Revised Group Project

[i will write insightful things here later]

Group Project

This is the group project that Noah and I did. The prompt was "the desktop came alive when..." We chose to interpret the prompt to mean a literal desk. Our story is about a man who keeps aggravating his desk, until the desk pulls out a rocket launcher and threatens the man. We were going for a semi-cartoon style. Noah and I split the work pretty evenly, and we both did about half of the modelling, texturing, and animating. I think most of our models turned out just fine, but we had some trouble making the rocket launcher look the way we wanted to and we couldn't figure out how to fit it inside the desk. The textures were also fairly simplistic. We did apply file textures to the floor, the lamp base, the pictures on the walls, and the desk. We ran into some problems when we tried to make realistic interior lighting. We had multiple lights in the scene, and I personally think it looked a tad too bright. The shadows on the objects were also super intense and blocked some of the objects from view, so we had to figure out which ones we could turn off without the scene looking bad. After I had rendered all the scenes, I realized there were some pretty blatantly obvious shadows that we had forgotten to turn off on certain objects, but by that time it was too late to fix them. The shadows look okay from certain angles, but other times they aren't too great. Some of the animations also posed a bit of a challenge for us. We gave our character disembodied appendages so that we wouldn't have to rig anything. Instead, I parented the extensions of the limbs inwards until everything was ultimately parented to the torso. This might've been the wrong way to do that, because when I tried to individually rotate certain parts of limbs they would warp horribly. We had to unparent everything and animate each limb component separately, which was pretty hard to coordinate. Some of the arm movements are a little disjoint because of this. Overall, I think the animation in our short was okay though. Some of the timing is a little wonky. 

Lighting Challenge 1- the Art Studio

This was my final rendered image for the first lighting challenge. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, but I know of some changes that I could've made. I started by just creating a physical sun and sky, and I added the night sky background. I was planning of adding a glowing full moon too, but I didn't have time. I changed the hue of the light to look a little more blue. I also added a little tiny spotlight over the models so that their shadows were cast a little stronger. I added a very light metal texture to the joints of the models, and I would've added a metal texture to the light fixture as well if I had more time. I kind of wanted to add some particles/fog so that it looked like the moonlight was catching some dust motes floating in the air. I also wanted it to look more like the moonlight was streaming through the window panes, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. 

Exterior Lighting- Day 3

Today I went back and fixed the trees in the back of the shot and the palm tree up in the front. I updated the brush image to give the palm tree some leaves, and it originally came out way too dark so I had to color correct it. For the trees in the back, I made them visible again and added a cutout brush. I've also noticed that for some reason the sky never shows up in the image files that I post on the blog. I'm not really sure why that is since the sky always shows up in the render view but nothing significant has happened with the sky anyway. 

Final Project

Here's my final video for the two-week project we had. The prompt was "Wait, what was that?!" My original idea was to have a guy who was about to toast some bread, but the bread got scared and jumped out of the toaster, so the guy turns around and is perplexed by his lack of toast. I was pretty happy with my original storyboard (which I have to upload), and I thought it was a manageable amount of work for two weeks. Although I think my models could've used more detail, I'm happy overall that I actually managed to model some discernible objects. I definitely think I could've spent some more time on the textures, and definitely had added more bump maps and detailed textures. My lighting was acceptable, but I definitely think the shadows are too strong. Some of the objects shouldn't really have shadows (like the toast's face), and I kind of forgot that it was possible to turn off shadows on certain objects. Of course, I realized this after I had already rendered the frames, but my models are still visible enough. My actual animation is okay, and I think I used the camera angles to my advantage to mask any bad things. My character model for the guy doesn't even have legs, but I only had the camera show him from the waist up. I definitely think I could've done more to make the animation smoother, but overall I was happy with that. My animation was looking just fine until I composited it, and I realized that the timing was heinously off on most of the clips. I had to extend the majority of the clips so that the whole animation wouldn't happen in only five seconds, so I had a really low overall frame rate. The animation is still super choppy, and each change in camera angle is really sudden. I don't like that at all, but I was kind of low on time so I couldn't really do anything about it. I also had some trouble with the sound effects. It was really difficult to time the sound accordingly, and I couldn't find the exact sounds that I wanted, so I had to compromise. I think if I had made a better composite and used sound more effectively, that would've done my acceptable animation justice. Unfortunately, I'm a little incredibly rusty in basically all aspects on animation. Luckily, I have the whole year to get better. Also, it's basically impossible that I could produce anything worse than this.