Performance Video Project – Finished Animations with Music

These are the animations that will be shown on each of the computers.

I combined the music and imagery in the same way for each of them but for some reason some of them have a pause in their loop whereas others are continuous, so I’m not really sure how to solve this, as I did exactly the same for each one and when the music and imagery were separate, all the loops worked fine with no gaps.

Performance Video Project – 3D Mushrooms Complete!

Here are the 3D versions of my mushrooms:

Future Cinema Project – Modelled Creatures

Here are the creatures after they’ve been modelled in Maya.

The above are the untextured versions. The modelling was relatively easy to do for the Grape Squid and the Bookworm. However, the Cactus Boy was slightly more challenging as it took a few different tries to make the contours of his face and body. In the end I achieved it by using a sphere for his head and raising every other column of vertices and then smoothing the whole thing twice. I used a cuboid for his body and cut it in ways so that his legs were connected and then I used a sort of 3D trapezium to make his arms. It also took a few tries to get his spikes right, as I found they were too big/small if they were any bigger/smaller than the current ones.

The below are the textures versions.

The two important things to mention about the textured Cactus Boy are that a) I decided to give him a mouth and b) I gave his lambert texture a slight bump mapping. I decided to give him a mouth because the shape of the sphere made him look weird when no mouth was present. I also felt that the bump mapping was essential for making him more realistic, as, without the bump mapping, his skin was TOO smooth and made him look more like a ball than a cactus. I think learning this subtle bump mapping technique was also very useful because it seems that is it quite commonly used when texturing characters/objects with a lambert shader.

I encountered a few problems when texturing this Bookworm. Firstly, I couldn’t texture him in the normal way of selecting a file to replace the colour because when I rendered it, the words came out blurry and thus didn’t look very good. So, I decided that I would have to apply the words through bump mapping. This did work in the end but I had to play around with the settings to get an effect that was just right, otherwise it would’ve looked too strong. I also had to use the UV texture editor to adjust the positioning of bits of the text; particularly the ones in his hair. The most problematic part though, was that no matter what I tried, the text would just not display properly on his body/tail and so I ended up having to texture that with a barcode instead (which is also part of a book, so still relating to the bookworm theme), but even that didn’t turn out like an obvious barcode, which is what I had wanted.

Dommi Fresh Promotional Video

I’ve been working on an animation promoting Dommi Fresh as an artist. I decided to use Maya to make it, and made it octopus themed:

Post Production Project – Final Thing

The finished product:

The quality isn’t as good on this one because it had to be compressed but it was the only way to upload it.

Visuals – me.

Music and sound effects – Doug Brown.

I’m really pleased with this outcome overall. It feel’s like I have learned a lot about Maya (through the teachings of Jemma and Ash), seeing as I only really knew how to model objects made of straight lines before this project and I can now model smoothed objects like the cat, and really complex objects like the gun. The gun was probably the hardest to model and it’s a shame you can’t really see the detail in the final thing, but I think modeling the gun helped me a lot with learning how to model complex shapes. It also took me an excessively long time to figure out how I wanted Pixel Cat to look, I guess that’s because it’s my first time making a 3D character design for a project. I think I should be able to come up with a character’s appearance a lot quicker in future.

The next problem was texturing. I love shiny textures but in this case, shiny textures were extremely hard to make because there wasn’t much in the surroundings to reflect off the shiny texture, which sometimes made the texture seem dull. I managed to sort of get round this by making a massive white sphere around the cat, which made him look more reflective. One thing that I wanted to try and do but didn’t manage to was to create and import a HDRI image of my kitchen lighting, but because no one really had time to teach me how to do it and I couldn’t figure it out myself in the time we had, I ended up just using the white sphere.

Rigging was okay but if I didn’t learn how to paint the weights of each joint, the animation would have looked really weird, like his whole body would’ve moved if his arm moved or something. There were just so many little problems that I kept encountering in Maya, which if weren’t solved, would have made the whole thing look terrible. However, I think I know now how to reduce the possibility of these problems occurring so I should hopefully have less problems like these in future.

I then encountered the problem of filming the background. I tried filming it with a high quality SD camera, but the footage turned out extremely blurry and grainy (this was caused by the fact that nothing was moving in the static shots). I decided that I couldn’t use that and so I borrowed Alex’s SLR and just took stills which looked a lot better and crisper.

Then came the animating step. The actual animating wasn’t that difficult to do/work out, but I had to work with 26 difference maya scenes so it took a long time to apply the same settings to each scene and make sure all the shot matched up without any obvious continuity errors. Then I had to wait until Mauricio taught us how to make and render shadow layers and composite the everything so that they looked really like they were really in my kitchen. This part was quite tricky to do because there were about 5 settings that you had to make sure were exactly right or else the shadow layer didn’t work. So there was a lot of frustration caused by the shadow layer not working. Luckily I managed to sort it out, so I then composited everything in After Effects, at which point I noticed that I really needed to add a reflection because the kitchen surface had reflected all the real objects. The reflection for each shot had to be done in different ways because some bits were more reflective than others. For a lot of them I just duplicated the character and flipped him upside down and lowered the opacity. However, that didn’t work for some of them as you could see the reflection of the of the object behind him through his reflection, which wasn’t really right so I had to figure out other ways of doing it. As for the reflection in scenes with a lot of objects, I had to re-render some of the objects separately to use them for the reflective layer because if you have loads of objects in one scene and you flip them all upside down, they’re often at a weird angle to the original because the perspective is not from straight on.

I then let Doug handle the music and sound because he was clearly very good at doing it and I didn’t have access to a sound effects library and didn’t really know how to use programs like l
Logic, which I would have used to make the music and record the sounds. I did help a bit with a few of the sound effects in the end though, because I wanted a few minor adjustments to the original soundtrack he made. I think in future though I would like to have a go myself at making the sounds for my visuals because he showed me briefly the basics of how to use logic and hopefully I can work with that.

Post Production Project – Compositing

Here is a still of how everything will look in the end:

I had to make the reflection in After Effects because I’m not sure about how it can be done in the correct way in Maya.

Post Production Project – Animating

So I used the photos I took to help me position my characters/objects in the right place and then began animating.

Here are some playblasts I saved while I was animating:

For some reason once uploaded onto youtube the quality goes really quite bad.

Post Production Project – Final Choice of Footage

After filming all the scenes with a high quality SD video camera, I captured them into Premiere and realised that the quality of the shots turned out terrible. I later found that this is because I was filming a static shot with nothing moving in it. Here is how it looked:

So it was clear that I couldn’t use a video camera to shoot my scenes as the same problem would be occuring as nothing in the scene moves. So, I decided to use an SLR instead and the photos were much better quality:

Post Production Project – Camera or Video Camera

I have positioned my Pixel Cat in front of two different backgrounds. One is from a camera and the other is from a video camera. This is to decide what type of footage I will use:

This is the background from a camera.

This is the background from a low quality video camera.

I believe the character looks a lot more like he’s actually in the scene with the video camera one so I decided that I would use footage from a high quality video camera.

ABC Maya – Jetfire Complete!

So we created the beauty, occlusion and shadow render layers and then rendered them out and composited everything in After Effects.

Here is a still from my final thing:

The video will be coming soon…