Update

The rendering of our animation is taking forever. I think the quality settings are way too high because it takes like half a class period to render a single frame. Our animation is a LOT of frames, so I'm worried about how long it's going to take to actually get every scene rendered. 

Update 5/6/16

Our animation was supposed to be due today, but since neither group is done we have another week. Basically everything has broken in our animation. The rigs have gone totally wonky because of some issue with a bend deformer, and probably a bunch of other reasons. None of us really have any clue what happened but we basically have to redo all of the animation, which is super annoying and irritating, mostly because I suck at character animation. Also, the quality settings on our scenes is so high that it's taken like three days to render 200 frames of a shot. From what I've gathered, we can't lower the quality any more or it will all look like garbage. We've tried to spread out the batch renders on as many computers, but we don't exactly have an infinite supply of desktops to render from. I am very worried as to how we're going to animate, render, and composite all of this by next Friday. 

Update 4/28/16

We're finishing up the character lighting in most of the scenes and are actually beginning to render some of the shots out. I spent the last two or three days meticulously copying a variety of lights into a ton of scenes so that our restaurant would have consistent lighting. I think it looks pretty darn good. Major props to Eileen. Right now there doesn't seem to be much left to do with our animation. I think Tyler is polishing his rig up finally. I don't know if we're actually going to use the new rig he built or if he's revising the old one. Regardless, I hope that he gets it straightened up. Other than that, we're just waiting to render so I can start compositing. 

Surfacing

This is some of the surfacing for objects in our animation. Most of my help with surfacing was limited to UV mapping basically every object with a file texture, but I did make some of the really basic materials. I also found all of the paintings that are in the picture frames. 

Playblasted 3D Animatic

This is the tentative version of our playblasted animation without any character meshes or surfaces. I did all of the camera animation. Most of it is pretty basic for now, but once we go in and smooth out the character motion I'll make the camera animation much better. Eileen, Tyler, and Noah did most of the character animation. While they were doing that, I was basically acting as the pipeline manager because I had to flesh out my naming conventions and referencing system. Neither of the characters have the meshes applied because we think something with the references broke. Also, the elbow rig on the guy is not working properly, so some of the animation that requires the guy to lean on his elbow does not look quite right. Tyler promised that he would fix that. Considering everything, I think we made pretty good progress on most of the primary animation. Once we apply the meshes and surfaces to everything, I think we'll be in good shape. 

Update 4/6/16

This week I was supposed to start the camera animation. So far I've set up as many cameras as I can without working in the same scene as someone else. I'm really hesitant to start actually animating any camera motion because the actual character animations have not been done, and my camera animation sort of depends on that. Also, there seems to be some confusion on how many scene files in each environment need to exist and how to name those files. I tried to be as specific as possible when delineating how to name files and when describing which shots on the storyboard need to exist in the same file. Sometimes it's hard for me to get across to my team mates that I need these naming system to be exactly the way I described it or else the referencing will break and I won't know which scenes to animate my camera in. Really most of the work that I'm doing right now is just figuring out how I want the scenes and frames organized. I think I finally understand why being a pipeline manager is considered a whole job within itself. This stuff is ridiculously hard to coordinate within a team of five people. 

Update 3/21/16

Today I started UV mapping the top part of our guy character. I started off with the head. The only parts of the face that were extruded out from the face were the nose and the mouth, so luckily it wasn't too hard to map. Tomorrow I'll probably have the hair UV mapped. Do I actually have to UV map the hair? I'll figure that out. 

Models I Made

I realized I never posted final versions of the models I created for our animation. Here they are. 

I made this crown molding using a CV curve that I traced over a crown molding profile. I then created a NURBS surface between two copies of the curve. Because of this, I can't UV map this piece of geometry because I would have to turn it into polygons and it looked absolutely heinous. 

Fork

Knife

Picture Frame

Spoon

I know this table isn't the finest, but you never actually see the table legs or the tabletop in our animation. Basically we just needed to create a surface to drape the nCloth tablecloth over. 

I made this wainscoting for the wall before I realized I could use CV curves. It's made out of actual polygons, which was probably an inefficient way to do it. I think it worked fine though. 

Update 3/10/2016

I was gone for the first two days of this week, but when I got back I kept UV mapping the guy character in our animation. I finished his hands, shoes, and am currently working on his torso. 

Update: 
Here are some snapshots of the work I currently have for the torso and shoe UV maps. 

Update 3/2/16

Today I began UV mapping the male character. I took about half the class to figure out how to delete an automatically mapped UV for the whole body and how to create and use UV sets. All of this was far more complicated than it should've been. I began mapping the hands, which I should be done with tomorrow. Finding a way to unsew a hand and stitch it back together strategically is actually kind of confusing, but I think my method should work.\

 This is hopefully the final version of the hand UVs. Here, one of the hands is reflected over the y axis because I was aligning them in order to make the UVs perfectly symmetrical. I put the seam around the palm of the hand, because it will probably be the least visible. I think this is a pretty okay first attempt at a hand UV, and I didn't really need a super complex one for the character in question. 

