This month I took visual effects 2. This was much more difficult than VFX1 because we had to step outside of our comfort zone and start using other software (other than Maya 2014) to do different VFX simulations. This class was very much based on doing your own research to figure out how software works and how you can use it to create your effect.
For the first assignment I was using Maya 3D fluid containers to create an effect of a fire. I chose to do the effect of a fire in a metal barrel. I modeled the barrel and wooden planks, then I created a volume particle emitter inside the barrel and emitted the fluid from those particles to create my effect.
The second assignment was an aircraft engine fire of a commercial air-liner. I created this effect in Houdini FX.
For my third assignment I was supposed to do an effect that I have never done before in any of my previous classes. I created the effect of a cannon ball going through a cinder block wall with Maya 2012 DMM plug-in. On top of that I created fluids to act as dust
Time to get an early start on my portfolio content creation. This side project that I am picking up is going to be a model of Bruce Willis's face/ head combined with the mechanical features of a cyborg like the woman's face on the left. I plan to model in extreme detail and rig this face later on. There will be many blend shapes involved in this process. I'm going to model all of the mechanical parts in the neck down as separate parts and they will all be moving during the face expressions.
First Pass:
getting down basic forms and simple shapes. (about 1 hour)
Second Pass:
Start shaping the mouth and nose area. Introduce neck until face is finished. (about 40 mins)
Making better progress on this model now. Please follow my pinterest board for more updates.
It's been a while since I posted my progress on this blog for this model/ rig so here is a few more recent images.
sculpts for wrinkle maps
I've also decided to change the project a bit. Instead of him being a cyborg-like character I'm just going to be putting him in an armor suit that I modeled out a long time ago. There will be some updating that I will be doing to this model for functionality purposes of the rig.
Here's an animation test for the functionality of the helmet. This is going to be changed in many ways, and it will not be splitting down the front in the middle because the front will be stowed into his chest plate.
The purpose of this class was to take me out of my comfort zone and force me to use a variety of different workflows in different software packages. I used Softimage XSI and Houdini FX.
I used softimage for modeling parts of a fence that I would later use in Houdini to create a customizable fence that could be modified for an environment on the fly. I also used Softimage XSI to model a vehicle. I chose to model a Jeep Wrangler.
I found that Houdini can be much more useful for procedural modeling purposes and simulation. I created a variety of models that were pretty easy to finish quickly in houdini, but would have taken a long time to do in Maya.
The simulation projects that I did were some dominoes, a marble machine, and I used my vehicle model and crashed it through a wall. I also created a customizable earthquake crack tool that can be animated.
This month in Character Animation 2 I had two main projects.
The first one was a pantomime, which is an animation that you can tell a story with no sound. I chose to do a character that is anxiously waiting for a phone call and gets some bad news.
This was a great class. I would pretty much call it "shading and lighting 2" because it was mostly a refresher. In this class we went much more in depth though and started looking at effects on a pixel-by-pixel level. We dove into attributes of complex shader materials and networks and touch on scene finishing and render pass compositing.
Here is a taste of some of the work we were doing. It is a time lapse video me building the glass bottle shading network.
Here is my final render of the scene
I was also very satisfied with our UV lecture. Because we've only barely touched on how to do UVs before this class.
As we close out the next chapter in my Full sail experience it's time to recap on what has happened. This class is pretty much an extension of fundamentals of animation. Except instead of just animating the legs and a bouncy ball we learned how to animate a full character through a walk and turn around.
We will go more in depth on animating these characters in our later character animation classes.
Lower half practice
silhouettes are important when you're posing characters, because it tells the story the best way.
