This was another super busy month with little sleep. Our classes were pretty small again which is always great. Both our classes had labs at 5 am, so 6 days a week I would have to be up at 4 =( My VEF class had its lecture later in the day so I would have to go back to school again for that. Usually I would just stay on the campus all day and try to get stuff done. So VEF is visual effect and it deals with creating special effects using dynamics.
VISUAL EFFECTS!!!
Within the 3d package Maya there is all kinds of things you can do with dynamics. This was our introduction class and we had 5 projects. For each project we had to create an effect simulation. I tryed to take each of these projects as far as I could with the time provided and I rendered out everything! To recap, rendering is the process of Maya actually calculating all the textures and lights in my scene and creating a picture like the one above. Just 1 frame (24 frames in 1 second) could take 30 seconds-8 minutes. For actual movies like transformers and stuff each frame could take days.
OK... so our first project was RIDGED BODIES. Its kinda wordy to explain but its basically simulating collisions and hard surface interactions by using simulated gravity and other fields.
We had to create a mouse trap style simulation... here was mine
Ill list the render times above the videos. I could have easily cut back my render times by doing a few things I learned later and by using less reflective materials... but I like having reflections =)
THE QUALITY on all these videos have been butchered, but you get the idea.
(6 hours to render on 7 computers)
Next we had 3 particle projects. We a list of effects we could choose from and for each project we had to choose 2 effects to simulate.
The course director gave us creative control of how we set up our scenes and how we set up our effects.
The first 2 effects I chose were water and steam
This steel mill scene was provided for us so for the first 2 projects I used that scene. All the other scenes you see were created by me.
4 hours on 8 computers
Did fire and smoke next
again 4 hours on 8 or so computers
This one was my favorite and I found some sound effects on google and edited them in for fun.
This actually only took 4 hours on just my computer so it was a really easy render.
--Fireworks and snow
So that was the last particle project our last project was a soft bodies project. I decided to take the chararacter I made a few months back and try to melt her.... it was very terminator 2 inspired.
I am not compleatly happy with how her melt went... but it still looks pretty cool
This took 8 minutes to render per frame for 140 frames.... that's a lot of rendering....
So those were my VEF projects, I thought it was a pretty kick ass class and am excited for VEF 2 in a few months. It really got me into dynamic effects.
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Next I had Character animation 1. This class mostly focused on animating a walk cycle including a few facial expressions.
We had 3 projects. The first project was just animating a simple walk, turn around, and I added a jump to mine. It was LEGS only to start out simple
I realize these animations look pretty cartoony, but that is how they wanted them.
Legs down walk
Next we had to use our character we would be working with in the future to create a few strong poses.
Here is some pre production drawings I did followed by my strong poses project
Posed out character
For our final project we had to do a few more drawings then do a simple walk/turnaround/button push. There were also a lot of other small things we had to do like expressions/ blinks/antenna and tail movement/anticipations... and about 200 small other things.
Here was my prePro
and here is the final product about 80 hours later.
Feel pretty confident I did well in both classes. I have had 0 time to do any modeling this month, but hopefully I will get some time tomorrow before classes start again on Monday =(
Next month I hit up Motion Capture and Visual Development.... 4 days off all month =(