Weekly Update

This is actually an update from the last week of February. We basically just finished modeling all of our assets for our short. I made all of the silverware, some wainscoting, crown molding, and a table. 

Storyboard

This is the storyboard for our short "Dream Girl." It was drawn and outlined by Tyler. Nice job Tyler. 

Concept Art- Dream Girl

This is the concept art that Noah and Eileen drew for our upcoming short. I colored some of the images in Photoshop so that we could have an idea of the general color schemes of each character. I did two color swatches for the guy character, and we all agreed that the one on the right was a better choice. For the girl, I gave her a fuchsia dress (for no apparent reason). Both of the characters are pretty cartoony and stylized. The guy is very rectangular and lanky, and the girl has a more round face. 

Weekly Update

This week is pretty short because of the Skills competition. We're just finishing up drawing and coloring the concept art for our animation. 

Weekly Update

This week we started our three month long animation project. My group had a bunch of trouble originally coming up with ideas. We eventually decided to go with an idea Tyler came up with. The basic premise is that a guy is waiting for this girl to show up on a date, and he begins to daydream about the girl and the date. By the time the girl shows up, the guy is totally zoned out, has is elbow in a plate of food, and looks like a crazy guy. The girl gets weirded out and leaves. I like this story and I think we can pull it off really well. 

The breakdown of our work will be something like this: 
Tyler will handle the character modeling, rigging, and animation.
Noah will primarily handle the scene modeling, and me and Eileen and Sean will help him out. 
I'm going to be doing the UV mapping and creation of UV textures, as well as camera animation. 
Eileen is in charge of all other surfacing and lighting. 
Sean is kind of going to help us all out with whatever we need. We might put him in charge of finding sounds to go along with our short. 

"Run Before it's Too Late"

This is the animation that I did with Eileen. Basically, a guy walks into his kitchen and takes a bowl out of his cabinet, presumably to make a bowl of cereal. When he looks back up, the cabinet disappears. All of the objects in the kitchen begin to vaporize into thin air. The guy sees the door begin to warp, and he runs for the door so he won't vanish into oblivion. 

Considering the amount of time we had for this, I'm pretty satisfied with it. I think the modeling should have been more consistent, and some of the textures needed to be more detailed. I think the lighting was just fine. Some of the animation and camera movement needed to be smoother and more natural. All in all though, I felt pretty confident about thi

"Nothing But Net"

This is the group project I did with Josh. There wasn't a prompt for this project, but we weren't allowed to rig anything and we only had seven hours to do it. Yikes.

But really, I'm pretty satisfied with how this turned out, considering we only had seven hours to do it. Basically, our story is about a basketball who really wants to make it through the basket ball hoop. After a couple of pretty pitiful jumps, he shoots up. The video cuts to black as you hear a whoosh and the sound of a ball going through a net. 

Josh and I both did the modeling, which was pretty minimal. We also both textured. I had a ton of trouble making the UV map for the basketball, and there was still some warping of the texture that is thankfully not visible in the video. I wanted to make a more detailed, realistic texture to fit the rest of the scene, but texturing wasn't the focus of this assignment so I let it slide. Josh lit the scene and composited the short while I did the animation. The actual animation was super simple, and all I used was a squash deformer. I am perfectly satisfied with the actual bounces, but I wish I had more time to focus on the face of the ball. The face of the ball wasn't parented to the basketball, because it would warp every time I tried to apply any transformation to it. I've had this issue before, so I decided to just animate the face at the same pace as the body of the ball and hope that they lined up. I think most of it looks fine, but there are definitely some parts where you can tell the body and the face aren't part of the same object. That would definitely be one of the things I'd try to fix. 

Lighting Challenge

I'm going to be completely honest, this lighting challenge was a pain in the butt. I had a ton of trouble figuring out how I wanted to stage the scene, angle the camera, and which objects to focus on. I ended up deleting a few objects and moving around the sword and the crown. Once I finally settled on this stuff, I didn't have too long to actually texture and light the scene. I actually really like the textures I used on the crown and the sword. I absolutely hate those coins. I think the bump maps are pretty okay, but the actual material is pretty horrendous. I couldn't figure out how to fix that. I decided to just ignore it and move on. A lot of the items in the scene just have file textures that I haphazardly placed, hoping that they would not look too warped or pixelated. I put a point light inside the lamp and added a transparent image of a flame. I wish it looked more like the lamp was emitting more of a glow. I also added a warm orange volume light to the lamp. In addition, I added a reddish area light to make the scene a little brighter overall. I wish I had more time to spend lighting this scene, but overall I don't think it turned out too bad. 

"Love at First Sight"

This is the project I did with Michael and Sean. In our story, a magnet on a desk sees another magnet, and he tries to jump towards her. Since they're magnets, they repel each other at first. When the magnet flips sides, they zoom together. They live happily ever after. 
I was pretty darn pleased with this animation. I thought the modeling and the texturing were pretty good, and I can't think of much that I would do better. I think the timing of the movements could definitely use some work though. I also saw some inconsistencies with object placement from scene to scene. I like most of our sounds in the short, but I think that we could have transitioned from the different music in a better way.