When I say art test, it is not a test that can be done in an hour or two, it is a project that would absorb 15-30 hours each week depending on how much time I had... both my classes this month were 3 days a week, so that plus the art test made for a challenging month.
Alright so first I had CHARACTER ANIMATION 2
This class was the continuation of CAN1 from 2 months back. In this class we continued to build off what we learned in all of our previous animation classes. There were 2 major projects, and a practical. The practical was done on our first lab, and we had to animate a walk cycle. We used a skeleton rig and had about 3 hours to finish it. It was basically to refresh us on how to animate within Maya, and to refresh us on the walk cycle.
I do not have the video, but here is a still shot of the skeleton rig we used.
Our first major project was to animate an emotion change using the familiar bug rig. This project is really the first project where we dived into facial expressions more in depth. We were provided a list of ideas to choose from. I chose the idea of coming home to discover my pet fish had died.
In class we filmed our ideas by acting them out to use as reference. We then had to work on some pre production drawings, and develop a back story for our character. Here were some of my drawings.
(final animation rendered out)
So I took some time to light this, and render it out. Blogger is destroying the quality so just image it like it is in the image above. I see a lot of mistakes in it now, but I guess that's a good thing.
The final project we worked on was a voice over animation. We chose one from a bunch of sound clips from movies, and created an animation/lip sync around that. This helped us learn all the shapes our mouths make when we talk. Again we had to develop a back story and do some pre-production drawings.
Once I had finished the animation I actually looked up the sound clip to find out it was from "Million Dollar Baby." After hearing it about 1000 times while doing this animation I was curious.
So again we acted these out in person and recorded them to use as a reference. I used the video of me to get my timing correct, I then played with the animation to make it more interesting.
Here is an early milestone when the scene was just getting blocked out
Here is the final after I lit and rendered it
All in all, I was pretty pleased with the progress I have made as an animator. I'm not exactly at Pixar level, but I feel like I came a long ways.
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The other class this month was SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY
Software tech tries to push some other software on the students to get them outside of their Maya comfort bubble. The software that we were exposed to is Soft Image, and Houdini.
Within those two programs the class focused on modeling, procedural modeling, and some dynamics/visual effects simulations.
In SoftImage we modeled a vehicle. Most people did cars, I did a WW2 plane. Because of the demands of my other class/test I kept the modeling detail to a minimum, also we were doing it in software that was very unfamiliar.
Houdini seems to be a very powerful program, with very powerful visual effects tools. While we spent a majority of the month working in it, I can tell we barley scratched the surface.
In Houdini we started out doing some procedural modeling... here is a few of the projects we worked on
Houdini is a node based program, so to build this simulation we built out a giant tree of nodes that looked something like this.
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ART TEST shading and lighting.
Alright so on top of my classes that went 6 days a week, I also took the shading and lighting art test this month.
As computer animation students we are required to pass one of the 6 art tests before we can peruse that discipline for our demo reel.
The 6 disciplines are
Modeling - Shading and Lighting - Rigging - Visual Effects - Animating - Compositing
so we get 3 attempts in each discipline, each test takes 1 month, if we can not pass the test by the 3rd attempt we have to choose another discipline and try to pass its test.
I am interested in Modeling and Shading and lighting so I thought I would take the SaL one this month.
For this test we were provided a reference image of a room as well as the model for the room. We had to match the lighting of the room as well as all of the materials and textures seen though out the room.
Each week we submitted our renders and were graded, and provided with feedback for things we need to work on by the art director. This is all done online. The grading is pretty strict, and it seems like a lot of people were not making the cut the first time around.
I will show each weeks Side by Side image so you can compare, the difference are probably pretty subtle if you don't stare at this things for hours on end like I was.
WEEK 1 Submission - I really only had 1 night to work on this one. This was after about 12 hours.
This one had some big lighting issues as you can see its pretty blown out around the doorway. There were loads of other subtle problems but I am not gong to go through them all
WEEK 2 Submission - After putting 20-30 more hours into it.
Was much happier with this turn in only had some minor issues after this
WEEK 3 Submission - Getting even closer
Thats IT! There was supposed to be a final turn in for week 4 but the Art Director actually pushed me through and APPROVED me early =) This was pretty awesome news. I cant express the work that and learning that went into this with just these 3 pictures, but I might as well have took a whole class for how much I learned while working on this.
I might take the modeling test in June, I am not sure yet, I am really liking the lighting and texturing process.
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Side Project Stuff
During spring break time frame I got a bit more work done on my character, here is some more work in progress pics.
Pretty sure the internship expired, but I am still pushing to finish this.
Next month I have Visual Effects 2 and Compositing 2! Last month of 2 classes!!!
