"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.