise was very helpful with what I have planned.

Factory - Storyboard Stage

(Storyboard image coming soon)

For the Factory project, I will be creating a factory setting where peas and carrots are being canned. Both veggies will be brought in by conveyor belt and rolled into cans. However, one can will get knocked over and the peas and carrots will spill to the floor.

The factory will be highly animated so the focus is not mostly on the peas and carrots moving.

Fly-Thru - Test Render

Returning to my Fly Thru project, I finally begin the actual process of going through my mansion. (The video will be added later due to upload issues)

Through a render of my fly thru, the area came to be too dark on the inside due to the physical sky attribute. I added an area light and it now looks much better.

I await the results from the next test render to see if the area light was successful.

Plus Fabrication Thoughts

The Plus Fabrication presentation was very cool. I loved getting the chance to actually hold their products in my hand while they discussed their company and processes. The two presenters themselves were very engaging and knew exactly what they were talking about. Some of their products looked strange, but it was a good thing because it left me wondering what it's function was. Overall I enjoyed it, and I hope to learn more about 3D printing in the future.

Wordplay - Wed, February 26th, 9:30AM - 10:30AM

Began modeling my wordplay. My two words are "slippery" and "sticky".

Using the light beam from a free Tron car model, I gave the word Slippery a floor to help give a slippery floor effect. The word itself has an Ice Pearl texture.

Animating it so it slips across the floor was the easy part. The challenge, however, is making "slippery" transform into "sticky" after it trips and hits the wall.

I'll try more attempts next work period...

Oracle - Tree Progress: Monday, February 24th, 2014 8:30AM-10:40AM

in process modeling:

Hair settings for leaf texture:

Final product:

Oracle - Tree Modeling: Sunday, February 23rd, 1PM-5PM

These are just screenshots for my practice work on tree modeling. I'm sure what I learn here will help with my future modeling projects, and I can even incorporate one of these into my Fly Thru project.

Fly Thru (Modeling cont) - Sun, Feb 9, 2014 1:15 pm-3:15 pm

More work has been done to my fly thru.

The fireplace has been completed, I now need to find an animated fire for the logs. The room itself was looking rather empty, so I added a table, a small vase and doors on each side of the fireplace. I'm debating whether or not to add chairs. I also plan to add picture frames, but the arrays function has been a challenge to work with.

Upstairs, I added railings along the second floor planes, and now the room to the "surprise" aspect of the fly thru is present.

The "surprise" is currently in progress….

When I go back into the fly thru, I think I will put more focus on working on the outside of the fly thru. I need to add more windows still, and I would like to add trees around the mansion.