This month I took visual development and motion capture. Visual development is expanding off one of my earlier class (shading and lighting), and focuses on creating realistic lighting, and realistic textures. Besides modeling, this is one of the other things I really love doing so this class was pretty exciting for me.
The other class was motion capture. When you see the behind the scenes in movies and they are in tight suits covered in reflective balls, and using the data recoded from the ball movement to animate CG characters......... that's motion capture.
VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
my final project VSD 1403 (models done by school)
So we had 4 projects in VSD
For the first one we learned a lot about creating lighting, matching shadows, and matching light angle and color. We were gave a scene and am image of that scene lit and told to try and match the lighting.
Im not going to bring in the reference image that was provided but it looked pretty much just like my render seen here.
For the next project we had to UV a few models. This means we to convert the surfaces of our models into a cleanly readable image so we can texture it. Here is an example of what a UV map looks like for a gear piece
Its kind of a long and tedious process but if done well it can help create really nice textures.
After that we had to use Photoshop and photographs to create a map for our gears texture using the UV map that we made... here was mine
For our third project we worked on layered textures as seen on the box, as well as learning aboiut refractions and caustics, seen in the bottle. A lot of work went in to each of these textures, here is an example of just the boxes network
...and thats why everyone is not as fond of shading and lighting as me.^
Here is the bottle by itself
I put in a particle system for the bubbles. If you look closely you can see the caustics effects in the orange lighting under the bottle.
Here is what everything looked like in maya before adding textures and lighting
... so that was VSD,... it was pretty awesome
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MOTION CAPTURE
Next was motion capture. Motion capture, as explained above is when you gather motion data from people, plug the numbers into a computer, and apply it to a CG character. It was A LOT to take in over just one month and most of the month focuses on a 3 man group project. The the project you create a short 20-30 second story, caption the motion data for it, clean up all the data, convert that data and apply it to a character rig, then finally put your character into a scene that we had to build, create all the camera shots, render it all out, then edit the movie. It was a LOT to do even for three people.
Here is the granny character from our scene.
Our group worked well together and we all did a little of everything. One of my major contributions was modeling the entire scene and lighting it.
Here was the final product. It may not seem super impressive, but for the time we had, we were pretty happy with it.
Here is what our classroom looked like for the class and our group member Alberto, in the capture suit. Notice he is being mirrored on the projector in the background.
So that was March! Next month is going to be possibly my most busy month yet, as I am taking 2 classes that are both 3 days a week each as well as an art test that ill talk about next month. Basically I am taking three classes.
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Side Project
So there is an internship in Bellevue at a game company that requires you to model a character for their art test. This is the reference picture that they provided.
Ill post any updates in my next post.
