Month 14: Visual Development/Motion Capture

Two thirds of the way through the program, and seven months left! I have 2 more months of having  2 classes a month, then Ill be starting on my portfolio months so things will get less hectic.

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

Once all that is done we can get a render like seen on my final render.

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. 

 So for about 2 months whenever I get a day off (not very often) I have been working on it. Here is some work in progress pictures.

I don't know if I will complete it on time, (there is no noted deadline) but I would like to get through the entire process.
Ill post any updates in my next post.

Month 13: Visual Effects 1/Character Animation 1

Alright so I literally just submitted the last thing for these classes an hour ago so I can finally breath a bit, and update this.

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!!!

(my cdc character in my melting woman scene)

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.... 

here is a still shot

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.

BAM... that was my month

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 =(

Month 12: Character Rigging 2/Professional Communication andPresentation-Online

Alright, an update is overdue. Things have been very busy as I jumped back onto my accelerated schedule. The few days I get off I usually spend catching up on home work.

So in January I took my second, and final rigging class as well as an online public speaking class. Yes... an online public speaking class.....

Ok so in Rigging 2  we had a very small class (only 6) which is pretty awesome for 1 on 1 time. We were gave a troll/ogre character that was modeled by our course director and we had to do several things with it.

First we had to select an already made motion capture file and attach it to the troll. A motion capture file is what is made when people dress up in those suits with all the balls all over that basically sends their movements to a computer. So we were essentially attaching that to the troll.

Then there were several clean up phases where we cleaned up the animation in places that things did not deform properly. Because the trolls body is not exactly like our motion capture data it would look a bit broken at first

Notice it in the ears, arm pit area, and under the belly.

So several days and hours later when it is more or less cleaned up we started doing some other things.

We added some rigging in the face so we can control different parts of the face. And I animated my shot camera to make the scene a bit more interesting.
In this video I left the controls on to give an idea what they look like.

 

So after this stage we did some dynamics trickery and gave a few pieces of the trolls body jiggle. We also added fur and a hair system to the troll.

With hair system and jiggle. The hair system has a few issues here so it looks kinda crazy.

Here is a rendered out frame to get an idea of what its looking like.

Before the mouth got textured.

So I did not get the time to render the whole shot, would have like to have posted that.

Overall it was a really cool class, even though I doubt ill be rigging much in the future.

I don't have any content to include for my online public speaking class. We basically did a couple speeches on our computers and timed them to a slideshow presentations. I did my final speech on how to live within your means as a student =)

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Because one of my classes was online I had some extra time and did some modeling stuff.
Here are a few projects I worked on for practice.

Bridge from Concept art

Never got to finishing this... classes started again. At this point I would rather work on other stuff.

Zombie creation

I used a bunch of zombie pictures I found on google and created this skeleton zombie guy.



OHHH also I almost forgot, my final project from MCR back in May was framed and hung up in the front of the 3d arts building along with 5 others. Very COOL! This was really cool because up to this point all they had put up on the walls was the work we do in our traditional art classes, it was really neat to see some 3d work.


So that's it, that was my January

Month 11: Production Modeling

This month was PRM or production modeling. It is the last modeling class I will get and also the hardest one. The grading is really tuff as they base your grades on how close they are to being production ready.

So everyone in the class was exposed to new software called ZBrush.  It is software for digital sculpting and is used in games and movies all the time for CG models.

After one class of discussing how zbrush works we were to sculpt a sword and a cat skull.
Here were mine,



This was based on some Warcraft concept art
 


 After these, we started on our speed sculpts.

 Speed sculpts were divided into three categories, characters, hard surface, and environments. For each category we had to do 3 sculpts based on their reference pictures.

Im going to post the reference pictures our class received, followed by my sculpts. Each sculpt took roughly 6-30 hours.

CHARACTERS

















I went with the dragon.

I chose the coolest one by far.

 
 That one took a long time and was a huge learning experience.




 I ran out of time for this one

Next we did HARD SURFACE stuff



This guy would turn into my final, for this we only had to do the arm.

game of thrones throne concept




 this was the hard surface I ran outta time on




On the last day of our speedsculpts we did ENVIRONMENT.








 
This was a fun one







 

 after our speed sculpts we did a a painting project and a few more random sculpts.

 


 From here we did a few more things that I wont talk about.

After those things we had to pick our final. For our final we had to go back to one of our speedsculpts and refine it and do a better job on it. Because I had taken all my sculpts pretty far I took the hard surface arm that I did and decided to do the entire character. Here are my progression sculpts from my final as well as the original reference.

Reference Picture For final


Chest work in progress

 Chest finished

Helm Finished

Pants wireframe

Pants Complete

 So that was all my stuff from this month. Again my efforts were noticed and I won the course directors award for this class. Really enjoyed this stuff and would like to turn it into a career if things go my way.

Thanks for reading, Merry Xmas =)