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.