Assignment #8 - Animation in Maya

Ciao, ragazzi!

This is the last post for my 3D class! :(

Actually, when I think about it, this is the last post for ANY class at UT! I graduated this past Saturday so everything from here on out will all be done for my own purposes. I'm kinda excited about that, though. I feel like I'll be a little bit better about actually DOING some of this stuff, when I don't necessarily have to. Or....that could be a big lie and you'l never hear from me again.... :)

ANYWAY, here's my clip for some 3D animation I did in Maya. I would like to not that I neither modeled or rigged this character. I just found it online. BUT, I did animate it! I think I was a little impatient with the movement. It's all move here, then here, then here....oh well, this was my first time animating an object in Maya (or 3D, in general). I'm honestly just surprised I could do as much as I could.

Enjoy:

3D Robot Animation from Alex McCrea on Vimeo.

Also, it's moving a little faster than I thought it would from the preview in Maya. Definitely something to think about next time, should I decide to export the movie in After Effects using the same settings.....

Assignment #7 - Particles!

Ciao ragazzi!

Oggi, facciamo colazione! (Today, we're making breakfast!)

At least, what I consider making breakfast. And that only consists of pouring cereal. :)

For my particle assignment, I decided to re-create pouring cereal into a bowl. I made the whole setting (bowl, glass, spoon, cereal box, and table) and used a particle ball emitter to create the "cereal". This was WAY fun and not terribly hard to do. I definitely think the Fruity Pebbles cereal box really is a nice touch! (As was the stray piece of cereal...that was TOTALLY on purpose...ahem...)

Enjoy:

Fruity Pebbles Particles from Alex McCrea on Vimeo.

Assignment #6 - Lights

Ciao ragazzi!

For this assignment, we were to light a textured object and render at least 3 images. I definitely wanted to play around creatively with light so I decided to replicate a stained glass window. Here's my reference image that I found on the internet:



Basically, I created a separate planar surface for each stained glass panel using the curves tool. Once I did that, I converted the panels to polygons and extruded the faces to make thick slabs. Then using a combination of different glass tutorials that I found online and on youtube, I made a glass texture for the panels using a variation on the blinn material. Once those settings were turned into a preset, I just continued to apply new blinn materials (with the glass preset and a color stained glass texture from the internet) to each panel with a varying color. Confused? Yeah, it's kinda hard to explain. Just look at the pictures:





What I really wanted to happen was have the light pass through the glass and create a colored shadow onto a surface behind it. But I honestly could not figure out what to do. The glass distort what's behind it, but for some reason the lights wont pass through.

So instead, I used the lights to add a reflection onto another surface; the outliners. Here are some example renders:




Kinda cool. I need to figure out something else to do with this. It took far too much work creating all those panels for it to yeild such "bleh" results....oh well!

Assignment #5 - Texture Materials and Surfacing

Ciao ragazzi!

Per questo esercizio, we had to create materials and texture a model of our choice. A few assignments back, I created a pretty decent lamp using a curves shape and the revolve function, so I decided to go all out and make it really look like a lamp!

Here are some rendered pics after the texture:







I really like how it turned out! Though, it wasn't exactly simple getting here. My original revolve was all one solid object so the first thing I had to do was separate all the pieces and hollow out the lamp shade. I also created the light bulb and socket to go in the middle. The lamp shade was easy. I just found a cloth texture online and made sure the transparency was increased slightly. The light bulb is actually just assigned a white lambert material. I just made sure to really amp up the incandescence and luminosity of the material so it looks like it's giving off a glow (we haven't started working with lights yet) and you can see it through the lamp shade. The base was actually the hardest part. Using lots of duplicates and the boolean difference function, I finally separated all the parts so that they could be textured differently. Both the textures I found online.

Hope you like it!

Assignment #4- Model (3D)

Ciao ragazzi!

So here's some renders from the final 3D model for the Beauty and the Beast (BatB) Castle! There are lots of pictures for this post, but that's because I wanted to try and give you as much of a 360 view as possible. This model took me quite a bit of time to complete, but really that was mostly because I tried to start it without proper reference. Once I photoshopped all those separate shapes, the whole thing got a LOT easier and also a lot more fun!

Also, this is still a pretty basic model. I had left out all the details save a few, so I definitely have some work ahead if I want to finish it. But to be honest? I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I took a few liberties with the design so it's not EXACTLY like the references. Hope you enjoy:

Assignment #4 - Model (References)

Ciao, ragazzi!

Devo practicare piu italiano perché é una possibilita che io debba usarla nel futuro!

For this assignment, we were to create a model in Maya using reference material. I kinda decided to go all out on this so I chose to base my model off of the castle in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Here are some screen captures of the castle from the film:






During my search for reference material, I actually stumbled upon some great semi-orthoganal views of the castle. One in particular stood out (I think it's from a coloring book):



Great stuff! With this view of the castle, it made it very easy to start modeling from it in Maya. The only problem? The castle was a little too complicated. All the shapes that make up the building are fairly simple, but from this frontal viewpoint, all of them appear to be stacked on top of each other. This made it very hard to clearly visualize what each of the pieces looked like, let alone where they are placed in the 3D space.

I struggled with this for a little while and realized I needed more broken down references, starting with the simples parts and building the castle from there. So I did a little photoshop engineering. :) First, I used the warp transformation tool to even out the sides. Then, I removed the majority of the detail and flair on the castle (statues, windows, etc.) and started to mask out the different sections (using the clone stamp tool to make any extensions where necessary). Here are some examples of the pieces and then the finished edited reference:







Pretty cool, huh? Well, I thought so at least. :) It helped SO much with getting started modeling. Only having to worry about the basic shapes one at a time has really got me going along. Check out the next post for my final model!