Visual Effects 2

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

Bruce Willis Rig

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.

http://www.pinterest.com/aaronwilson9237/bruce-willis-cyborg/

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.

Software Technology

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.

Character Animation 2

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.

YouTube link

The second project that I did was a lip sync animation. In this project we are supposed to chose a sound clip and create a story for it to animate to.

YouTube link

Visual Development

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.

Visual Effects 1

Visual Effects 1

This class was awesome. I got some good hands on practice with rigid bodies, soft bodies, and particles in this class. 

For the rigid bodies project I chose to show the mechanics of an AR-15 and target practice.

For the particles project I made a dragon fight between fire and ice.

For the Soft bodies project I made a pile of gummy bears

For this last project, since there were so many of them I had to write a few python scripts to make the process faster.

Character Animation 1

Character Animation 1

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.

My final video of the Bugsy basic walk

RECAP

I've decided to start this blog to show my experience progress through my time as Full Sail University. However, since I am already well into the Computer Animation BS degree program and I already have so much work done already, so I'm using this first post to get a recap on the CG work I have done already.

The way it's laid out is from most recent work on top to oldest on bottom. This way I can keep the flow of the blog setup.

Character Rigging 2

This class was a bit different than CRI1 because we were using Motion capture data to create a scene with a rig. In this class we learned about the skin binding process, how to make blend shapes, and nDynamics such as cloth, hair, and fur.

Character Rigging 1

In this class we created a proxy rig for a character that had an IK/FK switch on the arms. it also had reverse foot lock on the feet controls. We also practiced scripting in Python. I really enjoyed this class as well.

Production Modeling

This was probably my favorite class so far. I think it challenged me the most. This was our last modeling class. In this class we took an in depth look at using Zbrush and how to get better at doing digital sculptures.

Fundamentals of animation

During this month we converted what we learned in 2D animation and used it in 3D with Maya. We did a few animation and the final one was a "walk and kick" with legs.

Compositing Fundamentals

During this month we got our first look at compositing, which is the integration of different components for a specific image or movie, such as CG elements in film or CG on CG or even film with film. It's sort of the last step in the pipeline before the movie is finished.

2D animation

Next we dove into the principals of animation in 2D on paper. We drew out a few animation sequences that showed the basics of animation principals.

Character design and creation

This class is another modeling class, but unlike MCR and modeling in Maya, we started to take our modeling practices into other sculpting programs like ZBrush and sculptris. The name of the program doesn't exactly fit the curriculum because we didn't really design or create a character, but we did dive into modeling with correct anatomy. This way people that took the class would be able to actually go through and fully design and model out a character.

Methods of design

This was also an art class like FMA 1 and 2, but it was a little bit more focused on the design principles behind the same kinds of art work. During this month I also took college math, and during that class I wrote a paper on how to decide what your polygon limits are when creating a game. I will post this paper in a later blog post.

Fundamentals of Art 2

This class was pretty much an extension of FMA1 except we did a lot of live drawing. Drawing things while they move. We did live human anatomy practices, and drawings of animals, then we did some character design practices and sculptures.

Shading and Lighting

During this month we practiced the basics of using Maya Mental Ray and rendering using mia_material_x. We got a better understanding on how to light a scene and how to use the different lights given within Maya. Just my personal thought, I'm not really a big fan of shading and lighting. I found this class to be pretty confusing and boring, but I did well anyway. I don't think that this will be my focus when it comes to finals.

Fundamentals of Art 1

This class is pretty self explanatory it's the practice and understanding of the core concepts of art; such as Line, contrast, shape, movement, color, etc. This is some pictures of my work from this month.

Model Creation

The next month was MCR. I took this class at the same time as Art fundamentals 1. This class was focused on the basics of 3d modeling using just Maya. During this month we modeled out 3 scenes. The first one was a garage. Most of the items in the garage were already modeled, and we were given some choices on what we wanted to model. The choices were typical things you would find in a garage such as paint buckets/ brushes, tools, landscaping tools, broom, etc. We were given limits on the amount of polygons we could use, but it was much more reasonable than 3DF.
Here's a few screenshots of the items I modeled.

The next scene was an outdoor cafe. In this scene the only things that were already modeled were the cafe building, the ground, and the things inside the cafe. We had to populate the outside with a list of items. In this scene the models had to hold their shape in "3" key smoothing so we had to make sure we had holding edges and such as well.
Here's some pictures.

The last scene for the month was a final. This scene was different because we weren't already given anything other than a reference photo to model from. We had to chose from a list of pictures of rooms and we were given 3 tiers of difficulty to choose from. I personally asked the instructor what he thought the hardest out of all of them would be because I was doing well in the class already by this time and I like a good challenge. So the image of the Loft room was the one I ended up going with. I ended up getting a 100% on the project, and I was given the Course Director's award.

Here's the reference photo.

And here's mine.

3D Foundations

First up is 3DF. This was my introduction to 3D arts. Storyboarding, modeling, rigging, shading and lighting, and animation. We were assigned to do a 6 second video, and do all the requirements from beginning to end. At the time I thought that I did a pretty good job since the models were restricted to a certain number of polygons, but looking back I can see so much that went wrong. I've gone so far since then.